Over the last half-year the #1 thing we’ve heard from our open-source community is the desire to build custom applications on top of the core connections with common apps + search + assistants. While this has always technically been possible, it hasn’t been easy for two main reasons: (1) inability to use APIs with auth-enabled w/o grabbing cookies from the browser and (2) a lack of simple APIs. Well no longer!

For (1), we now provide a UI to generate API keys and for (2) we provide a pure “search” endpoint, a “chat” endpoint, and an implementation of OpenAI's Assistants API. With these, we take care of all the boring stuff (integrating with 35+ tools, constantly keeping docs up-to-date, and handling permissions) and provide an opinionated starting point for the generic hard stuff (really good hybrid-search + factoring in metadata, recency, etc.), so that you can focus on the specific business logic of the app.

Back when I was at Alation, on-call for our team could have been made so much easier by a small, custom app that auto-responded to every alert based on Confluence, Slack, and a few Drive folders. Danswer’s APIs would power the core of this, and all I’d be left with are app-specific things like routing alerts to the right team member based on the document ownership of the cited documents.

For an example of what it looks like to use the APIs, check out this script here: https://github.com/danswer-ai/danswer/blob/main/examples/ass...!

If you're curious what's happening under the hood, check out our docs: https://docs.danswer.dev/system_overview.

Thanks, excited to hear your thoughts!