Chat, web search, and factual Q&A skills

Answer questions through Arka’s chat engine with web search, deep-scrape RAG, math, weather, nearby-place lookup, and location-aware session memory.

Arka’s chat engine handles factual questions, deep web research, math, weather, and location-aware search.

Core skills

Skill	Example
web_answer	arka ask who won IPL 2025
deep_web_answer	deep_web_answer latest AI regulation news
calc	arka calc integrate sin(x) dx
hyperlocal_weather	arka weather near me
set_location	set_location Mumbai
nearby_places	nearby_places Kolkata
error_helper	error_helper <traceback>
arka chat_reset	Clear session + location context

Forced deep search

Prefix with / to force deep web search:

arka "/who won IPL 2025"

Deep search queue

Run background deep searches:

arka "deep_queue add "who won the last IPL final""
arka "deep_queue list"
arka "deep_queue run"
arka "deep_queue results"

Session memory

Answers are tagged [FROM SEARCH] or [FROM MEMORY] (stripped for TTS). Chat sessions persist context across follow-up questions within a session.

arka facing hair loss          # routes to web_answer with session
arka chat_reset                     # clear context

Location grounding

Set your location for hyperlocal results:

arka "set_location Mumbai"
arka "hyperlocal_weather"
arka "nearby_places"
arka map_download Kolkata           # cache city map to ~/.cache/arka/maps/

Web search tuning

DuckDuckGo lookups honor two env vars. If every retry times out or errors, chat logs the failure and answers from model knowledge instead of stalling the reply.

Var	Default	Notes
DDGS_TIMEOUT	20	Per-call timeout in seconds. Minimum 5.
DDGS_RETRIES	2	Attempts before falling back. Minimum 1.

Raise both on slow or flaky networks:

DDGS_TIMEOUT=30
DDGS_RETRIES=3

Install chat extras

pip install "arka-agent[chat]"

Requires: Agno, ddgs, trafilatura, sympy, geopy.

Web queries pass through security checks before search. See Security.