Today, we bring you a major update to the Nextcloud AI Assistant with Context Chat, Context Write, GPU acceleration, the ability to split off the Nextcloud server & AI server, and MUCH more! And for those without $100K GPU’s (you know who you are), we have also incredible news: we are working with several prominent European hosting companies, including IONOS, OVHcloud and plusserver to deliver AI-as-a-Service solutions that respect your privacy and digital sovereignty! For our US users and customers, there are already several companies offering AI-as-a-Service and some we support (OpenAI in particular) while others are in the works.
Introducing Assistant 2.0
With a nearly complete overhaul of the user interface AND how our AI Assistant works on the back-end, plus a ton of new, big features, we decided that this is the moment to call this the Assistant 2.0. Let’s go over what’s new, but first a short summary of where we are today!
Nextcloud has a ton of AI features, some big and elaborate, others more basic. Some train a neural network on your data, on your own server to give you a smart inbox in Mail or warnings about unexpected logins from Suspicious Login Detection. Others rely on a pre-trained network that can recognize faces and objects in photos, generate a transcript of your video call or modify text. We can also generate images, translate text and chat messages, and much more. Many of the features are accessible through our easy to use Nextcloud Assistant interface!
Nextcloud Assistant in Text
Many of these features can help you, save you time, or improve your productivity. And best of all: as always we focus on making all these services available of running on your own server. Given even the US Congress doesn’t trust ChatGPT or Microsoft CoPilot, there are good reasons to want control over the data send to and from an AI service! Our Ethical AI Rating system provides you transparency about the AI used to generate your text, image or classify your photos:
- Is it open source? Can I study how it works and re-train or optimize the model for my needs?
- Is the model freely available? Can I run it on my own server?
- Is the training data open and available so I can inspect it for issues and re-train or optimize the model?
Learn more in our blog post about our approach to AI.
See Nextcloud Assistant 2.0 in action
Sign up for our webinar and see all the features of Nextcloud Assistant mentioned in this article.
Context Chat and Context Write
And now, let’s explore what’s new: The two biggest new features are Context Write and Context Chat. These both share a lot in common, both providing AI-assisted outputs for you, but they’re also distinctly different.
Context Chat, in short, is the ability for the Assistant to answer questions about your data. You can ask the Assistant questions about a document you have: Say, you have a PDF with the manual of your new digital watch… you’ll be able to ask the Assistant how to set it up, or how to replace the battery. And if your company has a nicely documented reimbursement process in its documentation in Collectives, you can ask the Assistant questions about this process. This is an absolutely amazing ability!
It is not just limited to your files either: we developed an API so apps like Mail, Calendar, Talk and Deck can make their data available too. You’ll then be able to ask “When do I have my next meeting with my boss?” (from the Calendar) and “What tasks did she ask me to work on as high priority this week?” (from Mail). Or “Give me a summary of the status of project X.” (Deck + chat perhaps?)
Context Write, on the other hand, lets the Assistant rewrite something in a certain requested context, or style. Say, you have a nice poem and want to write another in that same particular style. By providing the original poem, then new text of what you want to say, the Assistant will then create a masterpiece. But you can also give it a form, give it your data, and ask it to provide the text you would need to fill in the form. Impressive, and useful!
