Hi HN, I’m excited to present Semantra, a tool and search UI where you can easily embed/query your own documents semantically (by meaning). Semantic embedding models are lightweight and can run on consumer grade CPUs. This project provides an embedding engine and human-in-the-loop web interface where you can run and iteratively refine queries. The project intentionally tries to make this interface as expressive and intuitive as possible without the use of any generative text models like ChatGPT. This makes the tool private, secure, and fast!
The tool is currently a Python CLI you pass files (text/PDF documents) into and it embeds them and launches a web UI. Embeddings are saved by file hash so files are only processed once and subsequent calls are instant. For a future direction, I am working on a native desktop app rewrite in Flutter and porting the project to use entirely C API-compatible libraries (which is a fun challenge when so many existing frameworks depend on Python). This will ideally make the tool easy for anyone to download and install and even opens up the possibility of mobile ports.
I’m excited to hear any comments or feedback! I’d love to know how it meets your needs and/or what features would make your lives easier.
