Talk AI
developed by EDUC — the European Digital UniverCity
Run many purpose-built AI assistants inside Nextcloud Talk — each with its own prompt, model, knowledge and tools, under real access governance.
Talk AI turns Nextcloud Talk into a home for multiple AI bots instead of one generic assistant. A bot can stay personal, be shared with a group or team, or go global after approval — so an institution can run a research helper, an onboarding buddy, a code reviewer and a faculty-only grants assistant side by side, each governed by who's allowed to use it.
It connects Talk messages, per-bot system prompts, any OpenAI-compatible model endpoint, file knowledge (RAG), and agentic tool calls (built-in + MCP) into one app-managed workflow — with admin control over providers, credentials, rate limits, fallback behaviour and tool access.
Highlights
- Governance-first scoping. Every bot has a visibility scope — personal, group, team, or global — with an approval workflow for shared bots. Users only see and use the bots they're entitled to.
- Multi-bot by design. Unlimited bots, each with a stable
@mention, own system prompt, temperature, and model selection. - Bring your own model. Any OpenAI-compatible chat / model-list / embedding / vision / speech endpoint. Primary + optional secondary endpoint, plus an automatic fallback model on eligible timeouts or connection failures.
- Knowledge (RAG). Index Nextcloud files and folders; optional Docling conversion for PDF, Office and image formats. Bots answer from your documents.
- Agentic tools. Built-in tools for document search, room-document search, image analysis, audio transcription and persistent Markdown wikis — plus an extension point so companion apps can contribute their own tools, and MCP servers admins approve and users assign per bot.
- Native Talk integration. Shared Talk bot, Smart Picker support, signature-verified webhooks.
Screenshots
| Multi-bot manager (owner view) | Create a bot |
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| Admin settings (providers, appearance) | Bot discovery (member view) |
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Quick Start
1. Install into a Nextcloud apps directory and build the frontend:
cd /path/to/nextcloud/apps-extra
git clone https://github.com/EDUCAlliance/talk-ai.git educai
cd educai
npm ci && npm run build
2. Enable the app:
sudo -u www-data php occ app:enable educai
Why
educai? The app's internal identifier iseducai— Talk AI began as the AI assistant of the EDUC university alliance, and the id is kept stable so existing deployments upgrade seamlessly (the routes, database tables andocccommands all use it). "Talk AI" is the product name;educaiis the package name underneath.
3. Configure under Administration settings → Talk AI:
- Primary API endpoint + API key (any OpenAI-compatible provider)
- A default model or an allowed model list (fetched from
/v1/models) - Webhook secret
4. Register the Talk bot (Talk AI attempts this automatically; if your environment blocks it, do it manually):
sudo -u www-data php occ talk:bot:install \
-f webhook,response \
"Talk AI" \
"your-webhook-secret" \
"https://your-nextcloud.example/index.php/apps/educai/webhook/talk"
Then create your first bot in the Talk AI app, mention it in any Talk conversation, and chat.
Model providers
Talk AI speaks the OpenAI HTTP API, so it works with OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, self-hosted vLLM/Ollama, and academic gateways alike. Configure a primary endpoint, an optional secondary endpoint, and one fallback model. Model IDs are endpoint-aware (primary:<model> / secondary:<model>); legacy unprefixed names resolve against the primary endpoint.
Documentation
- Feature guide · Architecture · Bot setup
- Quick start · Troubleshooting · Development
- RAG tool guide · RAG background jobs
- Tool-provider extension point — how companion apps add their own bot tools
Development
Requirements: Nextcloud 30–34 · PHP 8.1+ · Node.js 22 / npm 10.5+.
npm run build # production build
npm run watch # dev build, rebuild on change
npm run lint # eslint
vendor/bin/phpunit --bootstrap tests/unit/bootstrap.php tests/unit
See docs/DEVELOPMENT.md for local Nextcloud verification notes.
EU funding
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
About
Talk AI is developed by EDUC — the European Digital UniverCity, an alliance of European universities, where it runs as the alliance-wide Talk assistant (hence the educai package id). The app is fully generic: it works with any OpenAI-compatible endpoint on any Nextcloud 30–34 install.
Deployment-specific functionality (e.g. EDUC's course-catalogue search) lives in separate companion apps that plug into the tool-provider extension point — the core stays clean.
Contributions welcome. Licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later.