Orcheo is an open-source framework for building and deploying conversational search pipelines, released under the MIT license on GitHub.
A research team designed Orcheo around two persistent frustrations in the field: no standard way to share components between groups, and the disproportionate engineering cost of standing up a prototype for user studies. The platform ships with more than 45 pre-built modules covering query understanding, document ranking, and response generation. It runs in two modes, one for rapid prototyping and one closer to production, with credential management and execution telemetry included. Built-in AI coding assistance is meant to lower the learning curve for researchers who are not primarily software engineers.
Conversational search sits at the intersection of information retrieval and language generation, and it underlies most AI assistant products that handle follow-up questions. When every research lab rolls its own pipeline, results are hard to reproduce and harder to build on. Orcheo's single-file node module design is specifically aimed at that fragmentation, letting groups swap in a component without adopting an entire framework.
"45-plus off-the-shelf components" is a number that looks good in a paper abstract. Whether those components stay maintained once the authors move to the next project is the harder question every open-source research tool eventually has to answer.