Proton introduces privacy-focused writing assistant Scribe

Proton has announced Scribe, a smart and privacy-first writing assistant that’s built into Proton Mail and helps you with composing and improving your drafts.

According to Proton, over 50,000 businesses use its services to protect their communication because of its advanced end-to-end encryption and other security features.

In addition to security, Proton focuses its attention to productivity and privacy. That’s why the Switzerland-based company introduces Scribe.

Scribe is a new feature in Proton Mail that helps users to send professional and polished emails. All you have to do is write down what you would like to say, press the Pencil icon and Scribe will create a draft.

The Shorten and Proofread options will help you get rid of typos and grammatical errors. Do you need to send a formal message to a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or other high-placed employee? You can easily adjust the tone of your email by using the Formalize option.

If you’re not happy with the result Scribe delivers, then you can refine and edit your message.

Composing and editing emails with AI assistants can be risky due to the way artificial intelligence could use company sensitive data to train an AI tool, or share customer data. Scribe is designed to be a secure and privacy-focused alternative: it doesn’t read your inbox to train.

“We have developed our own internal AI models for improving the answer quality and response times of customer support, while preserving privacy by not sending data to third parties like OpenAI. This work has been developed by an independent internal team, which has now incorporated these learnings on privacy-first AI into Proton Scribe,” Proton says in a blog post.

Scribe is open source, meaning that independent security experts and privacy auditors can study its source code and suggest changes to improve the writing assistant. In addition, Scribe runs locally to make sure no private or confidential data leaves your device. Another option is to run Scribe on Proton’s no-log servers.

“With Scribe, you are always in control of your data. You choose who on your team gets access to Proton Scribe, you can always review and revise Scribe outputs before sending any email, and you can keep it all local on your device. With Scribe, our goal is to make it possible for you to have both privacy and productivity,” says Eamonn Maguire, head of the machine learning team at Proton.

Scribe is a free tool for both Visionary and Lifetime subscribers. Entrepreneurs can use it if they subscribe to one of Proton’s business plans.