Hi to All, is there a way to add/implement AI into this forum to help to summarize/synthesize long threads and to have the results in a specific language?
Thank you
Firefox already has built-in language translation capability (model downloaded and translation performed locally on your computer). It seems as if that’s a pretty solid direction to go in - so I don’t see much need for forum software to be able to cater for that.
The original HTTP specification envisaged some vague kind of idea that you and I can request the same resource, specifying what language we want, and we might get different results. However that is a) privacy fail and b) almost universally not implemented and c) at the time of course it would have been quite impossible to provide any translation on the fly so it could only realistically have been implemented with multiple static translations (so fairly cumbersome).
The idea of summarising (in English, or in whatever language the original posts are in, more generally) is more interesting. Probably best directed at Discourse (the forum software), rather than that each forum does its own implementation. Each forum is still going to have to consider what privacy and security implications might arise.
I don’t want to have a fake news machine build in forums. I will leave any forum that builds in ALA tools.
Discourse does apparently have an AI plug-in that has a “summarize” function, but I don’t think Purism would want to implement (and pay for) it, especially if there are privacy risks.
There are third-party websites that can do something like @veleno wants by just copying and pasting in selected text.
And of course there are translation sites like DeepL.
Firefox doesn’t seem to offer built-in translation for Purism forums, but there are several Firefox extensions that might be able to do it.
The issue is more that ALA still creates a lot statistical non-sense. Even Wikipedia stopped using it to translate articles, not just because of wrong translations, but also because it sometimes adds whole sentences that were never in the source article.
On internet the texts we write is public available for everyone. So privacy is no real reason here. But giving tools as easy as one click to use advertises these tools to all people and tell them “it works pretty well”, which it does not. And also think about the ethical aspects - there is no single free software ALA available.
Firefox has indeed a translation build in. If you want to use it on desktop, here is a desktop file that makes it nice to use:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Translator
Exec=firefox-esr --private-window "about:translations"
Icon=firefox-esr
If you use plain Firefox, remove -esr, if you use LibreWolf, replace firefox-esr with librewolf etc. If you want to save two specific languages, chose both languages in Firefox on that translation page and replace about:translations (keep " sign).
It opens a private window where you can copy paste text to ALA-translate it locally on your PC. It still can create failures, but it is an easy to use private ALA translator. The private window is used to not spam the browser chronic with translations.
Thank you @amarok and @Ick I found ai_summarize firefox extension that’s exactly what I wanted! Synthesis was the most important (translation is easy to do and anyway I understand english
)
Really thank you for your suggestions ![]()
If I had to take a guess … the problem is in how the web page signals what (natural) language it is.
If a web page commences <html lang=“xx” …> (where xx is not your language) then Firefox will swing into action and offer to translate. And there would be other standard ways for a web page to signal what language it is written in.
However this gets more complicated with web pages that are generated from underlying data and the outer layers of the page may well be in English while some text on the page may be in a language other than English. And more complicated still with Discourse sitting in the middle of the picture.
To be honest, I don’t even know how or whether it is possible within Discourse for a forum user to signal what language a post is written in.