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Cherry Studio

Use CAPI as a provider in Cherry Studio with assistants and knowledge bases.

2 min read

Cherry Studio is a desktop client built around providers, assistants, and knowledge bases. CAPI plugs in as an OpenAI-compatible provider, and its multi-modality makes the drawing and translation features usable from one key.

Prerequisites

  • Cherry Studio installed.
  • A CAPI API key.

Add the provider

  1. Open Settings → Model Providers.
  2. Click Add Provider and choose the OpenAI-compatible type.
  3. Fill in:
FieldValue
Provider NameCAPI
API Hosthttps://capi.ai/api/v1
API Keycapi_sk_live_...
  1. Click Manage next to the provider to add model IDs.

Cherry Studio does not auto-discover models, so add the ones you plan to use. The full list is in the catalog.

Group models by task

Cherry Studio shows one model list, so name models meaningfully when you add them:

Display nameModel IDUse
GPT-5.6gpt-5.6Default assistant
Opus 5claude-opus-5Deep analysis
Gemini Progemini-3.1-proLong context, vision
DeepSeek Flashdeepseek-v4-flashBulk, cheap

Assistants

Create an assistant per recurring task and pin the model plus a system prompt:

  • Release notes writerclaude-opus-5, temperature 0.3.
  • Commit message helperdeepseek-v4-flash, temperature 0.
  • Screenshot describergemini-3.1-flash, vision enabled.

Pinning both model and prompt is what makes output consistent run to run.

Knowledge bases

Cherry Studio embeds documents with the provider you select. Point embeddings at CAPI too:

  • Embedding model: text-embedding-4-large
  • Keep this model fixed for the life of the knowledge base.

Cherry Studio also ships a local embedding option. Choose one and stay with it — mixing embedders across a single knowledge base degrades retrieval quality.

Image generation

The drawing panel accepts a custom provider. Set it to CAPI with model gpt-image-2-text-to-image or seedream-5-text-to-image, and images are written to your local library.

Troubleshooting

Provider test fails. Cherry Studio appends /chat/completions to the host. The host must therefore end in /v1 with no trailing slash.

Model produces an error on send. The model ID is not available to your key — video models, for example, are not reachable through the chat route.

Knowledge base returns nothing. Re-index after changing the embedding model, and confirm the provider is not rate-limited.

Next steps