bawkee/mdcai

Multipurpose Desktop Chat AI

MDC Ai

Native Windows desktop GPT assistant app, which is your portal to the very powerful Open AI API.

Harness the mighty prowess of the public OpenAI GPT-4 API with MDC AI, your sophisticated Windows desktop AI companion. Your privacy and security are safe in your hands, as there are no intermediary services involved.

Click on the above Windows Store badge to install MDC AI. There is no direct/unofficial download yet.

• Craft Your Own AI Genie: Customize AI personalities to your liking with our user-friendly settings. Why settle for a one-size-fits-some AI? With MDC AI, you get a digital assistant tuned to your whimsy. No grumbling, lazy, half-baked responses!
• Easily select, copy, search and browse through the conversation thorugh powerful integrated Edge WebView2 renderer. Snappy, fast and powerful MDC AI UI allows you to quickly and easily find the message you are looking for in your history. Read AI messages, tables, programming codes and such in full width of the screen.
• Effortlessly navigate your conversations with the robust Edge WebView2 renderer integrated into MDC AI. Our interface is designed for precision and speed, ensuring that locating a specific message in your history is a breeze. Experience the clarity of AI-generated messages, tables, programming code, and more — all displayed elegantly across the full width of the window.
• Maintain discussion focus with Edit, steering conversations into new realms. Trim and direct dialogue with precision; MDC AI recalls your chosen forks, preserving context across sessions.
• Cut down on AI expenses with flexible OpenAI API's pay-as-you-go approach, bypassing subscriptions. Delve into MDC AI's tips and guides to master GPT AI efficiencies and stretch your dollar further.

Why Yet Another GPT Wrapper?

This is the only native, Windows desktop GPT App that:

• Has a clear privacy policy, is free, safe, secure and does not simply serve as a lead to some paid product or monetizes in some other, sneaky fashion. Your API key is safe with this app, there are no ulterior motives.
• Has a sleek UI that resembles Chat GPT, where markdown Just Works™, where you can select content and copy it with no problems and can search content via Ctrl+F. It is more compact than Chat GPT and displays conversations in compact, full-width mode which is great for code listings, tables and long documents.
• Offers Edit functionality just like Chat GPT, with added feature where it remembers where you left off with your edits, unlike Chat GPT which restarts your message version selection. Edit is pivotal if you want to save $ on tokens or just keep your sanity in long conversations, don't tell the AI to "take a step back" or such, just edit the message and fork the conversation.
• Uses actual Windows native UI technology which respects your Windows theme settings, dark/light modes, accent colors and looks consistent with other Windows apps. It automatically adapts UI to your device (tablet/desktop), DPI settings, multi-monitor setups, battery performance settings, etc. by letting Windows manage it.
• Allows you to change AI settings and the "Premise" setting (GPT system message) in the middle of a conversation or across categories. This is extremely useful. If you have a PDF or a Word document you want to "discuss" on, just create a Category with that document as the premise and ask away. This is how all those "pdf chat" apps work anyway. GPT4 Turbo has a massive token limit so you won't need embeddings in 99% of use cases.

Is it free?

Yes it is totally free and open-source. It asks nothing of you, but you can certainly help by:

• Reporting issues and bugs
• Suggesting new feaures and ideas
• Submitting a review on the app store and adding a star on this GitHub repo
• Contributing to the code base if you have dev experience
• Spreading the word and promoting the app further

Version 1.0.2 is out 👇

• Fixed a bug where only the first two messages get saved with new conversations.
• Fixed a bug where selecting message versions without doing anything else would not remember the current version.
• Settings pane is now involved in the Back button (top left) logic.
• Fixed a bug where app could hang when long conversations are selected first after starting the app.
• Deleted categories will no longer magically reappear after restart.
• Fixed a few odd markdown rendering errors that would otherwise require app restart.
• When completion generation error happens, a friendlier message will show up and user will be able to retry.

Screenshots

mdcai's Issues

Selecting message versions without doing anything else would not remember the current version

When selecting through message edits (without doing anything else in the convo), save should be triggered as with any other change.

Category delete does not work

When category is deleted, it magically reappears when the app is restarted.

When markdown rendering fails, error message appears and conversation is no longer usable

As the title says, instead of recovering and trying again, app throws an error when a possibly benign markdown parsing error happens.

User won't be able to proceed with the conversation and has to restart the app to continue.

Instead, app should log the error and continue trying. Sometimes, the AI will produce garbled markdown or just simply incomplete, causing some edge case bugs in the markdown renderer (which does have its own recovery but it can fail too).

Math formula LaTex support

Implement the LaTex renderer. Relevant: xoofx/markdig#259

Settings pane should be involved in the Back button stack frame

When going to the Settings panel via the navigation pane (left bottom button), the back button should pick it up and allow the user to go back.

Better error handling when completion goes bad

When, for any reason completion generation response or stream goes wrong, an error message (sometimes cryptic) will show up and the user won't be able to proceed further until restarting the app for that given conversation.

This should be fixed such that a friendly error shows up and the user can try again, because usually these are network or load related issues.

Better placement for the Create New Category button

Instead of the right-click, a button would be ideal to sit next to the hamburger menu (in which case it has to support all 3 visual states).

Hanging issue on the first selected conversation

If the very first conversation that the user selects contains more than 28 messages total, the app will hang and eventuall crash. The crash only happens if the "long" conversation is first to be selected. Going to the settings first for example will prevent the crash.

Workaround is to select anything else first.

NOTE: Does not happen when debugging in VS, only when running without the debugger attached (probably causes a sufficient enough delay not to trigger this).

There is a problem with WinUI cold startup layout logic causing a stack overflow in the main thread somewhere deep in the PropertyChanged handlers inside RxUI, related to the pivot view being used to switch views. The 28 messages is probably just a threshold on the given machine that makes the UI wait long enough for the bug to be triggered.

New conversation not saved completely

When starting a new convo, only the first two messages get saved. To save others you'd have to go away and go back to the convo to get it saved completely.

Does not happen with existing conversations.