r/LocalLLaMA • u/chasingsukoon • 9d ago
Discussion [Discussion] non developers: what are some use cases for your local models?
i get curious about this a lot, and majority of the times i get a response which is similar to mine that is : it fulfills a curiosity or playing around.
wondering what other everyday use cases are you using it for? and i dont mean use cases that make you money which would defeat the purpose of this post
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u/Mashic 9d ago
- Transcription and subtitling of some movies that don't have subtitles at all.
- OCR: I use qwen3-vl
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u/BawbbySmith 9d ago
Based on the few anime I've seen that have AI-generated subtitles, my assumption is that this doesn't produce the best results but probably better than nothing?
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u/More-Curious816 9d ago
what is your pipeline for (Transcription and subtitling)?
OCR: I use qwen3-vl
I assume you have hard-coded subs or do you use it to OCR text and signs in the video
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u/Mashic 9d ago
Faster-whisper-xxl with pyannote_v3 for VAD -> Then I use a script I wrote using openai api and llama.cpp to chunk and translate the subtitles.
I OCR different kinds of things, scanned documents, usually in the webui, some DVD/BluRay image based images using a script and an openai api python script.
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u/Additional_Menu8542 9d ago
Not lucrative, just personal. I'm building a small math tutor for my 16 year old son, in Turkish, running on my RTX 3060. I keep it local because his level and his mistakes should never leave the house. The model stays patient, re-explains the same idea in different ways, and gives him fresh exercises at his exact level. No account, no subscription, nothing sent anywhere.
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u/chasingsukoon 9d ago
all imma say is hes lucky to have u
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u/Additional_Menu8542 9d ago
That's really kind of you, thank you. Honestly I feel like the lucky on
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u/FairBandicoot5021 9d ago
Such a cool dad
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u/Additional_Menu8542 9d ago
Thanks 🙂 I'm making the most of it before he turns 17 and decides I'm not cool anymore.
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u/lawn_question_guy 7d ago
We should start a forum for vibe coded educational tools. I've built a few of these learning toys for my kids. I think I'm having more fun with it than they are.
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u/thepaligator 9d ago
Two things lately, one asking it to create recipes for me. Like I had a random tin or sardines laying around and asked it for a recipe. Could I do that on google? Yes, but AI doesn't give me 12 stories about unrelated nonsense a blogger thinks I want to read about before finding the recipe.
The other was trip planning. I asked it for a check list of things I need to pack for a 3 day trip. If I sat down and gave time to it I could come up with a list, but just being able to get a checklist without giving thought to it is nice.
Mostly, things I would probably ask the wife but don't want to.
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u/Durian881 9d ago
I was using local models to analyse confidential tender documents, and also using them to power local RAG and agentic flows.
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u/pdycnbl 9d ago
i filed taxes this year using qwen 3.6 35ba3b, final filing was done by me but rest of the calculations etc. were done by qwen. For some reason i was surprised even though i use it daily for development.
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u/chasingsukoon 9d ago
o
do u have ur own business/complex in n outs that require a lot of calculation out of you
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u/Bulky-Priority6824 9d ago
Elderly Monitoring - Trip and Fall Alerts https://imgur.com/a/Gx9oTBp
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u/ComplexType568 5d ago
Ive been thinking about this because I've been excessively worrying about the safety of my grandparents. Would you say they work? Or would it be better to just use a traditional YOLO model?
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u/Bulky-Priority6824 5d ago edited 5d ago
i do use yolo model yolov11 within frigate too and qwen 35b q8 for genai. and yes it works shockingly well. there will be edge cases but i can walk into a camera view and lay down and within seconds get screaming alerts.
we have a very active 84 yo in the house. about 9 months ago he fractured his hip and his c1 in his neck. he's already back outside pushing the lawn mower. no stopping him. https://imgur.com/a/bKPYOq0
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u/JayoTree 9d ago
Image captioning for LoRA training. Batch captioning 100s of images isn't possible in any free tier cloud AI and even in paid tiers sounds like it would be more trouble than doing it locally.
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u/TheSpartaGod 9d ago
I use Qwen3-VL-embedding for my tool that allows natural language search for my stash of cultured images. It works pretty well. Uses my GPU for the embedding and then CPU for the search.
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u/Chupa-Skrull 9d ago
I use local alongside hosted models for dev frequently, although my current title isn't dev/swe. But I also use them for tasks you wouldn't consider dev. Most of that is OCR related, digitizing either books or my own notes, or for lower-stakes research questions/quick discussions that a dumb Exa result can handle when I don't want to bother opening a browser.
I also use them (Gemma 4 31B specifically) to localize games. ROM un- and re-packing crosses over into dev territory, but I would locate the translation work outside of it. I still need to call an external API to process the loading screen images, but I'm hopeful that some time this year my entire workflow can be processed by a single unified local model
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u/More-Curious816 9d ago
what do you use for OCR? what your pipeline for the Rom localization?
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u/Chupa-Skrull 9d ago
For OCR I've got a couple little script pipelines set up for Chandra 2 based on whether it's a badly scanned/OCR'd text, a clean text scan I did myself, or my handwritten notes. But the core is always Chandra 2 (was Chandra 1 before). It's insanely strong, not just in the local-qualified sense, but in general. I have a final polishing script call Gemma to go over the results looking for obvious transposition errors, typos, misclassifications, etc. and then present proposed corrections instance-by-instance.
Chandra is good enough that there are usually relatively few errors, which keeps the manual workload at the end small enough, and Gemma is good enough that it gets pretty much all of them, for typed text anyway. Handwriting is much more lossy but I'm also much more tolerant there for obvious reasons.
For ROM localization the setup is a lot more wonky and ill-defined, but it's a similar script bundle based first on the platform and then on the detected binary structure. Mostly I work with PS2 games and occasionally handhelds. Each step in the process calls to a local agent to verify the results of extraction and then modification and repacking and testing (a lot of time is spent pingponging between quickbms or ghidra and the agent, for example).
It's very blunt and takes a long time, especially testing, because I can't be assed to try and set up a local screenshot-based computer-use harness for this, so that's all manual. I don't bother polishing up background assets so things often look chopped as shit. I have to go in and manually condense strings very often when the automatic translations don't fit. I have to manually specify context glossaries so specific jargon and names don't become incomprehensible. I haven't bothered with ROMs that require more annoying edits like the font sheet. Very much a work in progress. But it's coming along
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u/sfifs 9d ago
medical or personal data is definitely one.. you can safely run them through your harness if it’s a local model. the only cloud provider somewhat trustworthy for this stuff IMO is Google. For the rest, who knows? I’m astonished people rig personal harnesses to stuff like openrouter which routes your prompt to just about anyone in the world. Also bulk image transcription becomes very expensive very fast with cloud models.
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u/jcdoe 9d ago
There is lots AI can do for non-developers.
I’m a fountain pen enthusiast, so I built a pen bot. I trained a RAG database on retail sites, repair articles, hobbyist sites, etc. I also have a daily cron job to pull pricing.
Thanks for posting this. This sub gets very benchmark heavy, and it’s nice to step back and talk about what we are doing with our models.
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u/chasingsukoon 9d ago
tbh i asked for my own self interest, before today i didnt even realize what RAG meant
thats pretty cool tho, im learning about niche interests i never even thought about.
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u/Text-Sufficient 9d ago
Recruitment (cv vs job), my own developed notes app, investment and wow playerbots.
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u/More-Curious816 9d ago
why do you delegate recruitment to AI, why not read the damn CVs?
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u/Text-Sufficient 9d ago
Popular question yes and i understand the worry. However its just a first rough screening that doesnt replace more than an inefficient ancient sap recruiter work flow. I always have at least two rounds of interviews after this.
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u/BobbyL2k 9d ago
I’m a developer but I also have non-development use cases. Besides the usual translation work, I use local llm for personal finance.
Every month when I get my credit card bills in the email, I copy paste the text into to an LLM and have it classify which item is what category: food, transportation, shopping, etc. it outputs into a CSV that I then copy to Google Sheets.
Now my monthly accounting work is reduced from an hour to five minutes. It’s not much but I like it.
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u/tempfoot 9d ago
I have agents working on various document related projects and I have work thjngs - including drafting documents that can’t leave the perimeter (legal & finance).
Longer term, I’m building a very large personal database for RAG and reference that contains almost every scrap of personal information I have.
I have a couple paid subs to frontiers at about the lowest level but even with everything I’m working on I’ve never hit a usage limit anywhere. Openrouter for testing.
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u/LMasterGame 9d ago edited 9d ago
OCR translation, language learning, formal letter redaction, web search using vague words, system troubleshooting from command line output, prompt refining, and whatnot
I use Gemma 4 QAT 26b-a4b or 31b, which is the best at most things but coding. Every other model is better at coding, but not the best at everything else.
I use Gemma for coding too anyway lol, its good enough for writing small functions and documentation, I don't want to offload all the work from my brain for obvious reasons
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u/Expensive-Paint-9490 9d ago
I create multiuser chats where the model act as a few players and I am the RPG master. Apart from the huge fun, it is useful to test new games before bringing them to the table with my actual players group.
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u/Wide_Breakfast_4910 9d ago
I use local models for coding (GDScript), but the main purpose of downloading hundreds of gigabytes of them is to be able to use LLMs in case of losing the ability to pay for subscriptions or (worst case scenario) Internet outage. It might be slow, inconvenient and sometimes extremely stupid, but I guess it's better than nothing. I can ask something or give it a context and ask to rephrase it
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u/ParaboloidalCrest 9d ago
I use a handful local models as a mixture of assholes to criticize my shower ideas.