Maybe a bit off-topic: For my PhD, I wanted to leverage LLMs and AI to speed up the literature review process*. Due to time constraints, this never really lifted off for me. At the time I checked (about 6 months ago), several tools were already available (NotebookLM, Anara, Connected Papers, ZotAI, Litmaps, Consensus, Research Rabbit) supporting Literature Review. They have all pros and cons (and different scopes), but my biggest requirement would be to do this on my Zotero bibliographic collection (available offline as PDF/ePub).
ZotAI can use LMStudio (for embeddings and LLM models), but at that time, ZotAI was super slow and buggy.
Instead of going through the valley of sorrows (as threatofrain shared in the blog post - thanks for that), is there a more or less out-of-the-box solution (paid or free) for the demand (RAG for local literature review support)?
*If I am honest, it was rather a procrastination exercise, but this is for sure relatable for readers of HN :-D
I tried to do RAG on my laptop just by setting it all up myself, but the actual LLM gave poor results (I have a small thin-and-light fwiw, so I could only run weak models). The vector search itself, actually, ended up being a little more useful.
If you don’t mind a little instability while I work out the bugs, might be interested in my project: https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw_server ; it’s not quite fully ready yet but the backend api is functional and has a full RAG system with a customizable and tweakable local-first ETL so you can use it without relying on any third party services.
Oh! Same! I made an R / Shiny powered RAG/ Researching app that hooks into OpenAlex (for papers) and allows you to generate NotebookLM like outputs. Just got slides with from-paper images to be injected in, super fun. Takes an OpenRouter or local LLMs (if that's your thing). Network graphs too! https://github.com/seanthimons/serapeum/
onyx is good for this, it is standard doc ingestion -> chunk -> embedding -> index -> query -> rerank -> answer.
there are a few other local apps with simple knowledge base type things you can use with pdfs. cherry studio is nice, no reranking though.