Looking for an app where I can chat with a book

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39719547

by eerop • 2 years ago

9 14 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hey, I'm looking for an AI app that allows me to chat with a book. Problem with chatgpt is that it hallucinates and I can't give it a full book as a prompt.

Are there any LLMs or AI apps that allow me to give them a book such as "The Lean Startup" and I can ask them questions like "What are the arguments and what is the evidence?" without having to worry that it might hallucinate?

andrewoodleyjr• 2 years ago

You can use openai playground, copy and paste the entire book in the playground and then ask it questions. The cost will be high but it will provide what you need.

I heard this method works great for using new documentation, needing to combine multiple api's, and wanting ai to handle the coding.

vyrotek• 2 years ago

There are apps that let you chat with large PDFs. Perhaps your books have an option to purchase a digital copy?

nittanymount• 2 years ago

chatpdf.com LOL

adyashakti• 2 years ago

getcody.ai

psyklic2• 2 years ago

These have been on HN:

- https://www.bookai.chat/

- https://www.myreader.ai/

blizzardman3• 2 years ago

This is so cool, does anyone know how to build an app that answer question from the book? What would you need to learn to build an llm app like this? Can you use llama directly?

psyklic2• 2 years ago

Building a prototype of this would be very straightforward. The difficulty would be ensuring high-quality results.

1. You'd only have to know basic web dev. Enough to get input from the user, send it to an API (e.g. https://openai.com/blog/openai-api), and display results. There are many tutorials online showing how to do this.

2. You'd then design a prompt ("prompt engineering") that tells the GPT it's read the book, asking it to converse in a friendly manner as an expert literary critic, etc. Place this prompt and the prior conversation before the user's new question. Then send it to the API. (It's likely the GPT at least knows something about most popular books.)

3. You can now try to improve the results. A popular method: If you have the full text for the book, you can do a text search for the user's query. Then just include relevant parts of the book in the prompt.

joshxyz• 2 years ago

https://salina.app/

free for now

tmaly• 2 years ago

I would love something like this for my digital notes.

I think my problem with making something myself is finding a vector db that works on the AMD chip and Windows platform.

solardev• 2 years ago

Google's NotebookLM is designed for this use case. Blog post: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-google-ai/ (or try it at https://notebooklm.google/)

I'm not sure if there's a length limit, but basically you upload a PDF and it'll try to "ground" the LLM in that.

A key difference between NotebookLM and traditional AI chatbots is that NotebookLM lets you “ground” the language model in your notes and sources. Source-grounding effectively creates a personalized AI that’s versed in the information relevant to you. Starting today, you can ground NotebookLM in specific Google Docs that you choose, and we’ll be adding additional formats soon.

(It now supports PDFs and plaintext, from GDrive or elsewhere)

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In my personal experiments, though, it didn't really seem to be very different than just uploading a file into ChatGPT (in a custom transformer). Sometimes one or the other would be higher-quality; both would still possibly hallucinate. Importantly, neither one is strictly limited to the source text; they both still have prior outside knowledge.

What was cool, though, was NotebookLM's ability to cite passages in the source. Here is an example of your question:

https://share.cleanshot.com/pSnz4CXC

Their UI is a bit buggy, and sometimes questions just... disappear. That's why in the screenshot I asked it the same thing twice.

But still, might be a "good enough" way to get the gist of a new source that's not already part of the training set.

Looking for an app where I can chat with a book

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