Look what we just built!
I've been tinkering at my desk. It gave rise to a chatbot. The chatbot hangs out with our podcast guests. They seem to understand each other. Most of the time...
A slight deviation this week as I indulge my inner (ok, not so inner) coder. But don’t switch off if you are not a coder, because really this is about a way to find and retrieve information you may have in your internal systems - for us, it was an archive of podcasts. Have a read, and let me know if you think what we’re building is of interest to you. It’s open source, so this isn’t even a shake down!
At Voxgig we have now recorded 140 podcast episodes (as of Feb 2024). That’s a lot of chatting about developer relations. It’s great if you are a regular listener (thanks!), or have the time to listen to our back catalogue. But what is frustrating is that there is so much wonderful knowledge about developer relations locked up in an audio format that, while enjoyable to listen to, is not accessible or usable in an efficient manner.
When you need to know something about developer relations, and you want to tap into the wisdom of one our guests, you are out of luck. Or at least, you were. We decided to turn our coding skills to this little problem and write our own AI chatbot to let you ask our guests your questions directly.
If you go to the Voxgig podcast page, you can now see a little chatbot widget, and when you type in a question, you get a reasonably good answer!
Now this is a very crude initial version, and we are actively improving it. The chatbot uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to ingest all our podcast episodes, and let you ask questions of our guests directly.
We decided to open-source the entire project. Building a RAG ingestor and query engine is a natural fit for microservices (there are lots of little asynchronous tasks). So if you’d like your own podcast chatbot, just cut and paste our code: github.com/voxgig/podmind.
We’ve had such an enthusiastic reaction to this fun little project we’ve decided to take it further and extend the chatbot to handle all sorts of developer content. We’re also adding the ability to easily experiment with the prompt and the “chunker” (stay tuned if you want to know all about that stuff).
We’re going to “build in public” with this project. You’ll be able to follow along at a source-code level as we make it more and more useful.
To get started, I’ve listed the microservices I used and what each one does on the full blog post about this chatbot which you can find here. This blog post is part of a series, the building in public!
Get in touch with me at richard@voxgig.com if you want to chat about our chatbot, or want to be a guest on the podcast. I’d love to hear from you.