mycroft

Use mycroft to ingest EPUBs and ebooks, build a local vector index, and ask questions about a book.

Setup (once)

• export OPENAI_API_KEY="..."
• mycroft config onboard
• mycroft config resolve

Common commands

• List books: mycroft book list
• Ingest EPUB: mycroft book ingest /path/to/book.epub
• Ingest with summaries: mycroft book ingest /path/to/book.epub --summary
• Ingest with batch embeddings (50% cheaper): mycroft book ingest /path/to/book.epub --batch
• Ingest with batch summaries + embeddings: mycroft book ingest /path/to/book.epub --batch --summary
• Resume batch ingestion: mycroft book ingest resume
• Check ingestion status: mycroft book ingest status
• Show metadata: mycroft book show
• Ask a question: mycroft book ask "What is the main conflict?"
• Search passages: mycroft book search "mad hatter" --top-k 5
• Delete book: mycroft book delete --force
• Start chat: mycroft chat start
• Ask in session: mycroft chat ask "What does this foreshadow?"
• Continue chat: mycroft chat repl

Notes

• Use mycroft config path to find the config file location.
• book ask and book search require embeddings and an OPENAI_API_KEY.
• Chat commands require embeddings and an OPENAI_API_KEY.
• Prefer book search and synthesize answers yourself before using book ask.
• Summaries increase ingestion time and cost significantly; enable --summary only when needed.
• Use --batch to run embeddings and summaries via the OpenAI Batch API at 50% cost; results may take up to 24 hours. When combined with --summary, summaries are batched first, then embeddings on resume.
• After --batch ingestion, use mycroft book ingest status to check progress and mycroft book ingest resume to complete indexing.
• If a non-batch ingest is interrupted, use mycroft book ingest resume to continue from the last saved chunk.
• If a batch fails, resume automatically re-submits it.
• For scripted runs, avoid interactive flags like --manual or omit confirmations with --force.