Local AI Qualitative Analysis: Run Research on Your PC

Evidano is an AI-powered qualitative data analysis platform that imports local captures, cleans transcripts, enforces privacy, and produces stakeholder-ready visualizations. Hearth v0.7-preview (published July 17, 2026) makes practical local capture possible by recording voice, snapshots, and many document formats on-device. Together, Hearth and Evidano let research teams collect data locally and convert it into auditable thematic analysis while minimizing cloud exposure.

• Hearth v0.7-preview (published July 17, 2026) installs on Windows via a one-click installer and runs from source on macOS/Linux, enabling local-first capture.
• Hearth reads PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, CSV, JSON, HTML, EPUB, and IPYNB, reducing manual artifact cleaning before import.
• Evidano imports Hearth exports to run automated cleaning, speaker heuristics, PII redaction, coding, and visuals for stakeholder-ready reports.
• A practical seven-step run-book shows you can capture, QA, import, and analyze a small study in about a week.

Hearth published v0.7-preview on July 17, 2026, adding practical local capture features for research teams. Hearth installs on Windows with a one-click installer and runs from source on macOS/Linux, and the project is available on GitHub.

• Why it matters: Hearth can capture voice (faster-whisper), TTS (Kokoro), screen snapshots, and read/write many document formats locally, making it a practical collector for qualitative datasets without default cloud telemetry.
• Payoff for researchers: local capture plus scripted skills produce reproducible, auditable data exports you can import into Evidano for coding, theme extraction, and visualization.

Hearth is a local operator that listens, reads files, drives a browser, and persists memory on-disk, mapping to three core collector capabilities for qualitative research. Hearth supports speech capture with faster-whisper for continuous listening and mid-sentence barge-in, which is useful for interview capture and rough live transcriptions.

• Speech capture + STT: faster-whisper supports continuous listen with mid-sentence barge-in, handy for interview capture and rough live transcriptions.
• File ingestion & parsers: Hearth extracts text from PDFs, DOCX, XLSX, and large documents (chunked summaries), so raw artifacts can be pre-processed before export.
• Browser & desktop tooling: Hearth can script multi-step web tasks (observe usability flows) and take accessibility-aware snapshots of UI elements instead of pixel-only screenshots.

Hearth also includes researcher-friendly features such as shareable skills (repeatable workflows), background jobs for long scans, and sub-agents that parallelize summarization, and everything stays local unless you opt into a cloud model or web fetch.

This seven-step run-book shows how to go from Hearth capture to insights in about a week.

• 1) Install Hearth using the Windows installer or source builds and configure a local model or your preferred endpoint, see GitHub.
• 2) Create a Hearth skill for your interview script that includes a consent prompt and redaction reminders.
• 3) Capture 10 sessions using Hearth's /listen and save per-session artifacts to the workspace.
• 4) Export transcripts and PDFs to a staging folder and run quick QA for speaker labels and timestamps.
• 5) Import the staging folder into Evidano and run thematic and frequency analysis.
• 6) Use Evidano cross-segment analysis to compare personas, regions, or task flows and generate visuals.
• 7) Produce a stakeholder brief and attach verbatim quotes (clickable, source-linked) for transparency.

Hearth makes local-first data capture practical, and Evidano turns that local data into rigorous, shareable qualitative analyses without exposing raw content to third-party training. If you care about privacy and reproducibility, this pairing is a fast route from interviews and session recordings to actionable themes and visuals.

• Try Hearth on GitHub (v0.7-preview, July 17, 2026).
• Try Evidano for free to see how to import Hearth exports, run thematic and cross-segment analyses, and produce stakeholder-ready visualizations.

Ethics note: recordings and transcripts are research materials, obtain participant consent and follow your institution's data-handling rules before storage or analysis.