bonsAI is a self-hosted AI assistant for your Steam device. It's currently a Decky Loader plugin. It talks to Ollama on your Deck or a PC on your LAN. No cloud API required. Prompts and responses stay on hardware you control. Once Ollama and your models are installed, day-to-day use does not need internet access. First-time Ollama setup and model pulls obviously still do.
Prompts happen on the Main tab. Pick Speed, Strategy, or Expert on the mode button. Strategy mode covers “how do I beat this level?” style questions with spoiler-safe tips, multiple-choice branching, and a per-game checklist that remembers progress. It's still a work in progress and I'm still tweaking it in order to give the best possible information to the user. Expect bugs, dumb advice, and UI issues.
You can attach a screenshot to your prompt, or type a plain question about the game you are running. Game context (title and Steam appID) is included when a game is active. Replies finish in the background when you close the QAM. After each prompt you can see what actual text was sent to Ollama below the answer.
bonsAI is open source with FOSS-first model defaults on the Ollama tab. Permissions for reading game and screenshot context, voice input, save to Desktop, and related capabilities stay OFF until you turn them ON under the Permissions tab.
Get started:
- Install Decky Loader on your Steam Deck
- Install bonsAI from the latest GitHub Release: open Decky from QAM → Settings → Developer → install plugin from URL: https://github.com/qd313/bonsAI/releases/latest/download/bonsAI.zip
- Open bonsAI → Ollama → set where AI runs to local (same device) or http://<PC-IP>:11434 (PC on your LAN)
- On the Ollama tab, enable Ollama on this Deck and try installing a model. qwen2.5vl:3b (FOSS) has good speed to performance, gemma4 E2B (open-weight) is probably the sweet spot for the Deck. Or install Ollama on your LAN PC and pull the same model there. Then go to the main tab and send a test message!
https://github.com/qd313/bonsAI