OrcAI documentation
Entry point to the OrcAI documentation, with the main capabilities and links to usage, self-hosting and development guides.
OrcAI lets organisations build bots that answer from their own material and cite their sources. It started in teaching and learning and also serves research groups and specialist teams. Members upload files, OrcAI prepares them as assets, and bots search those assets to answer questions.
OrcAI is in beta and changes often.
Open source
OrcAI is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 only (AGPL-3.0-only). The complete licence is available in the repository's LICENSE file.
Start here
Platform overview
Understand what OrcAI does, who it is for, and how retrieval-backed chat fits together.
First steps
Join an organisation by invitation, or initialise a new instance and prepare its first organisation.
Using OrcAI
Follow user-facing workflows for chat, the Library, bots, access, and account settings.
Self-hosting
Run OrcAI with Docker Compose or manually managed infrastructure.
Development
Work with the repository, commands, architecture notes, and contribution flow.
Main capabilities
- Chats with bots that answer from their repositories and cite the passages they used
- Web search with cited pages, questions and quizzes the bot grades, and Generative UI checklists, reviews and tables
- The OrcAI Assistant, which answers questions about OrcAI and sets up bots, behaviours and repositories for you
- A Library of assets, behaviours and repositories that any number of bots reuse, with metadata the utility model suggests
- The Catalogue, where organisations list bots and blocks for everyone on the instance
- Roles, groups, invitations and sharing on each bot, block and asset
- Providers, models, quota pools and analytics for admins
- Self-hosting with Docker Compose, PostgreSQL, S3-compatible storage, Qdrant and SpiceDB