Inspired by https://archive.is/2025.04.13-061540/https://medium.com/data-science-collective/rag-in-action-build-your-own-local-pdf-chatbot-as-a-beginner-96c2833869ff

Multimodal Document Chatbot

A powerful chatbot that can answer questions about your documents - including PDFs, Word documents, text files, and images with text.

Features

• Multiple Document Types: Process PDFs, Word documents (.docx), text files, and images (.jpg, .png, etc.)
• Built-in OCR: Extract text from images and scanned documents using EasyOCR
• Semantic Search: Find relevant information across all your documents
• Claude AI Integration: Get intelligent, human-like responses to your questions
• User-Friendly Interface: Easy-to-use web interface built with Streamlit

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• Claude API key (from Anthropic)

Installation

1. Clone this repository or download the files

2. Create a virtual environment and activate it:

python -m venv venv

# On Windows:
venv\Scripts\activate

# On macOS/Linux:
source venv/bin/activate

3. Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Create a .env file in the project directory with your Claude API key:

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

Usage

1. Prepare your documents

Place your document files in a folder called documents in the project directory. The system supports:

• PDF files (.pdf)
• Word documents (.docx, .doc)
• Text files (.txt)
• Image files with text (.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .bmp, .tiff, .tif)

2. Process the documents

Run the following command to process your documents and create the vector database:

python process_documents.py

You can specify custom folders if needed:

python process_documents.py --docs_folder custom_docs --db_folder custom_db

3. Run Streamlit to access the user interface

Then start the app:

streamlit run app.py

4. Open your browser

Go http://localhost:8501 if it doesn't open automatically.