Key Takeaways
- Proton Mail expands Scribe, its AI-powered text composer, to more languages.
- Scribe’s prompts are processed on Proton’s servers.
- Scribe is now available to Proton Duo and Proton Family subscribers for free.
Proton Mail is among your best options for a privacy-focused email service, as it encrypts all your emails for the utmost protection. To ensure it remains competitive against Gmail’s AI-powered features like Help Me Write and Smart Compose, Proton Mail introduced Scribe in July 2024, an on-device AI-powered assistive text composer. However, this feature was only available as a part of Proton Mail’s Business-focused plans, ignoring regular paid subscribers. Proton is making amends now, expanding Scribe’s availability to all its paid plans while also introducing some improvements.
When Scribe launched, it could only compose, tweak, and proofread emails written in English. That’s changing now, with Proton expanding support to eight additional languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Based on user feedback, Proton promises to add support for more languages to Scribe in the future.
With support for the new languages, you can use Scribe within Proton Mail to compose or reply to emails in another language with a prompt. But there’s a catch: unlike English, Proton’s servers process the prompts for the additional languages. This means Scribe processing for non-English languages does not happen locally on your device. However, this should not be a reason for concern, given Proton’s commitment to privacy.
Scribe access expands to more Proton Mail subscribers
Modified from sources: Proton / Gmail
Apart from additional languages, Proton is opening Scribe to more of its subscribers. Starting today, AI-assisted email writing in Proton Mail will be available to Proton Duo and Proton Family subscribers at no additional cost. Proton Mail Plus and Unlimited subscribers can take a 14-day trial of Scribe. After this, they must upgrade to the Family or Duo plan to continue using it.
Proton has always taken a privacy-first approach with all its services, and Scribe is no different. Unlike Gmail’s Help Me Write and similar AI-assisted writing services, the AI-assisted writing tool works on-device, ensuring your data cannot be used to train the LLM models or harvest data. Proton also confirms that it will not log, save, or share your prompts to Scribe with any entity.
The downside is that Proton’s AI-assisted writing tool initially requires a hefty 4GB download. It also requires a PC with at least 8GB of RAM. Scribe in Proton Mail is limited to the web and desktop; you cannot use it on Android or iPhone.
