Low-Bandwidth AI Tools — Text-Mostly Workflows

If your internet is slow or metered, the trick isn't to give up on AI — it's to live in the text lane. A whole hour of chat AI use is often less data than loading a single video.

• Plain chat AI: very low data, mostly fine on slow lines
• Image generation and image input: heavy — save for fast-Wi-Fi trips
• Voice transcription: medium — uploading the audio is the cost
• Video generation and analysis: heaviest — generally avoid on rural data
• Browser-based research: depends on the sites it loads, not the AI itself

Don't reload chats unnecessarily — a long ongoing conversation has 'context' that the model already has loaded. Starting fresh costs more total bandwidth than continuing the thread.