diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index 4d10b73..416eac6 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -10,4 +10,5 @@ backend/app.log
 backend/Downloads
 backend/.ipynb_checkpoints
 backend/.venv
-.idea
\ No newline at end of file
+.idea
+qdrant_storage/
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/backend/app/core/config.py b/backend/app/core/config.py
index 7a9df5b..8e432ee 100644
--- a/backend/app/core/config.py
+++ b/backend/app/core/config.py
@@ -1,7 +1,9 @@
-from pydantic_settings import BaseSettings
+from pydantic_settings import BaseSettings, SettingsConfigDict
 
 
 class Settings(BaseSettings):
+    model_config = SettingsConfigDict(env_file=".env", env_file_encoding="utf-8")
+
     # Frontend Config
     FRONTEND_URL: str
 
diff --git a/backend/app/services/knowledge_base_service.py b/backend/app/services/knowledge_base_service.py
index 86f61d9..40c19c2 100644
--- a/backend/app/services/knowledge_base_service.py
+++ b/backend/app/services/knowledge_base_service.py
@@ -32,9 +32,10 @@ def create_knowledge_base_collection_if_not_exists():
         collection_names = [col.name for col in collections.collections]
 
         if KB_COLLECTION_NAME not in collection_names:
-            # Create collection with 1536 dimensions (Azure OpenAI text-embedding-ada-002)
+            # Create collection with Azure OpenAI text-embedding-ada-002 = 1536 / nomic-embed-text (Ollama) = 768
+            vector_size = 768 if settings.PROVIDER == "local" else 1536
             result = create_qdrant_collection(
-                collection_name=KB_COLLECTION_NAME, vector_size=1536, distance="cosine"
+                collection_name=KB_COLLECTION_NAME, vector_size=vector_size, distance="cosine"
             )
             return {"status": "success", "message": result}
         else: