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Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

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Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#61

Post by yuhongsun »

smeej wrote: post #60

I think the biggest problem I've run into with company documentation is that the relevant docs either don't exist at all or are woefully out of date. Sure, there might be a procedure doc that spelled out how to handle a particular type of issue, but it has probably been updated three times in Slack DMs and twice on Zoom calls since the doc was actually written. And maybe at least once, the company has "declared bankr…

We definitely recommend you trying it out!

As far as how outdated information is handled - we pass the most relevant documents along with metadata to the LLM. So in the case you mentioned, the LLM will be provided the procedure doc and the time it was updated, the relevant Slack messages and the times they were sent, and the call transcripts along with when the call happened. The LLM tends to handle this pretty well.

Additionally, during the retrieval phase, there's a time based decay applied based on the last time the document was updated. Also there is learning from feedback so users can upvote documents that are useful and downvote documents that are deprecated.

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#63

Post by BillFranklin »

yuhongsun wrote: post #14
BillFranklin wrote: post #12

Good luck folks! I'm glad there are projects trying to solve enterprise search. I guess the main problem is the "private" aspect, if I've understood your goals correctly. Since most SaaS products lock down the private data unless you pay enterprise fees for compliance tooling. For instance, if you want to ingest data from private Slack channels or Notion groups, you have to get the users in those groups to add your b…

I think I understand your concern but if I miss the point, please follow up! So regarding getting access to read knowledge from the different tools, it depends tool by tool but a lot of them have API keys or options for app integrations available in the free tier (GitHub, Google Drive, Confluence come to mind). Other tools don't have a free tier and you just get access to the API keys as a part of paying for the serv…

> It is what it is sadly.

This is what I mean -- previously I built a similar search engine on top of slack, notion, etc., but didn't launch the product because I thought that requiring users to constantly add bots to private channels would be a subpar experience. I thought this would be a blocker for good UX, so didn't go further, but maybe you'll find a nice solution!

Searching over public internal data is addressed by a few existing tools, but it's the private aspect which is pretty difficult to handle and disastrous to get wrong when managed ad-hoc - e.g. someone accidentally adds the bot to a private slack group called #layoffs :) so you'd want this handled properly and centrally.

I guess you'll also need to handle privacy well, ~maybe it's OK when run as a SaaS for db admins to have access to ingested data, but if it's OSS then the people that run it probably shouldn't be able to read the private data that's ingested, so now you need to handle search over encrypted data, which is a fun problem :D

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#65

Post by johntash »

yuhongsun wrote: post #26
carlossouza wrote: post #22

Congrats on the launch! Does it search within pdf files?

Thanks! Yes, it does do PDFs. We don't do anything fancy with it though like Optical Character Recognition (OCR). So pictures of text, as well as images and graphs will be lost. This is something we will work on though. Is this something that you would find a lot of value in or is simple text processing of PDFs sufficient?

I'd benefit from OCR too. Not just PDFs, but OCR on images could be super useful to.

For a personal use case, I'm thinking things like receipts. For work, I'm thinking OCR on architecture diagrams/etc.

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#66

Post by acod »

Really like the idea! The company I work for has recently contracted with (glean)[glean.com] which seems to serve the same purpose but imo the killer feature which they lack is being able to work collaboratively with the AI to produce an answer by enabling the human operator to explicitly scope down the context of a chat to specific documents and then converse with the document in question.

Sometimes you know roughly where the data you're looking for exists but the artifact containing the information is extremely dense to interpret. For example, a runbook for a system could span 10s to 100s of pages and to actually accomplish what you want means interpreting and joining information from different sections of the same document. It seems like there's potential here to allow an expert to define explicit scope of what it needs to search and then include information in the context as wide or as narrow as the question requires.

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#67

Post by yuhongsun »

acod wrote: post #66

Really like the idea! The company I work for has recently contracted with (glean)[glean.com] which seems to serve the same purpose but imo the killer feature which they lack is being able to work collaboratively with the AI to produce an answer by enabling the human operator to explicitly scope down the context of a chat to specific documents and then converse with the document in question. Sometimes you know roughly…

Sounds like Danswer might just fit your needs. Also ya, we came up with this idea of chatting with documents that you can select on the fly, I think we're the only ones who do this still. People have really been liking that one!

If you happen to want to talk to us about Danswer, we'd love to welcome you to our Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/danswer/shared_invite/zt-2afut44lv-...

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#68

Post by Weves »

tibanne wrote: post #32
yuhongsun wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! There is Basic Auth (email + password with email verification) and Google OAuth available in the free version. We also do OIDC and SAML to integration with Identity Providers (IdPs) like Okta but that's part of the paid features. Ahhh please don't hate us!

With the free version, can I constrain the emails to be from one domain? i.e. the company domain

Chris here (the other founder) - yes you can! We have an `VALID_EMAIL_DOMAINS ` env variable which controls this.

For example, for us we have `VALID_EMAIL_DOMAINS=danswer.ai`.

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#69

Post by yuhongsun »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #62

How does this compare to simply rolling your own OpenAI Assistant (apart from direct integration of Slack etc.)?

So one of the main things we do is automatically sync-ing documents from different sources of knowledge from your team. So all of the data connectors as well as the user authentication and access systems would have to be built from scratch if you did your own. Also if you have more than a few documents you would have to recreate the RAG pipeline (and ours is fairly involved so it would be quite some work). Finally there's the UI and other features like learning from feedback, usage analytics, chat history, etc etc.

If you're just looking to upload a few personal docs into a chat assistant for your own use, probably Danswer is overkill and more complex than the effort is worth. If you're thinking of a team wide use case, then using Danswer makes sense.

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#70

Post by cyanydeez »

yuhongsun wrote: post #33
cyanydeez wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've limited my expectations for LLM support to file management. locating relevant datasets or filing away things. the interactive QA just don't seem salient beyond some high level.

A lot of people are very bullish on AI, it's very interesting to hear the opposite side. My opinion is that LLMs are very powerful at digesting and distilling knowledge which is why we built this project. I also think that LLMs are terrible reasoning engines and so agent-flows are not quite ready for primetime. Would love to hear your perspective on the space!

I certainly see the value of large document retrieval and various forms of search.

However, what seems to be the business proposition is giving managers shallow access to documents but won't lead to rigorous information.

There's a few middle grounds where it can yield insights. like regulatory scenarios where you want to understand how public orgs satisfy permits with written plans.

however, what I don't believe will yield is the context size. when I want to explore my knowledge base, I need far more than 128k and there's sever orders of structure that language itself is not going to bridge.

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