CAVOK: Study Buddy
Private AI that answers only from your own textbook
12 followers
Private AI that answers only from your own textbook
12 followers
CAVOK: Study Buddy is a native Mac app for students with a textbook and a deadline. Drop in your own PDF and ask questions in plain language. CAVOK answers using only that book and cites the exact page. If it doesn't know, it says so, no guessing, no filled in gaps. Everything runs on your device by default. No account required. Turn on cloud mode with your own API key for deeper, adaptive answers. Nothing passes through us because we don't run servers. One-time purchase, $14.99.
Would love a quick toggle to compare my own notes or annotations against CAVOK's answer, like a side panel where I can drop a screenshot of my margin scribbles and see if the bot is interpreting the chapter the same way I am.
@webdevlife Appreciate this ^^^ Right now CAVOK only reasons from the textbook itself, it has no concept of your notes as a separate input. A side-by-side view, your annotations against the book's actual text, is a genuinely different use case than "answer my question," closer to "check my understanding" than "explain this to me." Nothing built yet, but it's a clean idea and it stays inside the same rule the whole app follows: it would need to tell you where your notes and the book agree or diverge, page by page, not just render a verdict. Curious how you'd picture using it, checking your own summary notes against the source, or literally photographing margin notes?
Would love a way to highlight a passage in the PDF and ask about it directly without retyping the question. A floating mini toolbar or a right-click option to "ask about selection" would make digging into tricky sections way faster during late night cramming sessions.
@rowan_ashen This one's more buildable than it sounds. Right now the PDF pane and the question box are separate surfaces, so you end up retyping context the app is already holding. Select and ask would just hand the selection over directly instead of making you describe it.
The late night case is the right one to design against too, retyping a paragraph at 1am is exactly the friction that makes you close the laptop.
Question on scope: would you want it answering only from that selection, or using the selection as a starting point and still pulling from the rest of the book if the answer runs past it? Also, if you want to actually poke at it, happy to send you a code. No strings, you gave me a better idea than I came in with.
honestly the "if it doesn't know, it says so" part is so refreshing. a lot of these study tools just hallucinate confidently and call it a feature. running locally by default is a really smart call too, especially for anyone dealing with stuff they don't want floating around in some cloud.
@n_yalc14858 Appreciate you noticing that, is was fundamental to the program. When I was developing my first RAG I became aware that AI's need to perfrom would result in the programming the code to only fit my test questions, it where the founding rule for me became "the document teaches the system first. The user teaches the system second. The developer teaches the system never." A non answer is better than a false answer.