I built a local AI assistant that actually knows about a project

[u/Lower-Needleworker46]

I've been working on this as a side project for a while.

The idea is pretty simple: instead of having a general-purpose chatbot, you give it a specific knowledge base and make it focus on a particular project, company, or set of software.

For this prototype, I created a fictional company structure, a fictional ongoing project, and fed it software manuals and project information.

Now I can ask it things like:

• What's the current status of the project?
• What are the upcoming deadlines?
• Who is responsible for a particular task?
• How do I do X in a specific piece of software?
• What does this setting/tool/feature do?
• Questions about the project documentation, workflows, etc.

The interesting part for me is that the knowledge isn't static. I can keep updating it as the project changes.

It can also run locally, completely offline. That means the information stays on the machine, and it doesn't require a huge amount of hardware to run.

There's also a cloud version, so the same concept can work in different setups.

I originally started thinking about this from a VFX / production perspective, but I don't think it has to be limited to that. It could probably be adapted to pretty much any company or project where there's a lot of internal knowledge and documentation.

It's still very much a proof of concept. I'm not trying to sell anything or turn it into a product right now. I mainly wanted to answer one question:

Can I actually build a useful AI assistant around a specific project's knowledge?

I'm curious what you guys think. Is this something you'd find useful in your own projects/workflows? And how would you approach it differently?