Dotient
Your local semantic search app
390 followers
Your local semantic search app
390 followers
Dotient is a local-first desktop application that helps you organize and search through your personal files using ML-powered visual search. Your files stay private, work offline.
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ArticosTest your messaging on your audience, right inside Claude or ChatGPT
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Pinning one well-tuned model is a totally fair call for v1. The one cheap thing I'd still bake in now: stamp every vector row in SQLite with a model id or hash. It costs almost nothing today, and it's what lets you re-embed lazily if you ever do swap models, where a file gets re-embedded the first time it's queried after the upgrade so the cost spreads across normal use instead of one multi-hour background rescan. Retrofitting that stamp after the fact is the part that hurts.
@dipankar_sarkar Noted!
local-first for AI is the right call. cloud semantic search means a third party sees what you searched for and what you stored. with files it gets worse. embeddings themselves leak content. you can reverse a vector back to something pretty close to the original text or image now.
real question for v2: when you ship cross-device sync, does the index stay local-per-device or sync encrypted? that's the moment most local-first products quietly become cloud products.
The lazy path worked well for us when we hit this: stamp every row with the model id it was embedded under, then on an upgrade run a background worker that re-embeds file by file into a fresh index dir while the old one keeps answering queries. You only flip a file to the new index once its new vector exists, so recall never dips mid-migration and the user never sees a half-embedded drive. Given how much you've tuned the siglip setup, sitting on it is the right call anyway, but the model-id stamp is cheap insurance for the day you do move.
Looks like something out of a sci-fi. I think this clicks better with how my brain is wired than anything I use currently. The demo video was a bit fast and jarring for me though. I think the UI itself is impressive enough without needing that twisting animation. Thanks for sharing!
@benonsocial Yeah the demo video was literally the first time I ever touched after effects, so can't say it was the best... Thank you!
How did this wonderful idea come about?
Did it stem from someone's problem?
Awesome, congrats! Though the description might be a bit misleading - as far as i understand, this is for images only, not all files. But that might be just me, do not overthink it.
As someone who's spent way too much time searching for "that one PDF with the blue chart" or "that screenshot I know I took last month," this feels incredibly relatable.
Love the local-first approach as well, privacy shouldn't have to be a trade-off for smarter search.
Definitely giving Dotient a spin. Congrats on the launch, and excited to see where you take it next! 👏
@jayant_siktia Thank you very much!