Do we have options for developing our own custom connectors? For ex, not much known apps like Erpnext etc.. In other words, any app not in danswer, we should be able to create custom connector and use..
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
#42Do we have options for developing our own custom connectors? For ex, not much known apps like Erpnext etc.. In other words, any app not in danswer, we should be able to create custom connector and use..
Yes! And we'd love it if you contribute them back to the project! More than half of the connectors are community contributed at this point and it's by far the most common area of contribution.
There's a simple Document interface that needs to be implemented to provide stuff like title, content, link, etc. From there the rest of the Danswer code takes it and handles the indexing and making it available for querying.
There's a contributing guide here: https://github.com/danswer-ai/danswer/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING...
And a connector contributing guide here: https://github.com/danswer-ai/danswer/blob/main/backend/dans...
Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data
#43What's your moat? FAANG+ are all working on similar products.
Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data
#44This is one of those posts that makes me feel like I'm in the right place at the right time. Thank you, this is a fantastic piece of tech.
Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data
#45What's your moat? FAANG+ are all working on similar products.
We're leaning heavily into the open source aspect. We think that a solution like this will be useful to even smaller teams (10-50) that other companies won't want to target. There is some non-trivial amount of setup required, specifically chasing down the API keys etc. So for the SaaS alternatives, they rely heavily on their sales orgs being very hands on so it makes no sense for them to target small teams. In fact for many of them, if you try to sign up for a demo and you say you're less than 50 people, they straight up ignore you.
So hopefully teams will self-adopt Danswer and as they grow, they will keep using us!
For larger teams, the transparency and peace of mind of self-hosting an open source solution is also a major benefit. We've often heard from large teams that have adopted Danswer, that the customizability of it has been a driving factor in their adoption. They want to own the solution and they want to customize it specifically for their needs. At the very basic level, a lot of teams have swapped in domain specific embedding models and prompts but we've seem some significantly more involved customizations as well.
Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data
#46This is one of those posts that makes me feel like I'm in the right place at the right time. Thank you, this is a fantastic piece of tech.
Thanks so much! It's always rewarding to hear people sharing our excitement!
Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data
#47[dead]
Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data
#48Congrats 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?
Not OP, but I would definitely find a lot of value from processing PDFs in such a way that it could eg understand tables and images. I work in mining and having it digest a 43-101 technical report with images and tables would be supremely valuable.
I know that might be a niche case tho.
Absolutely incredible work you’re doing tho wow, I’m very impressed by what you’re doing and the way you’re doing it. Even if you stopped now this is a masterpiece, so while yes I would definitely find a lot of value from being able to process images and graphs/tables, simply being able to process the text and cite it is already a superpower. Thank you for your amazing work!!!
Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data
#49This is really nice. Congratulations for launching. Just the last 2-3 weeks have I had talks with enterprise companies regarding this topic. It seems to be on every CEO's agenda. I have talked to a couple of startups who wanted to do a similar thing to you. But they all feared Microsoft Copilot is not beatable. So they don't even try.
>But they all feared Microsoft Copilot is not beatable. So they don't even try.
The thing is, you don't need to beat copilot. Copilot may well be the worse system and Microsoft can still win because they offer the most enterprise-y solution. I wouldn't be worried about competing with them on functionality. But I also would never even try to outdo them on a business level.
Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data
#50This is really nice. Congratulations for launching. Just the last 2-3 weeks have I had talks with enterprise companies regarding this topic. It seems to be on every CEO's agenda. I have talked to a couple of startups who wanted to do a similar thing to you. But they all feared Microsoft Copilot is not beatable. So they don't even try.
>But they all feared Microsoft Copilot is not beatable. So they don't even try. The thing is, you don't need to beat copilot. Copilot may well be the worse system and Microsoft can still win because they offer the most enterprise-y solution. I wouldn't be worried about competing with them on functionality. But I also would never even try to outdo them on a business level.
I definitely see what you mean. They also have advantages in bundling co-pilot with their other offerings. This will in no means be an easy battle for us, but we have hope that we'll be able to build something people love and end up using!