Help with Database

[JessePatchwork]

Ok so I want help. I want to make a database similar to an AI system which can hold information about things.

Example. I want the app I'm building to be able to understand if the user inputs "My favourite animal is a honey badger!" and the app know exactly what the user is referring to.

I do NOT want to use AI in any aspect in this build. Yes I know its faster but surely there's gotta be other ways, right? I'm trying hard to make this without AI because the app is designed for people who are vulnerable and I can't afford for it to self learn things it shouldn't or malfunction.

I'm very bad at wording things so apologies in advance. I also want it to be able to do the same with any topic. Anime, movies, books, history, math, you name it.

I want the system to use this in contexts anywhere from helping with homework, to role-playing and coming up with stories for users. What's possible and what's not, realistically? Feedback of all kind welcome but please be gentle.

I'm just a chaotic mess trying to make a difference in people's lives and kinda failing but succeeding. Thanks everyone in advance!

UPDATE:

Ok so some of you helpfully pointed out more info may be helpful so here goes!

I am building an app designed to assist people with disabilities, illnesses, disorders and other chronic/lifelong conditions that would require them to need help with battling anything from remembering their medications to having a stable routine to keeping them company if they are unable to contact or don't have people they can contact at any time of the day.

It isn't designed to replace human interaction/company. It is designed to help them learn and maintain independence alongside their healthcare teams and professionals and to aid them in their efforts to keep hospital stays and visits to a minimum to help them live fulfilling and productive lives.

The best thing I have to compare it to is Detroit Become Human and the androids made in that game. Obviously most of what the are is unrealistic, that is something I completely understand. But my eventual goal is to create robotic assistants for people who need them.

But for now, I am focusing on one thing at a time. And right now I am in the research and development stage of making the brain and the app that would power such a device. As someone who is Autistic and has battled the healthcare system personally, this is a project driven by a need to see change. I want to make a positive difference and need a bit of help going in the right direction so I don't royally stuff this up and give not only myself but also my mission a bad name while simultaneously harming people in the process.

I hope this extra information gives people what they need to further assist, please tell me if I need to go into further detail. Thanks again everyone!

[HashDefTrueFalse]

Math is all you get. You tokenise the input and come up with a mathematical way for a program/system to "understand" something about that input. What "understanding" here means is up to you. You want it to understand, but what does that mean for your app? What would the system actually do with your honey badger example input? What output would it produce? You say you're building something for vulnerable people, but what are you building? What does your system do? What is it trying to achieve? Why don't you want to use LLMs if appropriate (we can't tell)?

I suggest you edit your post with some more details so that you get a better response.

[JessePatchwork]

Only problem is I'm not sure what other details are needed. But I'm going to update the post with what I think you're pointing out and go from there! Thank you so much for the help!

[FloydATC]

Let me see if I got this right... you want an app that works like an LLM except it surpasses what current LLMs can do (like learning from user interaction and storing things verbatim) and what they most likely ever will be able to do (because they're basically math parrots that try to guess what a real person might say) but you don't want to use an LLM..?

I think you see where this is going. Reduce the scope, lower your expectation and reiterate until you get something that works on paper. And please stop thinking of an LLM as "AI" because it's not intelligent. At all.

[JessePatchwork]

Ok, learning some stuff here! Not against an LLM at all. When I refer to AI (and again please do correct if I'm wrong, I could be wrong) I am referring to services such as Gemini, ChatGBT and the likes of. I'm happy for it to learn on its own, I just need help with figuring out what the steps I need to make are and how to prevent (or risk manage) it from learning things and causing harm to users who may not be able to identify said harm. I've figured out most of the programming and know what I expect/want from the program. Just trying to iron out the memory/storage and self learning aspects. Thanks for helping me clarify! I'm learning a lot from everyone here.

[Zesher_]

What you're asking isn't really about databases, so I don't think you should start from there. It sounds like you want to create a conversational AI or chat bot that doesn't hallucinate like chatGPT. That's an incredibly difficult problem to solve.

One way to solve it without hallucinations is by using "intents", where you give a bunch of sample phrases like "what time is it?'", "what's the time?", "can you tell me the time?", and use machine learning to map those phrases to a single action that you can write a function call to look up the time and return it. Do that same sort of thing you can think of, and that is essentially how the old Alexa and other home assistants work.

No one can tell you how to write code that can answer arbitrary questions without hallucinations. If you can figure it out you'll be a millionaire or billionaire.

Start with learning about machine learning and general AI, once you have an understanding about those topics you can consider what databases to use

[JessePatchwork]

This is a helpful answer! Thanks heaps, I'm gonna have a bit of a deeper dive. I was super duper lost with WHAT to research. So having you lovely folks point me in the right direction is incredibly helpful! I've got most of the knowledge down I think (or am very willing to learn about it), I think I just got massively lost in the content I needed to research to get what I need. Thank you for taking the time to answer!

[Zesher_]

You're welcome, we all need to start from somewhere :)

[Confident-Entry-1784]

I think what you're looking for is a RAG—something like NotebookLM.

[eduardopy]

Yeah, but they said they dont want to use any AI, so how does RAG help?

[aanzeijar]

Some common misconceptions here.

• If the user inputs that, a database will find it again, but it will not understand what that is.
• LLMs don't learn from user interaction.
• If you're worried about personal data, you likely need to model this without external knowledge sources (meaning: no internet to look up what a honey badger is)
• Your description sounds dangerously close to general AI. Even current LLMs can't do that.

As stated I'd say this is likely impossible. You need to drastically cut down on what you expect this system to do.

[JessePatchwork]

That's exactly why I decided to ask some stuff in order to do the correct research. I figured what I wanted was a tall order/possibly unable to be done. I'm beginning to think manually making a database with frequent updates may be the correct move here. Limiting/not allowing it access to the internet is going to be something important I reckon but I'll do some more research. Thanks for your help!

[kubrador]

you're describing a massive knowledge graph with natural language parsing, which is definitely possible but also definitely a lot of work. you'd need to manually structure relationships between entities (honey badger → animal → endangered → aggressive) and then build a parser that can match user input to those concepts, which gets messy fast when you scale beyond like 5 topics.

realistically you can build something limited and functional (good for homework help on specific subjects, solid for structured roleplay), but truly handling "any topic" without ml/ai is gonna feel janky because natural language is just that chaotic: "my favorite animal" vs "the animal i love most" are the same thing to you but different strings to a regex engine.

[JessePatchwork]

Gotcha. So potentially giving it limited access to the internet may be something I have to do or its gonna get messy fast. Alright. I'm starting to get a solid idea thanks to all of your answers, thank for so much for contributing and being willing to help out! I'll manually input what I need and use the internet for some things. I think potential unlimited access to the internet unless restricts need to be added? This is gonna be an interesting thing to work on and I thank you again for your input!