PaperTalk

Ask questions about your PDFs. Get answers with sources.

Demo

papertalk.mp4

What it is

PaperTalk lets you upload PDFs/TXT into personal Spaces and chat with them. Under the hood it uses retrieval-augmented generation (semantic search + an LLM) so answers stay grounded in your documents, with citations.

What you can do

• Upload PDFs or text to a Space
• Ask natural-language questions and get cited answers
• Compare info across multiple docs in one go
• Sign in with Google; your data stays in your account

How it works (quickly)

1. We split documents into chunks and index them with pgvector.
2. Your question retrieves the most relevant chunks.
3. Gemini generates a concise answer, citing the sources it used.

Quick start

Prereqs: Python 3.11+, Node 18+, PostgreSQL (with pgvector), Google OAuth creds, Gemini API key.

• Create env files: backend .env, frontend .env.local (DB URL, OAuth, JWT, Gemini key, etc.).

Backend

cd backend
pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn app:app --reload --port 8000

Frontend

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Tech

FastAPI + PostgreSQL/pgvector, Next.js + React + Tailwind, Sentence-Transformers for embeddings, Gemini for generation.

Notes

• Currently supports PDF/TXT (up to ~5MB, ~25 pages). Text-only; scanned PDFs need OCR first.
• Best results in English.