Personal research libraries
Search notes, PDFs, transcripts, and reference docs without pushing an archive into someone else's SaaS.
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Local-first retrieval for operators who keep the disk.
Alcove ingests a directory of documents, builds a local semantic index, and serves fast search on localhost. No cloud account. No telemetry. No custody transfer.
Lead with the use cases
Search notes, PDFs, transcripts, and reference docs without pushing an archive into someone else's SaaS.
Index oral histories, local newsletters, and donor files on hardware that the community already controls.
Give staff a fast internal search surface for policies, minutes, and filings without introducing a hosted dependency.
Point Alcove at a folder of PDFs, EPUBs, Markdown, CSV, JSON, DOCX, and plain text.
Chunks, embeddings, and vectors stay on disk. Plugins can swap in new extractors, embedders, and backends.
Operators get a web interface that stays near the source material instead of sending it into a control plane.
Try it locally
pip install alcove-search
alcove seed-demo
alcove serve
Supports PDF, EPUB, TXT, HTML, Markdown, RST, CSV, TSV, JSON, JSONL, DOCX