Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I remember having used, a very long time ago, a self-hosted search engine on my library of PDFs, and it was unbelievably useful.

I dream about a similar thing that can do OCR on scanned docs and extract text from my also sprawling library of epub and mobi files. If someone builds something like this, with maybe a LOCAL LLM to extract text descriptions from photos and movies as well as indexing metadata for everything, subtitles from movies and lyrics for songs, and add that to a NAS appliance, it’d be a killer.

View on HN

That's what our app does: curiosity.ai, local index, support for many files types and apps out of the box, and integrated local OCR, STT and even local LLM

I couldn't find any mention on your website about LOCAL LLMs and according to your FAQ, it requires an account with your website.

Is there a way how to run curiosity.ai fully offline, without an account on your servers?

That is the future :) Much success!

DEVONthink 3 [0] (Apple only) will do most of that although I don't keep up at all with its interoperability with LLM extensions.

[0] https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink

Evernote will do this, you can feed it a bunch of PDFs and other documents, it will OCR them and make them all searchable. it's not perfect, but you can also add manual tags for things you know are important.

At some point I'd love to further train an LLM on all my PDFs and be able to ask it questions.

For txt based pdfs, doc files etc, this is super easy to do and requires very little technical expertise or configuration. Download the gpt4all client. Pick an LLM the new meta llama3 model works really well then configure the local documents plugin.

I wrote a scraper to download all of the California EdCode from the governments site, convert them all to txt docs and I can ask questions about California EdCode in plain English.

I work in a shared governance capacity that requires us to refer to the Ed code for contractual negotiations and it’s been extremely helpful.

> similar thing that can do OCR on scanned docs

It's only part of what you want, but ocrmypdf will add a OCRed text layer to PDF files, making the text selectable and indexable

I have most of this code for doing this - just needs to get rewritten for local storage (I was running it on Google Cloud). Need to pick something that doesn't run Solr as a service for local use. With Ollama, we have function calls running, so should be doable. I was also thinking about using the Open WebUI for use.

> extract text descriptions from photos and movies as well as indexing metadata for everything, subtitles from movies and lyrics for songs

The big AI players are probably already scraping the bottom of this "barrel" in their search for training data, I am sure ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com