Google AI Edge Gallery

I was outside of Pittsburgh one day, somewhere with no service, and I had to sit there for a while. I realized I couldn’t really do anything on my phone. So I started thinking, couldn’t I have a local AI model on here that I could at least ask questions and work things out with?

I’ve got the Pixel 11 Pro XL, so I figured there had to be something on it already. I tried Gemini, and it didn’t work. I kind of thought it would. Maybe it shouldn’t, but Google already has on-device AI on the phone for speech-to-text, so I don’t know why there isn’t a lightweight local model you can just chat with.

So I asked Claude, and it found Edge Gallery. I downloaded Gemma 4 through it and it works pretty well. It’s obviously not going to do much, and it can’t search the web when you’re offline. But paired with some downloaded regional maps and maybe a few other things, it could definitely be good in a pinch, and I was happy to have it set up.