SurfSense

While tools like NotebookLM and Perplexity are impressive and highly effective for conducting research on any topic/query, SurfSense elevates this capability by integrating with your personal knowledge base. It is a highly customizable AI research agent, connected to external sources such as search engines (Tavily, LinkUp), Slack, Linear, Notion, YouTube, GitHub, Discord and more to come.

Video

Old video. New one coming soon.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/48142909-6391-4084-b7e8-81da388bb1fc

Podcast's

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d516982f-de00-4c41-9e4c-632a7d942f41

Podcast Sample

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a0a16566-6967-4374-ac51-9b3e07fbecd7

Key Features

💡 Idea:

Have your own highly customizable private NotebookLM and Perplexity integrated with external sources.

📁 Multiple File Format Uploading Support

Save content from your own personal files (Documents, images, videos and supports 50+ file extensions) to your own personal knowledge base .

🔍 Powerful Search

Quickly research or find anything in your saved content .

💬 Chat with your Saved Content

Interact in Natural Language and get cited answers.

📄 Cited Answers

Get Cited answers just like Perplexity.

🔔 Privacy & Local LLM Support

Works Flawlessly with Ollama local LLMs.

🏠 Self Hostable

Open source and easy to deploy locally.

🎙️ Podcasts

• Blazingly fast podcast generation agent. (Creates a 3-minute podcast in under 20 seconds.)
• Convert your chat conversations into engaging audio content
• Support for multiple TTS providers (OpenAI, Azure, Google Vertex AI)

📊 Advanced RAG Techniques

• Supports 100+ LLM's
• Supports 6000+ Embedding Models.
• Supports all major Rerankers (Pinecode, Cohere, Flashrank etc)
• Uses Hierarchical Indices (2 tiered RAG setup).
• Utilizes Hybrid Search (Semantic + Full Text Search combined with Reciprocal Rank Fusion).
• RAG as a Service API Backend.

ℹ️ External Sources

• Search Engines (Tavily, LinkUp)
• Slack
• Linear
• Notion
• Youtube Videos
• GitHub
• Discord
• and more to come.....

📄 Supported File Extensions

Note: File format support depends on your ETL service configuration. LlamaCloud supports 50+ formats, while Unstructured supports 34+ core formats.

Documents & Text

LlamaCloud: .pdf, .doc, .docx, .docm, .dot, .dotm, .rtf, .txt, .xml, .epub, .odt, .wpd, .pages, .key, .numbers, .602, .abw, .cgm, .cwk, .hwp, .lwp, .mw, .mcw, .pbd, .sda, .sdd, .sdp, .sdw, .sgl, .sti, .sxi, .sxw, .stw, .sxg, .uof, .uop, .uot, .vor, .wps, .zabw

Unstructured: .doc, .docx, .odt, .rtf, .pdf, .xml, .txt, .md, .markdown, .rst, .html, .org, .epub

Presentations

LlamaCloud: .ppt, .pptx, .pptm, .pot, .potm, .potx, .odp, .key

Unstructured: .ppt, .pptx

Spreadsheets & Data

LlamaCloud: .xlsx, .xls, .xlsm, .xlsb, .xlw, .csv, .tsv, .ods, .fods, .numbers, .dbf, .123, .dif, .sylk, .slk, .prn, .et, .uos1, .uos2, .wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wks, .wq1, .wq2, .wb1, .wb2, .wb3, .qpw, .xlr, .eth

Unstructured: .xls, .xlsx, .csv, .tsv

Images

LlamaCloud: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .svg, .tiff, .webp, .html, .htm, .web

Unstructured: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .bmp, .tiff, .heic

Audio & Video (Always Supported)

.mp3, .mpga, .m4a, .wav, .mp4, .mpeg, .webm

Email & Communication

Unstructured: .eml, .msg, .p7s

🔖 Cross Browser Extension

• The SurfSense extension can be used to save any webpage you like.
• Its main usecase is to save any webpages protected beyond authentication.

FEATURE REQUESTS AND FUTURE

SurfSense is actively being developed. While it's not yet production-ready, you can help us speed up the process.

Join the SurfSense Discord and help shape the future of SurfSense!

🚀 Roadmap

Stay up to date with our development progress and upcoming features!
Check out our public roadmap and contribute your ideas or feedback:

View the Roadmap: SurfSense Roadmap on GitHub Projects

How to get started?

Installation Options

SurfSense provides two installation methods:

1. Docker Installation - The easiest way to get SurfSense up and running with all dependencies containerized.

   • Includes pgAdmin for database management through a web UI
   • Supports environment variable customization via .env file
   • Flexible deployment options (full stack or core services only)
   • No need to manually edit configuration files between environments
   • See Docker Setup Guide for detailed instructions
   • For deployment scenarios and options, see Deployment Guide

2. Manual Installation (Recommended) - For users who prefer more control over their setup or need to customize their deployment.

Both installation guides include detailed OS-specific instructions for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Before installation, make sure to complete the prerequisite setup steps including:

• PGVector setup
• File Processing ETL Service (choose one):
  • Unstructured.io API key (supports 34+ formats)
  • LlamaIndex API key (enhanced parsing, supports 50+ formats)
• Other required API keys

Screenshots

Research Agent

Search Spaces

Manage Documents

Podcast Agent

Agent Chat

Browser Extension

Tech Stack

BackEnd

• FastAPI: Modern, fast web framework for building APIs with Python

• PostgreSQL with pgvector: Database with vector search capabilities for similarity searches

• SQLAlchemy: SQL toolkit and ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) for database interactions

• Alembic: A database migrations tool for SQLAlchemy.

• FastAPI Users: Authentication and user management with JWT and OAuth support

• LangGraph: Framework for developing AI-agents.

• LangChain: Framework for developing AI-powered applications.

• LLM Integration: Integration with LLM models through LiteLLM

• Rerankers: Advanced result ranking for improved search relevance

• Hybrid Search: Combines vector similarity and full-text search for optimal results using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF)

• Vector Embeddings: Document and text embeddings for semantic search

• pgvector: PostgreSQL extension for efficient vector similarity operations

• Chonkie: Advanced document chunking and embedding library

• Uses AutoEmbeddings for flexible embedding model selection

• LateChunker for optimized document chunking based on embedding model's max sequence length

FrontEnd

• Next.js 15.2.3: React framework featuring App Router, server components, automatic code-splitting, and optimized rendering.

• React 19.0.0: JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

• TypeScript: Static type-checking for JavaScript, enhancing code quality and developer experience.

• Vercel AI SDK Kit UI Stream Protocol: To create scalable chat UI.

• Tailwind CSS 4.x: Utility-first CSS framework for building custom UI designs.

• Shadcn: Headless components library.

• Lucide React: Icon set implemented as React components.

• Framer Motion: Animation library for React.

• Sonner: Toast notification library.

• Geist: Font family from Vercel.

• React Hook Form: Form state management and validation.

• Zod: TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference.

• @hookform/resolvers: Resolvers for using validation libraries with React Hook Form.

• @tanstack/react-table: Headless UI for building powerful tables & datagrids.

DevOps

• Docker: Container platform for consistent deployment across environments

• Docker Compose: Tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications

• pgAdmin: Web-based PostgreSQL administration tool included in Docker setup

Extension

Manifest v3 on Plasmo

Future Work

• Add More Connectors.
• Patch minor bugs.
• Document Chat [REIMPLEMENT]
• Document Podcasts

Contribute

Contributions are very welcome! A contribution can be as small as a ⭐ or even finding and creating issues. Fine-tuning the Backend is always desired.

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