Orcheo: A Modular Full-Stack Platform for Conversational Search

TL;DR

Orcheo is an open-source, modular platform that streamlines the development, sharing, and deployment of conversational search systems, addressing key barriers in research and prototyping.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, production-ready framework with reusable components and comprehensive infrastructure for efficient conversational search development.

Findings

Facilitates component reuse and reproducibility in CS research

Enables rapid prototyping with 50+ off-the-shelf components

Validates utility through case studies demonstrating modularity

Abstract

Conversational search (CS) requires a complex software engineering pipeline that integrates query reformulation, ranking, and response generation. CS researchers currently face two barriers: the lack of a unified framework for efficiently sharing contributions with the community, and the difficulty of deploying end-to-end prototypes needed for user evaluation. We introduce Orcheo, an open-source platform designed to bridge this gap. Orcheo offers three key advantages: (i) A modular architecture promotes component reuse through single-file node modules, facilitating sharing and reproducibility in CS research; (ii) Production-ready infrastructure bridges the prototype-to-system gap via dual execution modes, secure credential management, and execution telemetry, with built-in AI coding support that lowers the learning curve; (iii) Starter-kit assets include 50+ off-the-shelf components for query understanding, ranking, and response generation, enabling the rapid bootstrapping of complete CS pipelines. We describe the framework architecture and validate Orcheo's utility through case studies that highlight modularity and ease of use. Orcheo is released as open source under the MIT License at https://github.com/ShaojieJiang/orcheo.