OrcAI documentation
Open sourceSelf-hostable

AI that answers from your own material.

Turn course or team material into bots that cite their sources, and share them with your organisation.

Contact the OrcAI teamRead the docs GitHub

Made for teaching and learning, research groups and specialist teams.

A chat with the Citation coach bot. It explains how to cite a book chapter in APA 7, and each statement carries a citation of the library's APA referencing guide.

Chat

Answers that show where they come from.

A bot searches its repositories for the passages that match a question and cites them in its answer. Each citation names the asset and links to it. With web search on, a bot also lists the web pages it used.

An opened citation in a chat answer. It shows the asset's title, source type, author and APA citation label, with an Open asset link.

Questions and quizzes

Practise with quizzes the bot grades.

A bot can ask structured questions in the chat and run quizzes on its material. After you submit, it grades every answer, explains what you missed and offers practice on it. Generative UI adds checklists, reviews and comparison tables to its answers.

A quiz on APA 7 in-text citations in a chat, with multiple-choice questions grouped under the section Author rules.

OrcAI Assistant

Set up bots by describing them.

The OrcAI Assistant creates bots, behaviours and repositories, asks you for files and writes their metadata. It proposes a plan for you to approve and asks again before it deletes something or changes access. It acts with your own permissions and answers questions about OrcAI from its documentation.

The OrcAI Assistant proposes a plan to create a Statistics helper bot and waits for approval, with Revise and Approve plan buttons.

Library and Catalogue

Build a bot from parts you reuse.

A bot combines a behaviour, which decides how it writes, with repositories, which hold the assets it answers from. Both live in the Library and work in any number of bots. Share them with members and groups, or list them in the Catalogue so other organisations on the instance can add them.

The Library overview with the bots Essay planner and Citation coach and their features, next to the counts of bots, behaviours, repositories and assets.

More in OrcAI

  • The utility model suggests titles, descriptions and APA citation labels for new assets.

  • Activity follows uploads, preparation and exports, and shows what needs you.

  • Organisation roles, groups and sharing decide who sees and edits each bot, block and asset.

  • Quota pools give groups a budget for model use in each period.

  • Analytics shows usage, estimated cost and answer ratings.

  • Connect OpenAI, Anthropic or any OpenAI-compatible provider and choose its models.

  • A readiness checklist leads admins through setting up a new organisation.

  • Pin, search and branch chats.

  • Two-factor authentication and passkeys protect accounts.

  • The app is in English and German.

  • Export your personal data as a zip archive at any time.

Self-hosting

Run OrcAI on your own servers.

OrcAI is open source under the AGPL-3.0 and runs with Docker Compose. Besides the app and its background workers, it uses PostgreSQL, S3-compatible storage, Qdrant and SpiceDB. Language models come from the providers each organisation connects, and embeddings from an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Self-hosting docs Source code

Origin

Built for teaching at Rhine-Waal University.

OrcAI grew out of the Sokratesᵗ project and KI:edu.nrw at Rhine-Waal University. It is in beta and changes often.

Contact the OrcAI team