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Comment by givinguflac | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a really neat tool, nice work! I wish I had a use case for it- any plans for pdf or text file support? I’d love a local assistant that allowed for parsing my pdfs and text files the same way.

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This is what Spotlight on macOS is doing for all files by default, just in case you didn't know?

It will only find exact matches though. No synonyms etc.

That's right. Though, I expect that this may change with the next macOS version this year. They (probably) have the knowledge how to apply a good embedding model on all text files, and their hardware is capable of doing it in an efficient way.

That's cool. I didn't know spotlight did that. Does it work for files that aren't in iCloud?

It works on local files yes

Does it? I thought spotlight was basically a text search. I didn’t think you could search for concepts.

Thanks! I've thought about it. The only thing stopping me is the size of the app. Adding a model to handle text would make the app much bigger.

Long-term I'd like to support this, maybe by letting users add/delete models as needed.

Can you design in it such a way that it only downloads the model if the user specifically enables that feature? Add a note along the lines of "A one time additional download is required to enable this feature" or some such, and I think it would allow you to expand the features if you wanted while keeping the initial download smaller. I might be weird in thinking this would be acceptable. Also, would be appreciated that I didn't download something I was never using.

Yeah, I think that could be a good way to handle it. Thanks for the suggestion!

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