Hello everyone,

I would like to start a discussion regarding AI integration into Zettlr. This has no priority right now, because (a) the community hasn't yet opened any issues regarding this by themselves yet, and (b) there are other, more pressing issues. Nevertheless, AI integration into Zettlr has been on my mind for quite some time, and I would like to relieve some pressure by telling you what I've been thinking. And, by doing so, ask you what you think!

Now that local AI has been improving steadily for almost two years, it is becoming easier and more accessible. We're not quite there, but once we are, it would be great to already have some nice features available.

So, none of this is going to happen anytime soon, but I am very curious as to what you think. Do you have some potential use-cases for generative AI within Zettlr in mind? Maybe something you already do, but would benefit from direct integration into Zettlr? Please leave your thoughts below. I'll start.

I have been using Apple's Writing Tools for a few weeks, and I believe that Zettlr would benefit from some of them inline within the editor. Specifically, I am thinking that beneficial features would be:

Rewriting a paragraph of text. This could include making it more concise, smoother, or change the tone of the paragraph.
Summarization of text. I have found that sometimes this is very useful for two reasons. First, summarizing an abstract that I wrote enables me to check if I made the point clear: If an AI is unable to properly extract what I wrote, it could just be the AI being stupid, but it may indicate that others will have difficulties parsing, too. Secondly, I find that sometimes summarizing some of my older paragraphs helps me more quickly parse what I have written.

Besides that, I also have found that generative AI can be quite okay at writing an abstract. For example for my blog posts, I have found that just dumping the text into an AI and letting it generate an abstract gives a quite useful first draft of the abstract. Naturally, I have to rewrite it, but having a starting point makes the process of writing the abstract much less painful. What we could include into Zettlr would be a function that does that, and simply puts the AI's output into the abstract frontmatter variable.

Then, when it comes to which integrations to offer: I don't feel comfortable integrating with OpenAI directly, but there are plenty of great local offers by now. Specifically, there's Ollama, which seems to be a quite great way of running AI and simply using that. Integrating with Ollama would be very easy and simple for us to do.

Now, as I said, this is just a starting point and thoughts I have been pondering over the past months, and I would be interested in your takes on AI integration in Zettlr!