I've just built a fully local Q&A chatbot for PDFs - and it’s entirely offline. No cloud dependencies, no API keys, just open-source Generative AI that runs on your machine, giving you complete control and privacy.
Why this matters
With growing concerns over data security and AI model transparency, many organisations want the power of modern AI without handing over sensitive documents to third-party APIs or cloud services. This solution gives you exactly that - all the benefits of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), running locally.
What’s under the hood?
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Ollama - easily run large language models like LLaMA or Mistral locally.
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Sentence embeddings + vector search - to find relevant context fast.
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Streamlit - for a clean, responsive user interface.
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Full RAG pipeline - document parsing, context retrieval, and generation - all handled securely on-device.
What can you do with it?
Just upload a PDF and start asking natural language questions. Whether it’s internal documentation, research papers, or archived reports, this chatbot turns static files into interactive knowledge.
It’s perfect for:
Try it yourself
I’ve written a step-by-step guide with full code to get you started. Check out the full blog tutorial and GitHub repo.
