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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I have a decent sized book collection, and what I'd like the most is a ctrl-f for books. Does that exist already in e-readers?

Personally I think question answering is still very gimmicky, in particular because I can't clearly understand why the answer is what it is. Ctrl-f is completely explainable, I know why it works and why it fails, and is a much more useful tool to engage with books. The main problem seems that the full text of most books is not available unencumbered to process as one sees fit

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I tend to download PDFs for an physical book I buy, but I’d like a hybrid approach. Ctrl-F is perfect for finding excerpts when you have a specific wording, but not great for finding something worded differently or something in a section you have not read yet. AI could step in for those and not only give specific references from the book (or it’s own referenced material) but could also give the text in full.

“AI, what does this book say about integrity?”

“(answer), based on paragraphs on page 143 and page 210”

“Show me those paragraphs inline, starting with the paragraph where the author transitions in to the topic”

Yes but also no. If you have an exact string query that'll turn up the topic you want then, sure, you can find a topic easily. If your question is more tangential, say you kind of know what topic you're looking for but don't know what it's called in language X's standard library, you're pretty basically SOL unless an author happened to mention a phrase you can match.

Using chat GPT to solve this problem seems pretty awesome, it would be super handy to query my (larger than it has any right to be) library of reference books using not-exactly-competent requests.

This and translating technical material into 5th grade reading level explanations are probably the best two uses of chat GPT I've seen yet.

Agreed. That's why the approach we are taking is to answer the question 'and' show the links/paragraphs which answer the question.

Demo we have created for our website: https://speech-kws.ozonetel.com/ozosearch

Not sure about e-readers. But any EPUB can be searched like any other text.

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