Dot: Local AI Application for Interaction with Documents (RAG)

Have you ever wanted to harness the power of large language models to interact with documents, but didn’t want your data to leave your computer? Well, I’ve got exactly what you need!

Let’s say you have a ton of documents on your hard drive—PDFs, Word files, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, even Markdown files. You want to ask questions about their content, get summaries, or generate new ideas from the information they contain. In short, you want an intelligent assistant that can understand and manipulate all of this data. That’s exactly what Dot offers!

At the core of its functionality is a pre-trained language model — at the time of writing, it’s Mistral version 7B — that runs locally and enables what’s called “Retrieval Augmented Generation” (RAG).

In simpler terms, this means the AI ​​doesn’t just generate text based on what it’s learned; it also pulls relevant information from a local knowledge base. You select a folder containing documents you want to index, and Dot will parse them, segment them, calculate embeddings, and build an index that lets you quickly find the most relevant pieces for a given query.

Then you can interact with Dot like you would with any AI assistant. You ask it a question, and it uses its general knowledge to formulate an answer, and it also pulls from your document database to enrich the answer with specific information. This makes the answers more accurate and relevant!

Of course, since Dot runs completely locally, you don’t have to worry about the privacy of your data—nothing ever leaves your computer. That’s a huge advantage over cloud solutions that send your documents to remote servers. And if you need help with tasks that don’t necessarily require access to your documents, Dot includes a “Big Dot” mode. With a single click, you can switch to this mode and have a universal AI assistant that can chat about any topic, help with writing, brainstorming, and more. It’s like having a local version of ChatGPT at your fingertips at any time.

If you want to try the app, it’s free, open source, and available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. You can download it here: https://dotapp.uk/