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One of the comments on the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 was a simple question: “So, no AI is now a feature?” LibreOffice does not reject artificial intelligence out of hand, but an office suite used by tens of millions of people – in schools, hospitals, public bodies, law firms and thousands of other organisations – will not add a feature to its default configuration until that feature can be delivered under the conditions defined by the project in accordance with its principles. User-controlled execution. The user must be able to choose where inference takes place: on the local computer, on an infrastructure directly controlled by the user, or on a service chosen independently by the user. A default setting that silently redirects to a single provider is not a choice. No content may leave the computer without authorisation. The content of documents is a user’s asset and, in many implementations, is also legally protected material: medical records, case files, tender documents and student data. Transmission must be the result of a user’s decision and not behaviour carried out in the background by the application. No telemetry of any kind. LibreOffice does not collect usage data, and this must also apply
I don’t know, Integration with a local instance of ollama from an open source text editor it would be perfectly fine for me. I write enough that a grammar-aware typo correction would be awesome. At work I find Gmails AI suggestions quite useful, especially when writing in languages where i am not fluent. That buy open source and self hosted? Yes, please.
The thing is… this setup works. But is it good? I too find text corrections to be a great application, but thinking about it I’m just blindly accepting most suggestions. I use that tool because I’m not confident enough to double-check my spelling and grammar, so naturally I can’t really double check the tool’s output either.
In areas where I’m way more knowledgeable, the usefulness seems to vanish. Namely, writing code. It’s doing really silly, yet valid things. The only difference is that I can spot them in this case, while on text correction I can’t.