Ever wished you could talk in to a text field rather than type? Ubuntu 26.10 hears you – quite literally. Canonical’s VP of Engineer Jon Seager, at the Ubuntu Summit, said the distro will soon lets users “press a button and talk into any field that you could previously type in”. A small, on-device AI language parsing model like Whisper will power the feature. It’s part of a wider push to integrate AI features in Ubuntu this year, with founder Mark Shuttleworth aiming to position Ubuntu as the ‘OS for agentic AI’. AI features in Ubuntu will be shipped as […]
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You’ll have to sift through fewer vibe-coded apps on Flathub in future, as the store has announced a policy change on software made using AI tools. Flathub, the de-facto place to find and install Flatpak applications, is banning the use of “AI” coded applications and automated submissions going forward. It’s not a blanket ban – mature projects with AI code are allowed A change to the store’s policy note says “applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowed”. A carve out will allow “mature, well-maintained projects” to include AI generated code and use AI tools […]
AI features are coming to Ubuntu in 2026, though Canonical has made clear that the distro is not becoming an AI product. In a community post, Jon Seager, VP of engineering at Canonical, says the company is “ramping up its use of AI tools in a focused and principled manner” this year, with a bias toward local inference and open-weight models whose licence terms match Canonical’s values. AI features in Ubuntu will take one of two forms. Implicit features improve existing capabilities using on-device AI models, for things like text-to-speech and speech-to-text to bolster accessibility. Ubuntu will become a context-aware […]
Your mouth can (probably) say things quicker than your hands can type them, yet voice typing is rarely used as a primary input method on desktop, despite most of us thinking nothing of using it on mobile. That’s despite speech-to-text being available on desktop OSes for decades, natively and through dedicated apps. It never caught on because it was inaccurate and slow and typically hidden away as an assistive feature. (And because a lot of what you do at a keyboard is navigation and that is less efficient to speak, unless ‘arrow down, arrow down, arrow down’ is some trendy […]
Thunderbolt is a new open source AI client from the Mozilla-owned MZLA Technologies aimed at enterprises who want to run self-hosted chatbots on their own infrastructure. MZLA Technologies is the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that develops and maintains the Thunderbird email client. It says Thunderbolt was created with the support of a grant from Mozilla. Terrible name aside (Intel owns a trademark for ‘Thunderbolt’ which Apple markets heavily, so it’s not the best choice for clarity), the LLM that MZLA Technologies asked to write their press release says that Thunderbolt is a “sovereign AI client” for organisations who want their own AI infrastructure. […]
Several Intel NPU fixes land in the latest update to Resources, which Ubuntu is making the default system monitor in 26.04 LTS. Resources is a GTK4/libadwaita tool that shows more system usage, processes and hardware details than GNOME System Monitor, which it is replacing as Ubuntu’s default in the new LTS. The Resources v1.10 release at the start of February added (among other changes) support for AMD Neural Processing Units (NPUs). The app has supported usage for Intel NPUs since its v1.7.x release in late 2024. The v1.10.2 changelog resolves what is described as “implausible” usage values in Intel NPU […]
The Firefox 148 update sees its stable release today, bringing with it a much-request ‘AI kill switch’ to easily disable all AI-powered features within the browser. Mozilla has said future updates to the browser will not re-enable AI features once disabled. Given that Mozilla now measures its success by how much revenue it makes from AI features in its products, Firefox included, that’s a reassuring stance. To disable AI features in Firefox go to Settings > AI Controls. Slide the ‘Block AI Enhancements’ toggle to turn off ChatGPT and other chatbots in the sidebar, AI link previews, the (supposedly) smart […]
Firefox 148 adds a new "AI Controls" panel to granularly disable or entirely block AI features with a kill-switch. Opt out of AI when the update drops in February.
Canonical will package AMD ROCm directly in the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS repos, making it much easier to get GPU-accelerated workloads running on the distro.
ONLYOFFICE 9.2 is out. The free, open-source office suite now includes a built-in AI Agent for document generation, content analysis, and more. Feature details inside.
Mozilla says its AI 'rewiring' is a moral crusade to save the web from Big Tech. Our snarky explainer asks if the real goal is to goose revenue instead.
Canonical announce beta DeepSeek and Qwen AI inference snaps for Ubuntu, both optimised to deliver better performance on Intel and ARM Ampere systems. 
Google Chrome is to become an AI browser powered by Gemini and agentic abilities to 'fundamentally change the nature of browsing', the search giant has announced.
Faster AI-powered face recognition and an AI powered image rotation plugin are among new features in an update to open source photo manager digiKam.
Mozilla Fakespot Deep Fake Detector shuts down on June 26 2025. It says it's to save money, but is it a sign Mozilla is moving away from its original ideals?
Real-time AI subtitling is in the works for VLC, the phenomenally popular open-source media player. VideoLAN, the non-profit in charge of VLC development, demoed automatic subtitle generation in VLC during CES 2025 —where not using AI made you stand out this year— and shared a clip of the feature in action at their CES booth on X last week. No cloud service or internet connection is needed for VLC to auto-generate subtitles with AI. The feature works offline to provide real-time translation support for more 100+ languages; is able to translate/display two languages at once; and can ‘save’ translations to […]
Removing backgrounds from video in Kdenlive, the free, open-source video editor for Linux, macOS and Windows, is about to get a whole lot easier. Developers are adding a “modern background removal tool” that uses machine learning to create object masks so you can ‘cut out’ an object, person, or item in a video clip. Real-time background removal features are common in video conferencing/chat apps like Slack. They allow a user to replace their actual backdrop (like a messy kitchen) with an alternative image or, sometimes, even a video clip. And image editing tools like GIMP and Photoshop have long been […]
Orbit by Mozilla is a new AI-powered assistant for the Firefox web browser that makes summarising web content while you browse as easy as clicking a button. After all, why read an article to understand what it says when you can read an AI summary rephrasing the article instead? ;) Mozilla’s AI assistant Orbit is currently a beta product and available to install from the Firefox add-ons site where the extension, which works on Firefox for Windows, macOS, and Linux, is pitched thus: Orbit empowers you to stay informed and efficient by delivering the information you need in a condensed […]