Xia

There is an old Chinese story about the Snail Maiden (田螺姑娘), a gentle spirit who appears each day to care for a home before anyone returns. Xia is a modern echo of that tale: an autonomous AI assistant that quietly tends to the details of your digital life.

Xia (/ɕja/, pronounced "shyah") is a portable personal AI assistant for online work. It runs as a single local application, remembers context across sessions, works with any OpenAI-compatible LLM models, and helps with web research, browser automation, authenticated APIs, and recurring tasks.

What Xia Is For

Xia is built for the parts of your digital life that live beyond your local file system:

• keeping long-term memory about people, projects, and ongoing work
• researching the web and extracting structured information
• signing into websites and using saved site logins
• calling authenticated APIs through stored service connections
• running recurring background tasks on a schedule

Xia is not a local computer-control agent. It does not access arbitrary files on your machine or drive your terminal like a coding assistant. User-initiated uploads and imports are supported, but they stay explicit and scoped.

Quick Start

Start Xia normally:

xia

Create a portable archive:

xia pack backup.xia

Open that archive later on this or another machine:

xia backup.xia

What to expect:

• Xia stores its state in its database, so conversations, memory, settings, and saved connections travel together.
• The local web UI is intended to be the main interface for non-technical users.
• Semantic memory recall uses a local embedding model. On first use, Xia will download the default nomic-embed-text-v2-moe GGUF model, which is about 512 MiB. You can switch to a bigger model if your computer supports it.
• Browser automation uses Playwright. On first use, Xia may also install Playwright browser binaries, and on Linux it can preview or run Playwright's system dependency setup as a separate explicit step.
• Local-document summarization defaults to extractive summaries. If you opt into model-generated summaries, Xia can use either a local model or an external OpenAI-compatible provider.
• You still provide your own LLM provider credentials, and you can use multiple LLMs at the same time.
• None of your credentials or secrets is exposed to LLM providers. Prompt injection cannot reveal secrets due to the lack of access. Security is one of Xia's main value propositions.

Local Web UI

Xia starts in terminal mode by default. To use the local web UI, start the HTTP server:

xia --mode server

Or run both interfaces together:

xia --mode both

By default, the web UI listens on http://localhost:3008/.

What the local web UI is for:

• chat with Xia from a browser instead of the terminal
• upload local text, PDF, and Office documents; Xia extracts text, chunks large docs along natural boundaries, and keeps summary plus chunk-level recall
• use scratch pads for copied notes and working context
• download Xia produced artifacts
• configure LLM providers, OAuth accounts, services, saved site logins, local document summarization settings, and the notification bridge foundation
• import safe prompt-only OpenClaw skills from local bundles or ClawHub zip URLs
• manage scheduled tasks and other local assistant settings

The server binds to 127.0.0.1 by default. Use --bind 0.0.0.0 only when you intentionally want to expose it beyond the local machine.

Typical Uses

• Keep an assistant that remembers your projects, contacts, preferences, and prior conversations.
• Let Xia research websites, follow links, fill forms, and return structured results through browser automation.
• Connect services such as Google or Github through static credentials or OAuth, then let Xia use them without exposing secrets to tools.
• Upload PDFs, DOCX/XLSX/PPTX files, Markdown, and other text-like documents so Xia can find them using hybrid search (fulltext + semantic).
• Import safe OpenClaw-compatible prompt skills from ClawHub zip URLs or local bundles when they fit Xia's security model.
• Schedule recurring work like checks, summaries, monitoring, and maintenance.

Privacy And Safety

Xia is built to be useful on a daily machine without getting broad access to the host machine, so you do not have to provision a dedicated machine for Xia:

• secrets are encrypted at rest in the database
• tools run inside a restricted sandbox
• authenticated API calls go through a capability proxy instead of exposing raw credentials
• the local web UI uses a local session secret and local-origin checks
• Xia is designed around online work, not arbitrary local file access
• explicit user uploads and imports are supported, but Xia still does not give tools ambient access to your host file system

More Documentation

• Technical and implementation details: doc/impl.md