How to Build a Private AI Chatbot Locally Using Ollama and Python

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A tutorial published on DEV Community walks developers through building a fully offline AI chatbot using Ollama and Python, requiring no API keys or cloud subscriptions. Ollama is an open-source tool that simplifies running large language models such as Llama 3.2, Mistral, and Phi 3 on macOS, Linux, and Windows. The guide covers installing Ollama, downloading a model locally, and setting up a Python virtual environment with LangChain and the langchain-ollama package. A complete Python script is provided that creates a conversational chatbot with message history, running entirely on the user's own hardware. The approach gives developers full control over their data and eliminates recurring cloud inference costs.

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