I built an AI reading companion you can talk to

Luca Zoffoli — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:41:39 +0000

Hello everyone,

This is my first post on Dev.to.
I don’t usually publish on social platforms, but this community feels like the right place to share something I’ve been working on.

I’m Luca, an Italian solo developer and a reader.
When I finish a book, I often want to talk about it — share thoughts, compare interpretations, understand characters better. But not everyone around me has read the same book, and sometimes I just want a companion to think with.

So I asked myself:

“What if I could talk with a virtual reading companion — someone who knows the book as well as I do?”

From that idea, I started building Clulib, a platform where you can:

upload an EPUB/PDF/TXT
chat with an AI that answers using the book’s text
talk with AI-powered characters grounded in the original story
join or create small book clubs to discuss what you’re reading

I’ve been working on this for the last months, and I have many ideas for the future — but I need external feedbacks to understand what direction Clulib should take.

How I built it (technical overview)
Clulib is built with Angular on the frontend and .NET on the backend.
I use SignalR for realtime chat updates and a RAG pipeline to ensure the AI answers only using the book’s content.
EPUB/PDF/TXT files are parsed server‑side, chunked, embedded, and indexed.
The platform runs on a Linux VM with Apache as reverse proxy and Kestrel behind it.
Privacy is a core part of the architecture: uploaded books remain private, and only minimal metadata is exposed when needed.

If you want to try it, here’s the website:
https://www.clulib.com

Thanks for reading,
Luca

DEV Community: Luca Zoffoli

I built an AI reading companion you can talk to