Correction — October 25, 2026. The download announced in this post was a 1.0 test build, and it has been withdrawn. No Helena build is publicly available yet: downloads arrive with the launch, direct from this site — one installer, no unzipping. The size and checksum printed below belonged to that test build and are no longer valid. The Fab note below is superseded the same way: Helena downloads direct from this site at launch, and a Fab listing comes later, as an option — never the only door. The rest of this post is the original October 14 text, kept as the record.
Today we shipped our first release: H.E.L.E.N.A. Lite 1.0, free for everyone.
Helena is a local AI assistant. Her brain runs entirely on your own machine — no account to start, no subscription, and nothing you show her ever leaves your computer. Unzip, open the Desktop folder, then HelenaHost, and double-click Helena.exe. That's the whole install.
What she does today
- Answers questions in plain words. Ask her the way you'd ask a person.
- Explains documents. Hand her a PDF or a picture of a letter and ask "can you explain this to me?" — she walks through it section by section, in plain words, and tells you honestly if part of it is unclear.
- Stays on your machine. Your files and conversations never leave your PC. There is no cloud brain quietly reading along.
Medicare open enrollment starts tomorrow (October 15), and mailboxes are filling up with plan letters written in a language nobody speaks at the kitchen table. That timing is exactly why we pushed to ship this week: hand Helena the letter, and get it back in plain words.
For Unreal Engine users
The same Helena also lives inside Unreal Engine 5 as a mentor plugin — she teaches the engine while you build. H.E.L.E.N.A. Lite for Unreal has been submitted to Fab and is pending approval; we'll post here the day it's listed. The standalone Windows download above needs no Unreal at all.
Honest details
- Price: free. Knowledge should be free.
- Size: 3.26 GB zip. SHA-256: 535b5b5f3eb59030f79b68164c2882d0b6c56d0688b6b9d0385e864a91155e8e — also printed on the Downloads page, where the download lives.
- Requirements: Windows 10/11 (64-bit). No account needed to start.
- Known gap, said plainly: her drawing tool (Crayon) currently works inside the Unreal editor build; in the standalone it isn't there yet. It's first on our fix list, and we'd rather tell you that here than let you find it.
What's next
A first update (1.0.1) is already scoped: the standalone fixes above, a proper installer, and continued polish. After that, our Kickstarter — if you'd like a reminder when it launches, the banner at the top of this site takes your email and nothing else. We store it for exactly one message: the launch announcement.
— Cameron, Harrison Interactive