Chat with your notes using a local LLM

ctietze

https://www.reorproject.org/

Found this in my feed: it creates a basic ChatGPT-like interface to ask questions about your notes.

The appeal is to do everything locally, given you have a decently powerful machine -- instead of using wasteful and data-stealing online services.

Haven't yet tested this, so beat me to it and report your experience

JustinW80

Thanks for following up here, @ctietze. I don't visit the forum as regularly!

I tried Reor with a local-first approach, and it seems okay. It feels though like the responses weigh more towards the training data than the notes I set it to augment.

For example, I asked it for tips on boss fights in Chrono Trigger, and it did not use my note at all in its response and just gave generic answers that could apply to any JRPG.

Reor claims to have "semantic search”, to enable searching without exact phrasing. But I find it doesn't rank results well either.

Though now that I poke around the UI some more, in the chat prompt there is a "tool" panel where you can check to have Reor use "search" on your folder. I had zero tools enabled during my testing!

GeoEng51

Hi Christian @ctietze
I've briefly tried Reor out. I found the interface so clunky that I don't really want to invest the time to see what it can do. Chatting with the AI bot is remarkably uninformative. Here's a few issues I've noticed so far:

1. When you load up your database, you can see a list of your notes. Click on one note and what do you see? Nothing.
2. I was hoping I could ask the bot to suggest connections between a selected note and other notes in the my database - no such luck.
3. Asking questions yields ineffective or useless answers.
4. It seems to be ignorant of the database I just loaded and it categorized.
5. The documentation on the Reor web site is narrow and almost useless.

I may try to run Reor again, but I don't really fancy wrestling with a seemingly stupid AI.

I suspect my first impressions are highly biased by my ignorance about the program, but neither the program nor the Reor web site does much to rectify that situation.