{
  "id": 15472073,
  "title": "AI-RAG-Bot — chat with your documents. 100% local, 100% private, $0 to run",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/18/ai-rag-bot-chat-with-your-documents-100-local-100-private-0-to-run",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-18T19:09:30.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/sanyamkansal/ai-rag-bot-chat-with-your-documents-100-local-100-private-0-to-run-3d90"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "AI-RAG-Bot is a locally-hosted Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system designed for intelligent document question answering. It allows users to drop files into a folder and ask questions in their terminal to receive answers grounded strictly in those files. The system supports .txt, .pdf, and image formats, with OCR capabilities for scanned PDFs and photos of documents. This makes even a photographed receipt searchable knowledge.\n\nThe AI-RAG-Bot project is built using open-source components like Ollama, ChromaDB, PyMuPDF, OpenCV, Tesseract OCR, and the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 model from sentence-transformers. It processes documents, creates vector embeddings, stores them locally, and leverages an LLM to generate answers. The entire pipeline is open-source, enabling users to swap models or embedders with ease.\n\nKey benefits include privacy, cost-efficiency, and offline functionality. Since no sensitive data leaves the laptop, it offers a secure alternative to cloud-based AI services. Additionally, running everything locally removes the need for per-query API bills, making it a $0/month solution. The project also emphasizes freedom of choice, allowing users to easily swap models or embedders as needed.",
  "summary": "This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle What I Built AI-RAG-Bot is a local \"chat with your documents\" assistant: drop files into a folder, ask questions in your terminal, and get answers grounded strictly in those files. It reads .txt , .pdf , and images — and for scanned PDFs and photos of documents, it runs OCR (Tesseract + OpenCV), so even a…",
  "key_points": [
    "AI-RAG-Bot is a locally-hosted Retrieval-Augmented Generation system for document question answering",
    "Supports .txt, .pdf, and image formats with OCR capabilities for scanned documents",
    "Offers privacy, cost-efficiency, and offline functionality as a $0/month solution"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}