GNOME's Newelle AI Assistant: Linux's Answer to Microsoft Copilot

It seems that AI has really shaken the tech world down to its core. With Microsoft and Apple adopting AI big-time, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Linux users would have passed on this tech trend. However, a recent project has proved us wrong, as the GNOME-based AI assistant, Newelle, has just been released in its 1.0 state.

GNOME's Newelle AI assistant is ready to rumble

As spotted by ZDNet, GNOME's AI assistant, Newelle, is now ready for its 1.0 release. As you might imagine from a Linux project, you have a lot of control over Newelle, including not installing it at all if an AI assistant isn't something you want on your PC. If you do, you can pick and choose which LLM Newelle uses instead of making-do with a pre-set one.

It comes with a ton of features:

🎨 Advanced Customization: Tailor the application with a wide range of settings

🚀 Flexible Model Support: Choose from mutliple AI models and providers to fit your specific needs

💻 Terminal Command Exection: Execute commands suggested by the AI on the fly

🧩 Extensions: Add your own functionalities and models to Newelle

🗣 Voice support: Chat hands free with Newelle, supporting many Speech To Text and TTS models, with translation options

🧠 Long Term Memory: Remember conversations from previous chats

💼 Chat with documents: Chat with your own documents

🔎 Web Search: Provide reliable answers using Web Search

🌐 Website Reading: Scrap informations from websites by appending the prefix #https://.. in the prompt

👤 Profile Manager: Create settings profiles and switch between them

📁 Builtin File Manager: Manage you files with the help of AI

📝 Rich Formatting: Supports both Markdown and LaTeX

✏️ Chat editing: Edit or remove any message and manage your prompts easily

The Terminal command execution has me equally excited and terrified. Excited because, as a Linux newbie, I sometimes forget the most basic of commands and would love an AI to handle everything for me and remind me of what I can do. However, I am also scared to give an AI Terminal access in case it enters some bad information. Here's hoping it knows what it's doing. If you want to gfive it a spin, pop over to GitHub or Flathub.

At first, I was a little surprised to hear that Linux was getting an AI assistant. After all, with Microsoft rolling out Copilot into every program imaginable, it seemed weird that the Linux community would do something similar. However, I think the major difference between Microsoft's and Linux's integration of AI is user consent. While Microsoft will add Copilot badges to everything you love and force you to like it, Linux's AI is entirely opt-in and requires you to set it up manually. In the meantime, if you like the idea of a DIY AI, check out these ways you can use Home Assistant with a local LLM.