Sokrateque.ai
An AI-powered research assistant that helps Master's and PhD students navigate thousands of pages of academic literature, delivering instant, citation-aware answers through advanced RAG and OCR pipelines.
Business Overview
Sokrateque.ai is an EdTech startup based in Amsterdam that builds intelligent tools for academic research. Their users are Master's and PhD students, people who routinely have to work through thousands of pages of academic literature to find the one insight that matters.
Doing that by hand takes hours. Sokrateque wanted an AI research assistant that could read the literature the way a graduate student does and answer in seconds, with proper citations attached to every answer.
Challenge
Academic material is messy. The assistant had to understand complex academic language and handle whatever format a paper arrives in: scanned PDFs, image-based papers, Word files, and modern digital publications alike.
It also had to work in two modes. Pre-indexed retrieval covers the library that has already been processed, but students constantly bring new documents, so the system needed live, on-the-fly parsing of papers that had never been indexed. And every answer had to arrive in real time.
Solution
We built a dual-mode RAG pipeline in a 10-week end-to-end engagement. Indexed queries run through the Weaviate vector database, while documents that have not been indexed yet are parsed live, on the fly. Both paths can merge internal content with relevant web data for a complete answer.
Under the hood, FastAPI powers the core services and Node.js handles async tasks, all deployed on AWS EC2 with S3 for storage and MySQL for metadata. OpenAI models drive the language layer.
The platform stands on five building blocks:
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On-the-Go RAG Pipeline
Dual-mode retrieval that supports both indexed search through the Weaviate vector database and direct, live parsing of documents without prior indexing.
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Text Extraction & OCR Pipeline
Handles PDFs, Word files, and image-based documents, ensuring scanned academic papers are accurately processed.
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Prompt Engineering Pipeline
Dynamic, context-aware prompts tailored to research questions, with academic citation standards built in.
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Citation-Aware Responses
Every answer includes proper academic citations with reference standards, maintaining full research integrity.
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Scalable Cloud Architecture
FastAPI core services with Node.js async tasks, deployed on AWS EC2 with S3 for storage and MySQL for metadata.
Citations First
An answer a student cannot cite is an answer they cannot use. Every response the assistant gives includes proper academic citations, formatted to reference standards, so students know exactly where each piece of information came from.
That is what makes the speed trustworthy. What took hours of manual searching now happens in seconds, and the citation trail means the shortcut never comes at the cost of research integrity.
Measured Results
The numbers speak
What Sokrateque delivers for graduate students working across thousands of academic pages.
Outcome
Sokrateque.ai now powers research workflows for graduate students:
- Hours became seconds. Fragmented manual searching turned into instant, citation-aware discovery across thousands of academic pages.
- Nothing is out of reach. The platform handles everything from scanned legacy papers to the latest digital publications.
- Trust in every answer. Proper academic citations on every response keep the speed compatible with real research standards.
Next Steps
The dual-mode design is what carries the product forward. Because documents can be parsed live without prior indexing, students can put brand new papers to work the moment they get them, and the platform keeps pace with the literature instead of lagging behind it.
Xpiderz has been instrumental in bringing Sokrateque.ai to life. Their team built advanced multi-agent systems, integrated Power BI with LLMs, and delivered a seamless data exploration pipeline that exceeded our expectations. We're incredibly satisfied with their work.
Tjaco Walvis
Founder & CEO, Sokrateque.ai
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