Bird Brain
A research repository you can ask questions
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Overview
Our Merlin capstone produced a lot of research: interviews, field observations, co-design sessions, and thousands of app reviews. Finding a specific quote or pattern meant digging through spreadsheets and folders, and that slowed down every design decision.
What did I do?
I built Bird Brain, a research repository you can talk to. The team imports studies from a spreadsheet, and Bird Brain makes them searchable by meaning, not just keywords. Ask a question in plain language, and it answers using our actual research data.
Under the hood, it’s a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) tool: a FastAPI backend, a SQLite database, and LanceDB for vector search, with a local AI model running through Ollama so research data never leaves the computer.
How did it end up?
Bird Brain gave the whole team natural-language access to our research data, so anyone could get grounded answers without knowing where a file lived. It sped up design decisions and kept them tied to what participants actually said.
