Introducing Proton Scribe: a privacy-first writing assistant
from the team:
Hi everyone,
In Proton's 2024 user survey, it seems like AI usage among the Proton community has now exceeded 50% (it's at 54% to be exact). It's 72% if we also count people who are interested in using AI.
Rather than have people use tools like ChatGPT which are horrible for privacy, we're bridging the gap with Proton Scribe, a privacy-first writing assistant that is built into Proton Mail.
Proton Scribe allows you to generate email drafts based on a prompt and refine with options like shorten, proofread and formalize.
A privacy-first writing assistant
Proton Scribe is a privacy-first take on AI, meaning that it:
Can be run locally, so your data never leaves your device.
Does not log or save any of the prompts you input.
Does not use any of your data for training purposes.
Is open source, so anyone can inspect and trust the code.
Basically, it's the privacy-first AI tool that we wish existed, but doesn't exist, so we built it ourselves. Scribe is not a partnership with a third-party AI firm, it's developed, run and operated directly by us, based off of open source technologies.
Available now for Visionary, Lifetime, and Business plans
Proton Scribe is available as a paid add-on for business plans, and teams can try it for free. It's also included for free to all of our legacy Proton Visionary and Lifetime plan subscribers. Learn more about Proton Scribe on our blog: https://proton.me/blog/proton-scribe-writing-assistant
As always, if you have thoughts and comments, let us know.
Amazing thing, unfortunately I won't be able to use it. I'm on ultimate plan which already costs quite a while and if scribe is going to be a paid add-on I will stick to local ollama models. Not the most convenient thing but it works.
Fucking hell its exhausting trying to keep one step ahead of having this AI bullshit shoved into every service I use.
I'm not against AI. I'm just against it being embedded in literally everything. I
If I want to "consult" an AI to have it look at my code for syntax errors or something like that, I'll go to its website and use it from there, accepting that yes... That particular bit of code or text is going to be scraped.
But the step from there to "always be reading everything I do is fucking massive.
Yeah that's fair enough. But I have to say it's still frustrating seeing everyone investing so much money on this exact same feature. I'm not sure we have had time to figure out how people use this, everyone is just frightened to be left behind.
Pretty sad all the people getting mad about an optional opt-in feature. I think this is pretty cool. If it’s free to use with my existing unlimited plan I’ll probably use it regularly, otherwise if I have to pay more I’ll probably just keep using ChatGPT since I already pay for that.
It's enabled by default and can send your email drafts to their server. The first time you try to use it (by clicking the Scribe button), it asks whether you want to use the local version or the cloud version. It's easy to disable it completely in Settings.
It does not, and cannot, train on your inbox, due to end-to-end-encryption.
I would prefer if the inital prompt included an option to disabled Scribe completely, and a warning about the privacy implications of enabling it, but overall I think their approach is good enough for my privacy needs.
So that's fair and I completely understand that. My problem is 1. How training data is obtained 2. How this change in the future and 3. I just started my proton switch about two months ago and all of the google AI integration is what broke the camels back for me.
I wanted a platform where I didn't have to constantly check how the AI is getting trained and handles privacy, which is now gone.
Please review the plans model, it is very wallet aggressive currently. Example the ability to create customer own plans with the services he wants and needs.
Our business audience was the most interested in a writing assistant, this is why we started gradually rolling it out starting with Business and Visionary plans. We will look into making it available to more users at a later date!
Chromium-based browser. Support for the Proton Mail desktop app will come at a later date.
Is it technically not possible on Firefox? I would've expected a large overlap between caring-about-privacy and not-running-chromium amongst your customers :/
Support for running language models locally is currently only available in the Firefox Nightly builds. In our testing with Firefox, we haven’t been able to get Proton Scribe to run reliably on a variety of devices. We will see how the situation evolves before adding support.
I did not look at the source code but I assume this uses something like webllm, which uses webgpu that Firefox currently doesn't support as much as chromium
ungoogled chromium is a free and open-source variant of the Chromium web browser that removes all Google-specific web services. It achieves this with a series of patches applied to the Chromium codebase during the compilation process. The result is functionally similar to regular Chromium.
I've read good things about Vivaldi, which also is chromium based.