A step-by-step guide to building a personalized AI assistant from scratch using Python

Have you ever wished for a personal assistant who just gets you? I’m not talking about a generic chatbot that can tell you the weather. I mean something that knows what projects you’re working on, remembers your goals, and can instantly find that one brilliant note you scribbled down weeks ago and forgot about.

What if you could build that assistant yourself?

That’s exactly what we’re going to do together. In this book, we're not just going to learn about AI; we’re going to roll up our sleeves and create one from scratch. We will build a custom AI assistant that runs on your computer, learns from your data, and becomes a "second brain" that is uniquely yours. Imagine being able to ask your computer, "What were my main takeaways from that article I read last Tuesday?" and getting a real, helpful answer. That’s the goal.

It might sound impossibly complicated, but I promise you, it's not. We can boil this whole project down to three simple, understandable parts:

1. The Brain: This is the powerful “engine” that does the thinking. We’ll use a ready-made Large Language Model (LLM), so we don’t have to build the engine ourselves, just learn how to use it.
2. The Memory: This is where your AI will store everything it learns about you. We'll set up a special kind of digital filing cabinet to hold your notes, ideas, and facts, making them easy for the AI to find.
3. The Connectors: This is our Python code. Think of it as the glue that connects the Brain to the Memory, allowing them to talk to each other and work together to answer your questions.

And here’s the best part: you don't need to be an AI wizard to do this. In fact, you don't need any AI experience at all. If you know the basics of Python, you have everything it takes to get started. We'll skip the heavy math and dense theory and focus on the fun part: building something amazing.

So, let’s get your workshop set up. By the end of this journey, you won't just have a new skill—you'll have your very own AI assistant, built by you, for you.

Table of Contents

Part 1: The First Spark of Intelligence

• Chapter 1: Your First Conversation with an AI
• Chapter 2: Building the Chatbot Shell

Part 2: Giving Your Assistant a Memory

• Chapter 3: Giving Your AI Its First Memory
• Chapter 4: The Memory Bank - Your First Vector Database
• Chapter 5: Retrieval - Finding the Right Memory

Part 3: Connecting the Brain to the Memory

• Chapter 6: The RAG Pipeline - Thinking with Your Memories

Part 4: Growing Your Assistant

• Chapter 7: The Automatic Learner - Ingesting Data Daily
• Chapter 8: A Friendly Face - Building a Simple Web UI

Part 5: The Responsible AI Owner

• Chapter 9: Privacy, Security, and Future Steps

Read full series here: Building Your AI Assistant.