Have you ever wanted to harness the power of large language models to interact with your documents but didn’t want your data to leave your computer? Well, I’ve got just what you need!
Let’s say you have tons of documents on your hard drive—PDFs, Word files, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, and even Markdown files. You’d like to ask questions about their content, get summaries, or generate new ideas from the information they contain. In short, you’d want an intelligent assistant that can understand and manipulate all this data. That’s exactly what Dot offers!
At the heart of its functionality is a pre-trained language model—currently a version of Mistral 7B as of this writing—that runs locally and enables what’s called “Retrieval Augmented Generation” or RAG.
In simple terms, this means that the AI doesn’t just generate text based on what it has learned; it also retrieves relevant information from a local knowledge base. You select a folder containing the documents you want to index, and Dot will analyze them, break them down into sections, calculate embeddings, and build an index that allows you to quickly find the most relevant passages for a given query.
Then, you can interact with Dot just like you would with any AI assistant. You ask it a question, and it uses its general knowledge to formulate a response while also pulling from your document base to enrich the answer with specific information. This makes the responses more accurate and relevant!
Of course, since Dot runs entirely locally, you don’t have to worry about the privacy of your data—nothing ever leaves your machine. This is a big advantage compared to 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 general-purpose AI assistant, capable of conversing on any topic, assisting with writing, brainstorming, and more. It’s like having a local version of ChatGPT at your fingertips anytime.
If you’d like to try it out, it’s free, open source, available on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and you can get it here: https://dotapp.uk/
