chatd

AI is slowly getting integrated into all sorts of solutions to help users be more efficient in more ways than one. While we’re still very much at the beginning of this AI experimentation phase, where developers seek to implement AI functionalities in various areas, it’s nevertheless an exciting period for software development.

Being able to query an AI based on an inputted document sounds intriguing, and this is precisely what chatd is all about. It installs a local AI model on your system which can interpret any selected document, leading to some interesting results.

That all sounds very advanced — you select a document, then the AI scans it to answer any questions you may have about it — but it's impressive how simple the app is to use in the end. It can come in handy in a number of ways: for instance, you can incorporate such a tool in your studying sessions.

You add your document in, query the AI on it, and this will hopefully help you better understand and memorize certain information. Note that the program will generate answers solely based on the data in the inserted document.

As the program uses a local AI, there’s no interaction with the cloud, making this a private solution overall. You simply run the app, wait for the model to be installed — which can take a while — and your document chatting AI buddy will be waiting for you.

As the AI model runs locally, system resources are bound to be used fully. You can expect to wait a while upon querying the AI: in my case, an answer would be generated in about 30 seconds or so, but this may vary between different systems.

In any case, chatd has a lot of potential. Besides being easy to use, the AI model worked well to generate answers to my queries. In the end, it’s up to the user to come up with relevant queries.