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Remote endpoints

Piixie is local-first, and using a remote model is a deliberate opt-in. When you configure an endpoint, document text is sent to that provider during anonymization. For the tradeoffs, see privacy.

Remote endpoints make sense when local hardware is too slow, when you want a frontier model’s detection quality, or when your organization runs a shared inference server (see Piixie as a local server).

Adding an endpoint

Section titled “Adding an endpoint”

In settings, open the AI endpoints section and add an endpoint:

  1. Protocol: one of three API shapes
    • Anthropic (Messages API)
    • OpenAI chat (Chat Completions, also the protocol for most self-hosted servers: llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, a Piixie server)
    • OpenAI responses (the OpenAI Responses API)
  2. Name: a label, shown next to the endpoint’s models in the model selector
  3. Base URL: without any /v1 suffix; Piixie appends API paths itself
  4. API key: required for commercial providers, optional for self-hosted endpoints

Choosing models

Section titled “Choosing models”

Click Fetch models and Piixie queries the endpoint for its model list. Each model row has:

  • An enable toggle: only enabled models appear in the model selector
  • A display name you can edit
  • A vision flag, auto-detected from the model ID and overridable. Vision-enabled models receive rendered images for image analysis; others get text only.

Enable the few models you actually use rather than the whole list. The model selector merges local and remote models into one menu, and a short list keeps it usable.

Using a remote model

Section titled “Using a remote model”

Pick the remote model in the model selector. The first time you select a cloud model, Piixie shows a confirmation that document contents will be sent to that remote API and leave your machine; “don’t ask again” suppresses it per endpoint. Everything else is unchanged: same modes, same profiles, same streaming progress dialog, same history records. Streaming works across all three protocols.

A note on keys and storage

Section titled “A note on keys and storage”

Endpoint configurations, including API keys, are stored in Piixie’s local SQLite database on your machine. Keys are sent only to the endpoint’s base URL.