Experimenting with AI services in Nightly

In the coming months, we will experiment with providing easy access to optional AI services in Nightly to improve productivity as you browse. This work is part of our improvements to multitasking and cross-referencing in the sidebar, and we are committed to following the principles of user choice, agency, and privacy as we bring AI-powered enhancements to Firefox. To start, this experiment will only be available to Nightly users, and the AI functionality will be entirely optional. It’s there in case it’s helpful, but it is not built into any core functionality.

In the first experiment that you can try out this week, you will be able to:

• Add a chatbot of your choice to the sidebar, so you can quickly access it as you browse.
• Select and send text from webpages to:
  • Summarize the excerpt and make it easier to scan and understand at a glance.
  • Simplify language. We find this feature handy for answering the typical kids’ “why” questions.
  • Ask the chatbot to test your knowledge and memory of the excerpt.

Select the text you want to summarize

To activate the experience:

• Go to Settings > Nightly Experiments and turn the AI Chatbot Integration experiment on.
• Choose your preferred chatbot from this list of providers:
  • ChatGPT
  • Google Gemini
  • HuggingChat
  • Le Chat Mistral

Then, as you browse, select any text, right-click it, and choose the Ask chatbot option to send the text, page title, and prompt to your provider. If you want to keep permanent access to the sidebar, click Customize toolbar in the toolbar right-click menu, and drag the sidebar icon to your toolbar.

We believe providing choice in AI services is important for many reasons. First, you should be able to choose the service that works best for you, and not be locked into a single provider. Second, all of these models are still being developed and improved. None are perfect, and they’re each good at some things and not at others. This gives you an opportunity to experiment with many services to find the one that’s most helpful for whatever you’re trying to accomplish. AI is an ingredient that can make your experience better. It doesn’t need to replace the tools you already know and love.

We will continue to improve our AI services experiment before making it available in our beta and release channels, and we welcome your feedback on how to make it more useful. If you have suggestions for improving the feature and feedback on what custom prompts work best for you, please share your thoughts in this Connect post.

Nightly can be configured by advanced testers to use custom prompts and any compatible chatbot, such as llamafile (discord), which runs on-device open models, including open-source ones. We are excited for the community to share interesting prompts, chatbots, and models as we make this a better user experience. We are also looking at how we can provide an easy-to-set-up option for a private, fully local chatbot as an alternative to using third-party providers.