ἵστωρ

Ask your sources anything.

Istor is a local research notebook. It runs entirely on your machine: add papers, websites and notes, ask in your own words, and read answers where every claim points back to the passage it came from.

Download Istor See how it works

Local model, local database, no telemetry. The only network traffic is the fetches you trigger.

Why Istor

A research partner, not an answer machine.

An answer you can check.

Most tools hand you a paragraph and hope you trust it. Istor answers from your own sources, and every claim carries a citation you can open.

The citations in this preview work. Try them.

Example

What did the 2019 field survey find about habitat fragmentation?

Species richness declined most sharply in , while core forest interiors stayed across the seven-year window.

Field survey report, 2019 · page 14

Patches below ten hectares lost on average 31 percent of recorded species within four seasons, the steepest decline recorded in the study.

Field survey report, 2019 · page 17

Interior plots beyond 500 metres from any edge showed no significant change in recorded richness between 2012 and 2019.

Search the idea, not the words.

Full-text search finds the exact phrase. Semantic search finds the passage that means what you asked, even when the wording is completely different.

transect methods for dawn bird counts

Field notes, 2021 · page 3

Counts followed fixed transects, beginning thirty minutes before sunrise.

Matched the words

Field survey report, 2019 · page 9

Transects were walked within one hour of sunrise, at a fixed pace, on three consecutive mornings each month.

Matched the meaning

2 passages · 3 sources · searched on this machine

It says when the sources run out.

Ask something your library cannot support and Istor does not improvise. It names what it could not find and what it would need, so you always know where the edge of your evidence is.

Why did the survey stop at the eastern river?

Your sources do not say. Three papers mention the river, but none explains the decision.

No answer offered

→ Fetch the survey methodology from the web?

The loop

From sources to cited answers.

Add your sources

Drop in PDFs, websites and your own notes. Istor extracts the text and keeps the originals in a library you own.

Ask grounded questions

Ask in your own words. Istor reads the library and answers from what your sources actually say.

Check the citations

Every claim carries a citation. Click one and the exact passage opens beside the answer.

Inside the notebook

One quiet room for everything.

Your library, your model and every citation, in one window. Nothing is a tab you have to hunt for.

The notebook

Everything a research session needs.

Import anything

PDFs, web pages and plain notes land in one library. Duplicates are detected and merged, so the library stays clean as it grows.

Search two ways

Full-text search finds the exact words. Semantic search finds the idea behind them, so a question in plain language still reaches the right passage.

Local models

Pick a model from the list in settings. Swapping takes effect immediately, with no restart and nothing leaving the machine.

Thinking streams

Watch the reasoning form live while the answer streams. When a claim matters, you can see the path it took to get there.

Notes in place

Write alongside your research. Notes live in the same library and are searchable together with everything you imported.

Backups you own

Export the whole library as a zip any time. One file carries your sources and notes, ready to move or restore.

Try it here

Run the loop, right on this page.

Three questions from one small sample library. Pick one and watch the loop run. It all happens in your browser; the app runs the same loop on yours.

What did the 2019 field survey find about habitat fragmentation?

read the library · 3 sources · checked every claim

Species richness fell most sharply in small habitat patches, while core forest interiors stayed relatively stable across the seven-year window.

Field survey report, 2019 · page 14

Patches below ten hectares lost on average 31 percent of recorded species within four seasons, the steepest decline recorded in the study.

A miniature of the real loop. The app runs it on your library, with your model, and cites your pages.

Who it is for

A notebook that fits the work.

Literature reviews

Drop a semester of papers into one library and ask across all of them. Every borrowed sentence keeps the page it came from.

Field research

Survey notes, reports and transcripts stay in their original files. Semantic search finds the passage however you phrase the question.

Writing projects

Draft beside your sources. Borrowed facts stay pinned to their pages, so checking a claim never means losing your place.

Privacy

Your research stays yours.

Istor runs entirely on your machine.

  • Local model

    Inference runs on your own hardware through open models. Nothing is sent to a server.

  • Local library

    Your sources live in a SQLite database on your own disk. Back it up, copy it, carry it.

  • No telemetry

    No accounts, no analytics, no usage reports. There is nothing to opt out of.

  • You trigger the traffic

    The only requests Istor makes are the fetches you ask for.

Questions, answered.

Does Istor need an internet connection?

No. Research works fully offline. Istor only touches the network when you ask it to fetch a web source.

Does asking a question send my data anywhere?

No. Retrieval, prompting and inference all happen on your machine. Nothing leaves it unless you trigger a fetch yourself, and the whole library exports as a zip any time. If you are weighing tools on privacy, here is what to check in any of them.

What hardware does it need?

A GTX 1650 class GPU runs the models comfortably. There is no cloud requirement, so the hardware you have is the hardware it uses. The details are on can you run a research AI on a GTX 1650.

Can I choose which model to use?

Yes. Pick your model in settings, and a swap takes effect without a restart.

What if my sources do not contain the answer?

Istor says so, and names what a real answer would need. It will not produce one your sources do not support.

Start your notebook.

Download Istor