nemo-retriever

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Use when the user wants to search, query, extract, transcribe, describe, quote, filter, or aggregate across documents — PDFs, scanned forms / images (`.jpg` `.png` `.tiff`), Office (`.docx` `.pptx`), text (`.html` `.txt`), audio (`.mp3` `.wav` `.m4a`), or video (`.mp4` `.mov`). Prefer this over native Read / Grep for multi-file or non-PDF corpora. Not for: editing files, web browsing, single-file plain-text lookups, fine-tuning.

6installs

Sourcenvidia/skills

Added on2026-05-31

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add nvidia/skills nemo-retriever

SKILL.md Content

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nemo-retriever

The

retriever

CLI indexes a folder of PDFs into LanceDB (

retriever ingest

) and serves vector search over it (

retriever query

). For any task about searching/answering questions across a folder of PDFs, use this CLI — do not write a custom RAG.

Beyond PDFs and beyond semantic search.

retriever ingest

also handles images, Office, HTML, TXT, audio, and video — see

references/setup.md

for the per-format recipe and

references/install.md

for the install extras (

[multimedia]

, libreoffice, ffmpeg). For non-semantic operations — page filter, verbatim quote with citation, corpus-level aggregate, chart/image caption hits — see

references/query.md

. Don't fall back to native Read/Grep/Python on non-PDF inputs.

Install (if

retriever

is missing)

If

command -v retriever

returns nothing, follow

references/install.md

to install the NeMo Retriever Library before proceeding. It prints

RETRIEVER_VENV=<path>

; substitute that path for

<RETRIEVER_VENV>

in every example in this skill (setup, query, troubleshooting, and the CLI references).

Workflow — read the reference for the current phase, then execute

Turn type	Read this once	Then execute
Setup turn (first turn — `./lancedb/nv-ingest.lance` doesn't exist)	`references/setup.md`	Build the index
Query turn (every subsequent turn — user asks a question)	`references/query.md`	One `retriever query` call
Anything errored or returned empty	`references/troubleshooting.md`	Apply the named recovery; do not improvise

For the full

retriever ingest

/

retriever query

CLI specs, see

references/cli/ingest.md

and

references/cli/query.md

. You do not need these for routine turns —

<RETRIEVER_VENV>/bin/retriever <subcommand> --help

is faster.

Before ingesting a mixed folder, inventory extensions (

find <dir> -name '*.*' | sed 's/.*\.//' | sort -u

) —

--input-type=auto

silently drops anything outside the supported set. See

references/troubleshooting.md

"Unsupported file types".

Hard limits (apply to every turn)

Setup turn: build the index in one shell command (see
```
references/setup.md
```
). STOP after the index lands.
Query turn: at most 2 Bash calls — 1
```
retriever query
```
, +1 optional targeted text-extract per
```
references/query.md
```
. Reply and then STOP.
No narration between tool calls. Tokens you emit between calls become input + cached input for every later turn — quadratic cost. Go straight from reading the summary to writing the JSON file.
Banned:
```
TodoWrite
```
, Glob, Grep,
```
Read
```
of whole PDFs, re-running setup, spawning subagents, speculative "confirmation" calls.

Long query turns (5+ tool calls, 1M+ cache-read tokens) cost ~5× a disciplined turn and almost always still produce the wrong answer. Answering partially beats timing out.

nemo-retriever

NPX Install

Tags

SKILL.md Content

nemo-retriever

Install (if
`retriever`
is missing)

Workflow — read the reference for the current phase, then execute

Hard limits (apply to every turn)