Introducing Proton Scribe: a privacy-first writing assistant
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.
Proton Team
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This is the right way to do it. Kudos!
/Visionary
The negative, since I couldn't see it:
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 :/
The team states the following regarding Firefox:
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'm good with this response. I'm a Firefox user so can't yet make use of scribe, but its a feature I didn't expect and don't have today so I'm not missing out. For others with different threat models, if they can use it and enjoy, then more power to them.
yeah, I'm a non-chromium user
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.
Even if degoogled, Chromium still does a poor job at protecting your privacy.
I liked Vivaldi. Its a good browser. I just switched to Firefox because the world needs more than a chromium browser owner by a single company.