ultralytics/docs/en/datasets/explorer/index.md

---
comments: true
description: Discover Ultralytics Explorer for semantic search, SQL queries, vector similarity, and natural language dataset exploration. Enhance your CV datasets effortlessly.
keywords: Ultralytics Explorer, CV datasets, semantic search, SQL queries, vector similarity, dataset visualization, python API, machine learning, computer vision
---

# Ultralytics Explorer

<p>
    <img width="1709" alt="Ultralytics Explorer Screenshot 1" src="https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics/assets/15766192/feb1fe05-58c5-4173-a9ff-e611e3bba3d0">
</p>

<a href="https://colab.research.google.com/github/ultralytics/ultralytics/blob/main/docs/en/datasets/explorer/explorer.ipynb"><img src="https://colab.research.google.com/assets/colab-badge.svg" alt="Open In Colab"></a>
Ultralytics Explorer is a tool for exploring CV datasets using semantic search, SQL queries, vector similarity search and even using natural language. It is also a Python API for accessing the same functionality.

<p align="center">
  <br>
  <iframe loading="lazy" width="720" height="405" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3VryynorQeo"
    title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0"
    allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share"
    allowfullscreen>
  </iframe>
  <br>
  <strong>Watch:</strong> Ultralytics Explorer API | Semantic Search, SQL Queries & Ask AI Features
</p>

### Installation of optional dependencies

Explorer depends on external libraries for some of its functionality. These are automatically installed on usage. To manually install these dependencies, use the following command:

```bash
pip install ultralytics[explorer]
```

!!! tip

    Explorer works on embedding/semantic search & SQL querying and is powered by [LanceDB](https://lancedb.com/) serverless vector database. Unlike traditional in-memory DBs, it is persisted on disk without sacrificing performance, so you can scale locally to large datasets like COCO without running out of memory.

### Explorer API

This is a Python API for Exploring your datasets. It also powers the GUI Explorer. You can use this to create your own exploratory notebooks or scripts to get insights into your datasets.

Learn more about the Explorer API [here](api.md).

## GUI Explorer Usage

The GUI demo runs in your browser allowing you to create embeddings for your dataset and search for similar images, run SQL queries and perform semantic search. It can be run using the following command:

```bash
yolo explorer
```

!!! note "Note"

    Ask AI feature works using OpenAI, so you'll be prompted to set the api key for OpenAI when you first run the GUI.
    You can set it like this - `yolo settings openai_api_key="..."`

<p>
    <img width="1709" alt="Ultralytics Explorer OpenAI Integration" src="https://github.com/AyushExel/assets/assets/15766192/1b5f3708-be3e-44c5-9ea3-adcd522dfc75">
</p>