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Bowerbird 0.1.0
First public release of Bowerbird, a local-first research notebook.
Add your sources, ask questions, and get answers where every quote is checked against the passage it cites. Quotes that aren't in the source are marked unverified, and clicking a citation opens the passage (or the printed PDF page) with the quoted words highlighted.
Highlights
- Sources: PDF, Word (.docx), EPUB, Markdown, plain text, web pages, YouTube captions and audio recordings. Scanned PDFs are read with local OCR (PP-OCRv5, Latin script), recordings are transcribed locally with Whisper.
- Search: SQLite FTS5 keyword search fused with EmbeddingGemma vectors, so differently worded or cross-language questions still find the passage.
- Any model: everything genai supports, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Groq, xAI, OpenRouter and Ollama. Default is
deepseek-flash. - Study tools: notes, reports (study guide, briefing, timeline, FAQ, custom), flashcards with Anki export, quizzes, mind maps, data tables (CSV), slide decks (PPTX), infographics (SVG, PNG) and audio overviews voiced locally with Kokoro.
- Finding sources: web search through DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, Brave, Tavily or Exa.
- Your data: each notebook is a plain folder in
~/Bowerbird. Copy it to back it up or move it.
Downloads
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| Linux | .deb or .AppImage |
| Windows | bowerbird-windows-x64.zip (portable, unzip and run Bowerbird.exe) |
| Android | .apk (64-bit ARM, debug-signed) |
Local models (search 200 MB, OCR 12 MB, speech) download on first use. Add a model API key in Settings.
Known limits
- OCR reads Latin script only; Cyrillic and other scripts aren't read yet.
- The Android APK is signed with the debug key.
- The Windows build is unsigned, so SmartScreen may warn on first launch.
- There is no macOS or iOS build.
About 80% of this code is vibecoded. Bug reports welcome.
Full Changelog: https://github.com/jolovicdev/bowerbird/commits/v0.1.0