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Re:Show HN: An Open-Source E-Book Reader for Conversational ... by Finnucane on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @09:31AM (#44811749)
"By conversing with an AI that fully understands the book's content in real time,"

That seems like a maybe a wee bit of an overstatement of possibilities.

Re:Show HN: An Open-Source E-Book Reader for Conversational ... by takigon on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @10:12AM (#44812295)
You're right to call that out, that's a fair point. "Fully understands" is indeed a bit of an overstatement for the current state of AI.

What I meant from a technical perspective is that the system uses a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach. It has the entire book's content available in a vector database, and when you ask a question, it performs a semantic search to pull the most relevant passages in real-time to use as context for the LLM's answer.

So, from a user's perspective, the experience is designed to feel like you're conversing with an expert who can instantly recall any part of the book. I should have used more precise language. Thanks for keeping me honest!