Ollama
Run answer generation on a local model through Ollama's OpenAI-compatible API.
Your channels
answerLoops
What you control
Ollama runs open models on your own machine and exposes an OpenAI-compatible API. answerLoops talks to it through the OpenAI-compatible provider option — point it at Ollama's base URL, leave the key blank.
The OpenAI-compatible provider (any custom endpoint, Ollama included) is part of Custom AI model configuration, which is on the Enterprise plan. Self-hosted deployments have it unconditionally.
Chat runs locally. Embeddings can too, if you serve an embedding model that outputs 1536-dimension vectors (the size the knowledge base stores), or you can keep embeddings on OpenAI's hosted API — that's the only part that would leave your network.
1. Run Ollama
ollama serve
ollama pull llama3.2
ollama pull <your-1536-dimension-embedding-model> # only if you want local embeddings2. Configure in answerLoops
- Settings → AI Model → Edit (owner or admin).
- Chat provider: OpenAI-compatible.
- Base URL:
http://localhost:11434/v1— or, when answerLoops runs in Docker on macOS/Windows,http://host.docker.internal:11434/v1. - Model ID:
llama3.2(or whatever you pulled). - API key: leave blank — Ollama doesn't authenticate.
- Embeddings: either
- OpenAI-compatible with the same base URL and an embedding model that outputs 1536 dimensions, or
- OpenAI with a hosted key (embeddings then leave your network).
- Click Test connection — it will fail if the base URL isn't reachable from the answerLoops server — then Save.
Ollama runs on the host, not inside the answerLoops container. Use
host.docker.internal (Mac/Windows) or the host's LAN IP (Linux) as the base
URL, not localhost.
Related
- Self-hosted installs — the server key, embedding size and re-indexing for self-hosters
- AI Model settings