Otaku — an LLM frontend for creative writing

I understand this kind of product may not be exactly right for this subreddit, but I still think it deserves some attention, as it's an LLM frontend for local engines in the first place, and can be used for general-purpose chats with LLMs once lore extraction is disabled in the settings. Otaku is built with a focus on three key ideas: maintain writing quality as the story grows; keep the context small, even for long stories, without losing the details that matter; offer high-quality interfaces, in the browser and in the terminal. The two interfaces: a web UI (customizable) — see the interactive demo; a terminal UI — see its own interactive demo. Both the web UI and the terminal share the same functions with one exception for now — the characters library is in the web interface only and will be added to the terminal later. The difference between the interfaces is that in the terminal you execute the functions with slash commands (the reference is available with /help), while in the web UI the operations are available from the menu. A while ago I posted about it here and got some positive feedback. Since then, it has gained new features: characters library that works both ways: you can add cards to the library and start stories with them, or you can start a story from scratch, and after characters are extracted automatically from your story, you'll be able to create a card in the library from a character, or link it to an existing card; story mode similar to NovelAI: you write not in the prompt box but directly in the transcript, and the model continues when you press Enter; attaching pictures, and the pictures stay in the context, so you can refer to them later in the story; web search tool so that the model can search for facts on the internet; questions tool so that the model can ask you questions on how to continue the story; injections like ST's Author's Note; custom cap on context size: when the story exceeds the cap, its middle is replaced with summaries. The web interface now: is optimized for mobile; supports HTTPS and password protection; has several new layouts. Install Otaku is free and open source; it works on macOS, Linux and Windows. Install it with uv — uv tool install otaku — or see the GitHub README for other options. Repo: https://github.com/enclavum/otaku Get started To start, you launch either otaku for the terminal or otaku web for the web UI. The web UI's default URL is http://localhost:9600. Two sample chats ("stories") along with sample character cards are imported on first start to give you an idea of the features and what play looks like, and you land right in the middle of one of them. On first start, you choose a provider and a model: Otaku automatically detects local installations of llama.cpp, KoboldCpp, oMLX and LM Studio, and lets you pick from their models. Cloud providers (OpenRouter, NanoGPT) are also there — enter an API key and their catalogs appear. After exploring the provided stories, you can start your own chat with the /new command. Roleplay Otaku is primarily developed for creative writing and roleplay, an alternative to SillyTavern and the like. The context-building mechanism itself is described in an engineering doc that may also interest some people. Asking for feedback Otaku is a personal side project, and I'd like to get feedback from the community on the product and on what to add. submitted by /u/Fickle_Tradition4491 [link] [comments]

Source: r/LocalLLaMA | 2026-10-17

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