We had the manuals. We could not use them when it mattered.
The issue was never finding survival information. It was pulling the right page with no signal, in a hurry, on the device already in your pocket.
Over several years we collected field manuals, emergency medicine references, government preparedness guides, wilderness skills books. More than 5,000 pages. Locating a bleach-to-water ratio meant twenty minutes in three PDFs. In an emergency that delay is the whole problem.
Cloud AI already solves search. It also dies when the tower dies — which is when you need it. So we asked whether retrieval-augmented generation could run entirely on-device, forced to answer from a closed library, and show the page it used.
That is No Signal. A local model. A curated library. Offline maps and field tools. Inventory for the household. Nothing in the app is supposed to leave the device.
Phone first, laptop still
The first version lived on the desktop because that is where a 7B model and a 15 GB library fit. The job, though, is in the field. Hikers and first responders carry phones. So we are building iOS and Android as the lead product: a compact on-device model, the same citation rule, GPS and camera where a laptop is a joke. Desktop stays as base camp — full-power model, bulk library, map downloads, household inventory.
We are not selling fear. People prepare for storms, remote travel, and outages. Wanting knowledge when Google is gone is reasonable. We also will not pretend a phone can silently run the entire desktop stack. Different binaries. Same brand.