Briefgeist

v0.1.0-preview

Briefgeist is a privacy-first, local desktop assistant for automating the reading, analysis, and response of scanned physical letters.

1. Watcher service (Watchdog) for real-time monitoring of incoming scans
2. OCR module (Tesseract) for text extraction from PDF scans
3. Analysis Engine (local LLM via Ollama “gemma:7b”)

📦 Installation

git clone https://github.com/jltk/briefgeist.git
cd briefgeist
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # bzw. venv\Scripts\activate on Windows
pip install -r requirements.txt

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✅ Features

• 🖨️ Scan letters (via NAPS2)
• 🧠 Analyze content with a local LLM (Gemma 7B via Ollama)
• 🗣 Text-to-speech playback (Coqui TTS)
• 📄 Suggest replies or fill forms
• 🖥️ Simple GUI (NiceGUI)
• 💻 100% offline, no cloud or telemetry

Feature	Status
OCR (ocrmypdf)	✅
Text extraction	✅
Local LLM (Ollama)	✅
TTS voice output	✅
GUI (NiceGUI)	✅
Multi-page scan	✅

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🛠 Setup (Windows 10+)

1. Install System Dependencies

• Python 3.11
• Visual Studio Build Tools
  → Select: "Desktop development with C++"
• Tesseract OCR (UB Mannheim)
• SumatraPDF
• NAPS2 (scanner frontend)
• Ollama (LLM runtime)

2. Clone This Repo

git clone https://github.com/yourname/briefgeist.git
cd briefgeist
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Start Ollama

ollama run gemma:7b

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🚀 Usage

1. Scan

Use NAPS2 to scan a letter as PDF into the input/ folder.

2. Process with Watcher

python watcher/watcher.py

This will:

• OCR the scanned PDF
• Extract text
• Save .txt in output/
• Archive the original in processed/

3. Open GUI

python ui/app.py

• Upload the .txt
• Click "Analyze"
• Click "Read Aloud"

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🧪 Testing

Test Step	Expected Result
Drop PDF in input/	Processed + .txt created
Run GUI	Interface appears with input fields
Analyze	LLM provides meaningful summary
Read Aloud	Voice plays locally
Print PDF (optional)	Sent to default printer

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🗂 Project Structure

briefgeist/
├── core/
├── ui/
├── watcher/
├── input/         ← Drop PDFs here
├── output/        ← Get your results here
├── processed/     ← Archived input

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🔐 Security & Privacy

Briefgeist runs fully offline. No cloud calls. No telemetry. No account required.

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📦 Next Milestones

• Improve UI/UX
• Form field detection (insurance, invoices, etc.)
• Auto-response generation as PDF
• One-click print & archive
• Portable GUI build (PyInstaller)

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💬 License

GPLv3