Chordalia products can optionally connect to external services — Azure for cloud AI, Ollama for local AI, MariaDB for multi-machine index sharing. These step-by-step walkthroughs cover the one-time setup for each. Pick the ones that match the features you want.
Microsoft cloud services for AI Q&A, cloud-hosted search, and OneDrive file access. Everything here runs inside your own Azure account — Chordalia Systems never sees your data or queries.
Create a free-trial Azure subscription and a resource group. The foundation for everything else on this page.
Deploy a GPT model (GPT-4o-mini or GPT-4o) to power AI question-answering. Answers stream from your own Azure endpoint.
Create a cloud-hosted search index. Required for Arion Tier 2 and Chordium. Free tier available for small indexes.
Start with Azure Account Setup if you're new to Azure — the other two depend on it. (The OneDrive connector also uses an Azure-side app registration; see Cloud sources below.)
Run AI models entirely on hardware you control. No cloud, no subscriptions, no data leaving your machine.
Index documents that live in cloud storage rather than on your local drive. Each connector authenticates with the provider using credentials you create yourself — nothing routes through Chordalia Systems.
Run the database server on one machine and connect from others, so your desktop and laptop share one index. Optional — only needed if you want multi-machine access.
Two small command-line tools enable extra file types. Both are optional — if your library doesn't contain the relevant formats, skip them. Standard installers from the upstream projects, no Chordalia-specific setup.
Required to index .wpd, .doc, .odt, and .rtf files. Arion runs LibreOffice in headless mode to convert these formats to text. ~250 MB install. After installing, restart Arion and run Tools → Settings → System Status → Run Diagnostics to confirm it's detected.
Required to transcribe video files
(audio-only formats like .mp3 / .m4a / .wav don't need it).
Arion uses ffmpeg to extract the audio track from MP4 / MKV /
MOV / WebM containers before sending it to Whisper. After
installing, ensure ffmpeg is on your PATH and verify with
ffmpeg -version in a terminal.
Neither tool sends data anywhere — both run locally as plain command-line utilities that Arion calls when it encounters a relevant file.
These guides cover the common paths. If you hit something not described here, email support@chordalia.com — we'll help sort it out and, if it's useful to others, add it to the relevant guide.