hark

Hark is a self-hosted AI chat bot for websites that provides a receipt for every answer. It is designed to address the opacity of typical chat bot builders, which are described as black boxes where it is difficult to reconstruct why a bot responded in a certain way. Hark makes the reasoning visible: "Open any reply and the receipt unfolds: the instruction, every tool call with its request and response, the rows read from your database, tokens split into prompt, completion and reasoning, and what it cost." The bot is not tied to a single model; it supports OpenAI, Anthropic, and any service that speaks the OpenAI chat format, such as Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio, or OpenRouter. Switching between providers requires only two fields in the settings. Hark also probes model capabilities to avoid sending unsupported parameters, as "Providers disagree about what they accept, and the disagreement is not in the docs." The system includes tools for HTTP and SQL connections, with SQL queries subject to strict guards to prevent write operations. It also supports handing over conversations to human managers through a queue system, with notifications via an admin stream or a custom webhook. The widget is lightweight and customizable, and the admin interface is available in Russian and English. Hark is distributed as a single binary with an embedded SQLite database, and it can be run locally or in a container.