What is Chronicler
What it does
You give Chronicler your documents — contracts, reports, manuals, scanned PDFs — and then ask questions in plain language. Instead of a search results page, you get an answer, with citations pointing back at the documents the answer came from, so you can check it.
Scanned documents are read with OCR, so a photographed page is searchable like any other. Documents are grouped into collections, and a conversation can be scoped to one collection, a few specific documents, or everything you have access to.
The one decision: Cloud or self-hosted
The download is the same either way. Which server it talks to is a setting inside the app, and you can change it later.
| Cloud | Self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs the server | We do | You do |
| Where your documents live | Our hosted service | Your machine or your own server |
| Where answers are generated | A remote model | A model running on your hardware |
| Setup | Sign in | Install Docker, start the stack |
| Accounts | You sign yourself up | An admin creates accounts |
| Licence | Included | A licence key is required |
| Works offline | No | Yes, once it's running |
Choose Cloud if
You want to start in two minutes and don't want to maintain a server.
Choose self-hosted if
Your documents can't leave your premises — legal, medical, defence, or simply a policy that says so. Nothing is sent to us: the model that writes the answers runs on your own machine, and so does the indexing.
The trade-off is hardware. Generating answers on a CPU works but is slow (expect a minute or more for the first answer after a pause); a GPU makes it fast. See Requirements.