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Illinois Chat

Illinois Chat is a self-hostable AI chat platform for building course, research, and organization-specific assistants over curated documents and web content.

Upload your documents (or use the built-in web crawler), then chat with them. Ask questions, use it like search, have it review your grant proposals, and more. It excels at Q&A over an unlimited number of documents — some projects contain millions.

Illinois Chat homepage showing chatbot creation and material upload

The campus-supported instance is available at chat.illinois.edu, and the entire platform is open source on GitHub under the Apache License 2.0, so you can also run it yourself.

Why Illinois Chat?

  • Control over your information sources. Unlike vendor-driven chat sites, your data is never used to train models. You decide exactly which documents your assistant knows about.
  • Source citations. Answers cite their sources, so users can click through to the original documents you uploaded or crawled.
  • Robust platform features. Authentication, sharing and access control, analytics, and support for many different language models.
  • User analytics. When you share your assistant as a learning tool, Illinois Chat provides analytics on how users interact with it, helping you tailor your content.

How it works

Illinois Chat uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG):

  1. Ingest — documents are split into overlapping chunks and converted into embeddings.
  2. Index — embeddings are stored in a per-project vector index, isolated from other projects.
  3. Retrieve — each question is embedded and matched against the index to find the most relevant passages.
  4. Generate — the retrieved passages are passed to a large language model, which produces a cited answer.

Learn more in Concepts → Retrieval.

Top use cases

  1. AI teaching assistant — create a virtual assistant for your courses that provides expert answers, cites sources, and encourages students to explore primary documents. It even integrates with Canvas.
  2. Literature review — upload academic PDFs or research papers and let the assistant help you find relevant information and citations.
  3. Project onboarding companion — integrate resources like GitHub repos and PDFs to efficiently onboard team members.
  4. Advanced search tool — use Illinois Chat over your curated content for fast, reliable information retrieval.

Explore the docs

  • Quickstart — create your first project and start chatting in minutes.
  • Guides — uploading materials, web crawling, sharing, tools, Canvas, analytics.
  • API Reference — integrate Illinois Chat into your own applications.
  • Self-Hosting — run the full stack yourself with Docker Compose.
  • CropWizard — the flagship agricultural assistant built on Illinois Chat.
  • Blog — release notes and announcements.

Acknowledgements

Illinois Chat is developed by the Center for AI Innovation (CAII) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with support from the Office of the CIO, the Healthcare Innovation Office at NCSA, and the Gies College of Business, among others.