Echos

What is Echos?

Echos is a self-hosted personal knowledge system that captures voice notes, links, images, and stray thoughts, then makes them instantly searchable. It transcribes, tags, and summarizes everything automatically, so your ideas stay organized and private on your own machine, with no subscription and full ownership. It works right inside Telegram for quick capture.

Top Features:

• Smart capture: send voice, text, links, or images and get instant organization.
• Hybrid search: combines keyword and semantic vectors to find ideas by meaning.
• Personal writing: drafts posts, emails, and threads grounded in your saved notes.

Use Cases:

• Idea capture: save fleeting thoughts by voice before they slip away forever.
• Research storage: keep articles, videos, and PDFs organized and easy to retrieve.
• Content drafting: turn saved notes into blog posts written in your voice.

Who Can Use Echos?

• Writers: collect inspiration and turn raw notes into finished drafts quickly.
• Developers: self-host a private knowledge base with full control over data.
• Researchers: store and retrieve sources across many formats in one place.

Pricing

• Open Source (free): full MIT-licensed software with every feature included at no cost.
• Self-hosting (your infrastructure): you cover only your own server or hosting expenses.
• AI usage (pay your provider): connect your own API key and pay usage.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Privacy: data stays on your own machine with no third-party cloud storage.
• No subscription: the software is completely free and open source forever.
• Obsidian friendly: notes are plain markdown files compatible with your existing vault.

Cons:

• Technical setup: self-hosting requires some comfort with servers and configuration steps.
• Single user: built for one person, so it is not multi-tenant.
• API costs: you must supply and fund your own AI provider key.

FAQs:

1) Is Echos really free?

Yes, it is open source under the MIT license with no subscription required at all.

2) How do I capture notes?

You mainly use a Telegram bot to send voice, text, images, or links instantly.

3) Does it work with Obsidian?

Yes, every note is a plain markdown file that syncs with your Obsidian vault.

4) Do I need an API key?

Yes, you connect your own AI provider key and pay for usage directly.

5) Is my data private?

Yes, everything stays self-hosted on your own infrastructure with no external cloud storage.