Book Summaries That Never Leave Your Device

"AI book summary app" describes two very different products. The first is a catalogue of pre-written summaries of business bestsellers — someone else's compression of someone else's book. The second runs AI over your books — and until recently, that necessarily meant uploading them to a server, with a subscription priced to cover the inference bill. On-device AI breaks that assumption, and it changes both the economics and the privacy story at once.

Why free, and why on-device

Those two facts are the same fact. Cloud AI features cost the developer money per use, so they end up behind the paywall. Apple Intelligence inference runs on the chip you already own — the marginal cost of summarising a chapter is zero, so gating it would be rent-seeking. Velo puts the entire dashboard in the free tier and reserves the subscription for things with genuine server costs (sync, and an optional heavy-OCR pass for difficult scans).

On-device also means the obvious thing that's worth saying anyway: your book is never uploaded to be analysed. For a published novel that's a nicety. For an unpublished manuscript, a client report, or anything under NDA, it's the entire decision — the analysis happens on your hardware or it doesn't happen. It's the same architecture behind Velo's no-tracking privacy stance, and it means an already-analysed book keeps its dashboard even in Airplane Mode.

What the dashboard actually does

• Summaries, scoped how you need them. Whole-book summaries mostly tell you what the cover already did. The useful operation is summarising a chapter or section — before deciding whether to read it closely, or after, to check what stuck. Velo does both.
• Ask-the-book Q&A. Put a question to the book — scoped to one chapter or the whole text — and get an answer grounded in what's actually on the page. (More on that here.)
• Classification and key entities. What kind of book this is, and the people, places, and terms that structure it — a fast orientation layer over a new import.

The honest hardware note: summaries, Q&A, and classification need Apple Intelligence — macOS 26 or later (and a current, capable iPhone); language detection and entities run on macOS 15 and up. On-device AI is a young platform and this is its real edge today.

A summary is a tool, not a substitute

A page selling AI summaries should say this: a summary is not the book. Compression loses exactly the things long-form reading exists for — the argument's structure, the qualifications, the texture of how a conclusion is earned. Velo's dashboard is built as a reading accelerant: triage what deserves your attention, recap where you left off, interrogate what you've read. The reading itself is what the rest of the app is for — a typeset Reader mode and an RSVP focus stream sharing one position, over your own DRM-free EPUBs and PDFs, all local, all offline.

Free tier: both reading modes, 3 imported books, the full intelligence dashboard, and a built-in classics library. Import something dense and see what a zero-cost, zero-upload summary is actually good for.

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