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Dartmouth Chat Tool Usage

Dartmouth Chat provides access to LLM Tooling. LLM Tools allow you to supplement a LLM’s ability to give you information on a topic with additional information you provide external to Dartmouth Chat.

It does this through a capability named “Tool Servers” This allows you to connect to MCP Compatible tools that provide such as the following:

Filesystem Access - Allow Dartmouth Chat to access your local files without uploading them
Memory - Create a portable knowledge base that Dartmouth Chat (and other AI applications such as Claude Desktop) can refer to in your queries.
Database Access - Allow Dartmouth Chat to access a database for additional context.
Git Server - Allow Dartmouth Chat to interact with a Git repository

Please see the detailed upstream documentation for more information.

This is a rapidly developing field and there are risks to exposing your data to LLMs. We recommend starting only using trusted tooling and make it read-only to start with

Example Tool Usage - Memory

In this example we will add the ability to Dartmouth Chat to store and retrieve information about you and your past chats

Download Research Computing created binary for your platform:

Note this binary will start a http server on your local machine running on port 8083 and will read and write from a file named memory.json where you execute the binary

Run dchat_memory_server (on the Mac you will need to whitelist this as a untrusted binary)

On Dartmouth Chat setup a connection to the tool as follows:

Click in your Profile in the upper right-hand or lower left-hand corner and go to Settings -> Tools

Click the + sign and for the url put in “http://127.0.0.1:8083” and click Save.

Leave the Settings window open and click on General and under “System Prompt” add a prompt such as “When I’m asking things, Use the knowledge graph server tool to reference information about past conversations” and then click Show next to Advanced Parameters.

Click Save and X out the window.

Select a model from one of the following providers:

Gemini
Anthropic
OpenAI (best supported)

In your prompt there should now be a “Tool” icon as follows:

You can test this tool by typing in something like:

“create a memory that Gilgamesh was a Sumerian demi-god”

and the LLM should mention that it is using “create_entities” to create an entry about Gilgamesh.

If you open a new chat you can ask about Gilgamesh and Dartmouth Chat should pull information from the dchat_memory_server tool.

This is just one example of using a simple tool with Dartmouth Chat to supplement your query results. Information can be read from and to databases, files, services such as Github, Slack etc.