🦉 ResearchOwl

Exhaustive research engine with Telegram interface.

Recursively discovers, scrapes, and processes sources from across the web, then generates podcast scripts, blog posts, reports, or social threads using Ollama.

Architecture

Telegram (/research <topic>)
    ↓
ExhaustiveScraper
    ├── DuckDuckGo (8 queries × 5 results)
    ├── Wikipedia + recursive internal links
    ├── Reddit (top posts + top comments)
    ├── YouTube (transcripts)
    ├── PDFs (public documents)
    └── Web scraping (trafilatura)
         ↓ recursive expansion (depth 1-3)
ContentProcessor (Ollama qwen2.5:7b + bge-m3 embeddings)
    ├── Chunking (800 token chunks, 100 overlap)
    ├── Quality scoring (0-10 per chunk)
    ├── Embeddings (cosine similarity RAG)
    └── Deduplication
         ↓
OutputGenerator (Ollama)
    ├── 🎙️ Podcast script (20-30 min)
    ├── 📝 Blog post (1500-2500 words)
    ├── 📊 Research report (structured)
    └── 🐦 Social thread (15-25 tweets)

Telegram Commands

Command	Description
/research <topic>	Start exhaustive research
/status	Check progress
/finish	Stop early, proceed to generation
/generate podcast|blog|report|thread	Generate output
/sources	List all sources found
/cancel	Cancel current research

Local Development

# 1. Clone and setup
git clone https://git.chemavx.xyz/chemavx/researchowl
cd researchowl

# 2. Create virtualenv
python3 -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

# 3. Configure
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env with your values

# 4. Run
python main.py

Deploy to k3s

# 1. Create namespace and secrets
kubectl create namespace researchowl
kubectl create secret generic researchowl-secrets \
  --from-literal=telegram-bot-token=YOUR_TOKEN \
  --from-literal=telegram-allowed-users=YOUR_USER_ID \
  -n researchowl

# 2. Copy manifests to your k8s-manifests repo
cp k8s/*.yaml /path/to/k8s-manifests/researchowl/

# 3. Apply ArgoCD app
kubectl apply -f k8s/argocd-app.yaml

# 4. Push to Gitea → Gitea Actions builds → ArgoCD deploys
git add . && git commit -m "feat: add researchowl" && git push

Tuning

Variable	Default	Description
MAX_SOURCES	150	Hard cap on sources
MAX_DEPTH	3	Link recursion depth
QUALITY_THRESHOLD	0.4	Min chunk quality (0-1)
REQUEST_DELAY	1.0s	Delay between requests

Want more thoroughness?

• Increase MAX_SOURCES to 300+
• Increase MAX_DEPTH to 4-5
• Lower QUALITY_THRESHOLD to 0.3

Want faster results?

• Lower MAX_SOURCES to 50
• Set MAX_DEPTH to 1-2
• Higher QUALITY_THRESHOLD to 0.6

Bot avatar

The profile picture of @chemavx_researchowl_bot is not an opaque binary checked into the repo: assets/make_avatar.py draws it with PIL at 4× and scales it down, so the emblem can be retouched without hunting for an original. Telegram crops avatars to a circle, so everything that matters lives inside the inscribed circle; verified legible at 48 px.

python3 assets/make_avatar.py     # writes assets/avatar.png

It is applied over the API with the token from the secret, no BotFather. Watch out for setMyProfilePhoto: its photo parameter is not the file, it is an InputProfilePhoto object pointing at the attachment. Posting the file on its own gets you a baffling photo isn't specified.

TOK=$(kubectl get secret researchowl-secrets-infisical -n researchowl \
        -o jsonpath='{.data.telegram-bot-token}' | base64 -d)
curl -s -F 'photo={"type":"static","photo":"attach://av"}' \
     -F "av=@assets/avatar.png" \
     "https://api.telegram.org/bot$TOK/setMyProfilePhoto"
unset TOK

Notes

• Uses qwen2.5:7b (scoring) and bge-m3 (embeddings) on your existing Ollama — zero API cost
• Optionally add ANTHROPIC_API_KEY for Claude fallback on generation
• SQLite database stored in /data/researchowl.db
• All outputs saved to DB and available via /outputs