The person behind MyHandler.
I'm Tery Emilson. I've been building software for people — and selling the companies I built it in — since before "the cloud" was a word. MyHandler is the thing I most wanted for myself, and couldn't find.
Tery Emilson — and the whole engineering team.
I've been writing software since the late 1980s, usually to solve a problem I had in a business I was running. I built my first sales-and-inventory system in dBase to run my own distribution company — then sold that company. I started the first cellular store in eastern Saskatchewan and sold that too.
Along the way I built FuturePAGE, the world's first scheduled and group paging software, and abcDB, a mobile database that ended up used in more than 110 countries, localized into Spanish and Japanese, and that got me invited to Microsoft's headquarters in 2004 as one of a handful of developers worldwide.
Since then I've spent fifteen-plus years as a full-stack developer — CRM systems running more than a dozen dealerships, e-commerce platforms serving customers across North America. C#, .NET, SQL Server: the unglamorous plumbing that actually has to work.
MyHandler is built by one person who has shipped, maintained, and stood behind software for over thirty years. When something breaks, you're emailing me.
I wanted the assistant. Not the trade.
I've been working seriously with AI since 2024, and from day one I saw what an extraordinary assistant it could become. But there was one thing I was never going to do: upload my entire digital life — emails, files, screen, meetings — to someone else's server to make that work.
When Littlebird launched I genuinely thought they'd cracked it. Beautiful product, sharp positioning. But the same fundamental compromise sat at the core: my data still had to live in their cloud for the AI to see it.
So I started building MyHandler, with the explicit goal of being the first AI assistant that runs completely on your own machine. Data encrypted and stored locally. A local model that works fully offline. And when I want faster, smarter answers, one click enables a cloud model with Zero Data Retention — and only the snippets needed to answer that one question get sent. Nothing for training. Nothing retained.
I picked this idea because I believe a meaningful segment of people — the privacy-conscious knowledge worker, the lawyer, the journalist, the founder, the doctor — will refuse to make the cloud-AI trade as long as a credible local-first alternative exists. As of mid-2026, there isn't one that covers the full surface: screen, meetings, files, channels, dictation, memory. MyHandler is the version of that product I wanted to use and couldn't find. So I built it.
A handler for your whole digital life —
that lives on your machine.
MyHandler runs on your Windows PC and quietly keeps track of what's going on across your screen, your meetings, your files, and your email and calendar. It reads the text on your screen through the same accessibility APIs screen readers use — never screenshots — transcribes your meetings locally, indexes the documents you point it at, and pulls your channels into one encrypted place you actually own.
Tools like Rewind and Recall record pixels of your screen. Granola is great at meeting notes and stops there. MyHandler is the layer underneath all of it: text-only capture, an encrypted local vault, and the option to run the AI entirely on your own machine. It surfaces what you'd have forgotten and briefs you before it matters — and it speaks for you only when you ask it to.
Your data never lives
on my servers.
Here's the honest architecture, not a privacy badge.
It lives on your device
Everything MyHandler captures is stored on your own machine, in an encrypted SQLite database, with the key in your Windows Credential Manager. Not my disk. Yours.
Cloud AI is one click, and optional
Cloud AI is on by default and one click to turn off. When it's on, the inference calls go to Groq and the answers come back — Groq retains nothing under Zero Data Retention.
For channels, I'm a relay — not a store
Channel messages pass through our servers encrypted and then sync down to your machine. Nothing is retained on our servers. Turn the cloud off entirely or put your device in airplane mode, and capture, transcription, document search, and local AI keep working with no network at all.
Early, and honest about it.
MyHandler is Windows-only today. macOS and Linux are planned, but I won't give you a date I'm not sure I can hit — when they're real, they'll ship.
It's one developer building in the open, so some of the surface is still rough and more is landing every week. If something's missing or broken, telling me is the fastest way to get it fixed — I read everything that comes in.
Say hello.
Real questions reach a real person. Email is best.