Introducing Biblos, a simple tool for semantic search and summarization of Bible passages. Leveraging Chroma for vector search with BAAI BGE embeddings, semantically find related verses across the Bible. The tool employs Anthropic's Claude LLM model for generating high-quality summaries of retrieved passages, contextualizing your search topic. Built on a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, the app implements a simple Streamlit Web UI using Python. Deployed using render.com, the app is available at <a href="https://biblos.app" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://biblos.app</a><p>Note: Search by just topic/keywords, e.g. "Kingdom of Heaven", for broader results!
Playing with this a bit more, and it is very cool!<p>One thing I like is that it provides the source text, so you can verify whether the summary is accurate. Other engines just give you an answer, leaving you to verify accuracy on your own as a separate step. But I wonder which translation it uses?<p>Wondering if it has a bias toward any particular theology, I tried some controversial terms.<p>The program gave an accurate defense of the five points of calvinism, but when I asked about dispensationalism, the verses it gave were less relevant than I hoped. On the other hand, it did give relevant results for Arminianism. On predestination, however, it missed Romans 9 but instead returned passages from Ecclesiastes and Galatians 4.<p>Concerning Roman Catholic theology, it did not seem to know what the immaculate conception is, and instead wandered aimlessly. It did know what purgatory is, but I expected to see 1 Cor. 13 and instead it returned passages from Job and Ecclesiastes.<p>Concerning Orthodox theology, it did not seem to know what the word filioque means. This isn't a word found in the bible, but neither is calvinism nor trinity, which it did know. It also knew iconostasis, though I am not qualified to judge whether it explained it accurately.<p>I was impressed that it knows what a gift economy is; I don't think this is a term I would expect to see in a typical commentary.<p>It did not feel comfortable commenting on facebook, but when I asked about the internet, the summary explained that we should only be judged by God and not our friends, and also warned against adulturous women. It was more positive about an information superhighway, returning results about sharing knowledge and being honest.<p>A bug: if I click Summarize before the search is complete, I get a different response than if I wait for the runner to stop running and then click Summarize.
It was interesting talking to my father, a former Christian minister, about AI. ChatGPT interactions had instilled some misconceptions and it was difficult to convince him that its responses were just cleverly weighted randomness. It produced compelling theological debate. I told him not to trust any chat bot unless it could cite verifiable sources, and when prompted ChatGPT could only fabricate. Trust eroded.<p>In consolation I sat up a vector index of The Works of Josephus (his interest at the time) and a StableBeluga chatbot. It answered questions fairly well, but most importantly supplied the references that were used as context. In the end there was still just too much cultural and historical context missing to be a useful alternative to scholarly analysis.
This is a cool project. I have a few suggestions that would really make this into a powerful tool:<p>Add the verse numbers in the results and turn them into links so that the full passages can be read<p>Include other translations, especially the KJV and Greek interlinear, since those are still widely used and referenced. Different churches have particular reasons for using the versions that they've chosen, and cross-examining translations is highly important in Bible study<p>Include optional commentaries as search sources since those can lend a lot of insight into different passages, even serving as cross-references to other related passages
After playing around with it for a few minutes, all of the results scored between 0.5 and 0.8 even when using nonsense queries like "interdimensional cable" and "eat my plumbus" which is a sign that the model you're using for embeddings is very poorly tuned for cosine similarity for your use case.<p>A little fine tuning would probably go a long way since the embeddings are likely trained mostly on a nonreligious corpus in the modern tongue. It might also be overfitted so trying smaller models might also help.
Interesting concept/research-project, but the results to just about every query I tried seem inaccurate and perplexing. Assuming the "similarity score" is meaningful, you may want to raise the cutoff or add an indicator (different color, fade, etc) for passages that get surfaced with a low match.
Some years ago I was wondering what the words 'There is a balm in Gilead' means. Spent hours googling, both in English and Danish (my native lang). Found Jer 8:22 "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?" and inferred that Jeremiah must have associated Gilead's balm with (glorified?) healing processes.<p>So as a test I asked this service 'what is balm in Gilead' and it returned 4 other Bible sentences. Pressed 'Summarize', which unfolded comments on the 4 sentences and a summary of<p>'Overall, these passages present Gilead as a contested but fertile region east of the Jordan river. It was prized territory that was given to several Israelite tribes and seen as a divine provision. The name "Gilead" means "hill of testimony" referring to its choice lands. So the metaphor of "balm in Gilead" signifies the healing, restoration, and provision God can bring even in difficult times.'<p>My key observations:<p>1) The overall summary highly matches my own interpretations<p>2) Jer 8:22 was not referred - possibly because it does not define the concept, it just refers to its meaning<p>3) Inferring the summary from the 4 sentences is not easy but apparently AI can do so<p>I have a question on the generation of the overall summary: Is it based on on the 4 sentences only or does it include other biblical text behind the scenes?
I'm really loving this concept. I'm going to finetune an LLM based on a bunch of scripture, collate as many hallucinations as I can and go start my own religion.
I asked this one about homosexuality, it didn't find the most glaring passages from Leviticus.<p>This is a common thing for vector similarity search. I wonder if there's a solution already. I thought about giving the query to an LLM to reformulate in the database-relevant way before embedding it.
In case people aren't aware, the Bible is one of the few books out there for which you can buy a companion concordance, which is a printed inverted search index.
Very interesting and thanks for sharing! I am involved with a project involving a couple Bible Translation orgs to create a service like this but built in a more backend-agnostic fashion (e.g. choice of vector DB, LLM, etc.). We have a prototype and currently planning out next steps. Let me know if you would like to collaborate (find my email ID on my HN profile).
Very cool project, AI is definitely going to transform religion and make it far more relatable and understandable. If anyone is interested, we released Noah's Bible that has full ChatGPT integration. You can click on any verse and get a full summary and chat about any verse.<p>One thing we also added is imagery, generated by AI, which gives the Bible imagery that most text based bibles do not have.<p>iOS: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noahs-bible-ai-powered-bible/id6448840332" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noahs-bible-ai-powered-bible/i...</a>
Android: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ai.noah">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ai.noah</a>
Also a town in Lebanon where the alphabet was created by the Phoenicians: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byblos" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byblos</a>
> I apologize, upon reflection I do not feel comfortable summarizing or interpreting passages in this manner.<p>You're censoring the Bible now? Lol.
Noob question by a simple web dev.<p>Have been seeing Vector databases been thrown around, how is this different from normal search, or elastic / solr.<p>What do I input / output. Been reading into it shortly, but don;t get it yet.