/pdftochat

Chat with your PDFs with AI

Primary LanguageTypeScriptMIT LicenseMIT

PDFToChat – Chat with your PDFs in seconds.

Chat with your PDFs in seconds. Powered by Together AI and Pinecone.

Tech Stack · Deploy Your Own · Common Errors · Credits · Future Tasks


Tech Stack

Deploy Your Own

You can deploy this template to Vercel or any other host. Note that you'll need to:

See the .example.env for a list of all the required environment variables.

You will also need to prepare your database schema by running npx prisma db push.

MongoDB Atlas

To set up a MongoDB Atlas database as the backing vectorstore, you will need to perform the following steps:

  1. Sign up on their website, then create a database cluster. Find it under the Database sidebar tab.
  2. Create a collection by switching to Collections the tab and creating a blank collection.
  3. Create an index by switching to the Atlas Search tab and clicking Create Search Index.
  4. Make sure you select Atlas Vector Search - JSON Editor, select the appropriate database and collection, and paste the following into the textbox:
{
  "fields": [
    {
      "numDimensions": 768,
      "path": "embedding",
      "similarity": "euclidean",
      "type": "vector"
    },
    {
      "path": "docstore_document_id",
      "type": "filter"
    }
  ]
}

Note that the numDimensions is 768 dimensions to match the embeddings model we're using, and that we have another index on docstore_document_id. This allows us to filter later.

You may call the index whatever you wish, just make a note of it!

  1. Finally, retrieve and set the following environment variables:
NEXT_PUBLIC_VECTORSTORE=mongodb # Set MongoDB Atlas as your vectorstore

MONGODB_ATLAS_URI= # Connection string for your database.
MONGODB_ATLAS_DB_NAME= # The name of your database.
MONGODB_ATLAS_COLLECTION_NAME= # The name of your collection.
MONGODB_ATLAS_INDEX_NAME= # The name of the index you just created.

Common errors

  • Check that you've created an .env file that contains your valid (and working) API keys, environment and index name.
  • Check that you've set the vector dimensions to 768 and that index matched your specified field in the .env variable.
  • Check that you've added a credit card on Together AI if you're hitting rate limiting issues due to the free tier

Credits

  • Youssef for the design of the app
  • Mayo for the original RAG repo and inspiration
  • Jacob for the LangChain help
  • Together AI, Bytescale, Pinecone, and Clerk for sponsoring

Future tasks

These are some future tasks that I have planned. Contributions are welcome!

  • Add a trash icon for folks to delete PDFs from the dashboard and implement delete functionality
  • Try different embedding models like UAE-large-v1 to see if it improves accuracy
  • Explore best practices for auto scrolling based on other chat apps like chatGPT
  • Do some prompt engineering for Mixtral to make replies as good as possible
  • Protect API routes by making sure users are signed in before executing chats
  • Run an initial benchmark on how accurate chunking / retrieval are
  • Research best practices for chunking and retrieval and play around with them – ideally run benchmarks
  • Try out Langsmith for more observability into how the RAG app runs
  • Add demo video to the homepage to demonstrate functionality more easily
  • Upgrade to Next.js 14 and fix any issues with that
  • Implement sources like perplexity to be clickable with more info
  • Add analytics to track the number of chats & errors
  • Make some changes to the default tailwind prose to decrease padding
  • Add an initial message with sample questions or just add them as bubbles on the page
  • Add an option to get answers as markdown or in regular paragraphs
  • Implement something like SWR to automatically revalidate data
  • Save chats for each user to get back to later in the postgres DB
  • Bring up a message to direct folks to compress PDFs if they're beyond 10MB
  • Use a self-designed custom uploader
  • Use a session tracking tool to better understand how folks are using the site
  • Add better error handling overall with appropriate toasts when actions fail
  • Add support for images in PDFs with something like Nougat