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title: 📚 Introduction
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## What is Embedchain?

Embedchain is a production ready Open-Source RAG framework - load, index, retrieve, and sync any unstructured data. 

Embedchain streamlines the creation of RAG applications, offering a seamless process for managing various types of unstructured data. It efficiently segments data into manageable chunks, generates relevant embeddings, and stores them in a vector database for optimized retrieval. With a suite of diverse APIs, it enables users to extract contextual information, find precise answers, or engage in interactive chat conversations, all tailored to their own data.

## Who is Embedchain for?

Embedchain is designed for a diverse range of users, from AI professionals like Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers to those just starting their AI journey, including college students, independent developers, and hobbyists. Essentially, it's for anyone with an interest in AI, regardless of their expertise level.

Our APIs are user-friendly yet adaptable, enabling beginners to effortlessly create LLM-powered applications with as few as 4 lines of code. At the same time, we offer extensive customization options for every aspect of the RAG pipeline. This includes the choice of LLMs, vector databases, loaders and chunkers, retrieval strategies, re-ranking, and more.

Our platform's clear and well-structured abstraction layers ensure that users can tailor the system to meet their specific needs, whether they're crafting a simple project or a complex, nuanced AI application.

## Why Use Embedchain?

Developing a robust and efficient RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline for production use presents numerous complexities, such as:

- Integrating and indexing data from diverse sources.
- Determining optimal data chunking methods for each source.
- Synchronizing the RAG pipeline with regularly updated data sources.
- Implementing efficient data storage in a vector store.
- Deciding whether to include metadata with document chunks.
- Handling permission management.
- Configuring Large Language Models (LLMs).
- Selecting effective prompts.
- Choosing suitable retrieval strategies.
- Assessing the performance of your RAG pipeline.
- Deploying the pipeline into a production environment, among other concerns.

Embedchain is designed to simplify these tasks, offering conventional yet customizable APIs. Our solution handles the intricate processes of loading, chunking, indexing, and retrieving data. This enables you to concentrate on aspects that are crucial for your specific use case or business objectives, ensuring a smoother and more focused development process.

## How it works?

Embedchain makes it easy to add data to your RAG pipeline with these straightforward steps:

1. **Automatic Data Handling**: It automatically recognizes the data type and loads it.
2. **Efficient Data Processing**: The system creates embeddings for key parts of your data.
3. **Flexible Data Storage**: You get to choose where to store this processed data in a vector database.

When a user asks a question, whether for chatting, searching, or querying, Embedchain simplifies the response process:

1. **Query Processing**: It turns the user's question into embeddings.
2. **Document Retrieval**: These embeddings are then used to find related documents in the database.
3. **Answer Generation**: The related documents are used by the LLM to craft a precise answer.

With Embedchain, you don’t have to worry about the complexities of building a RAG pipeline. It offers an easy-to-use interface for developing applications with any kind of data.

## Getting started

Checkout our [quickstart guide](/get-started/quickstart) to start your first RAG application.

## Support

Feel free to reach out to us if you have ideas, feedback or questions that we can help out with.

<Snippet file="get-help.mdx" />

## Contribute

- [GitHub](https://github.com/embedchain/embedchain)
- [Contribution docs](/contribution/dev)
