Key findings
- Proton Mail expands Scribe, its AI-powered text editor, to more languages.
- Scribe prompts are processed on Proton’s servers.
- Scribe is now available free to Proton Duo and Proton Family subscribers.
Proton Mail is one of the best options for a privacy-focused email service as it encrypts all your emails, ensuring utmost protection. To ensure it remains competitive with Gmail’s AI-powered features like Help Me Write and Smart Compose, Proton Mail introduced Scribe, an on-device AI-powered text editor, in July 2024. However, this feature was only available as part of Proton Mail’s business-focused plans, ignoring regular paid subscribers. Proton is now making changes, expanding Scribe’s availability to all paid plans while introducing some improvements.
When Scribe was launched, it could only compose, optimize, and proofread emails written in English. That’s changing now, as Proton expands support to eight more languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Based on user feedback, Proton promises to add more languages to Scribe in the future.
Support for the new languages lets you use Scribe within Proton Mail to compose or reply to emails in another language with a prompt. There’s a catch, though: unlike English, Proton’s servers process the prompts for the additional languages. This means that Scribe processing for non-English languages doesn’t happen locally on your device. But given Proton’s commitment to privacy, this shouldn’t be a cause for concern.
Scribe access expands to more Proton Mail subscribers
Modified from sources: Proton / Gmail
In addition to additional languages, Proton is opening Scribe to more of its subscribers. Starting today, AI-powered email writing in Proton Mail is available to Proton Duo and Proton Family subscribers at no additional cost. Proton Mail Plus and Unlimited subscribers can try Scribe for 14 days. After that, they must upgrade to the Family or Duo plan to continue using it.
Proton has always put privacy first in all its services, and Scribe is no exception. Unlike Gmail’s Help Me Write and similar AI-powered writing services, the AI-powered writing tool operates on the device, ensuring that your data cannot be used to train the LLM models or collect data. Proton also confirms that it does not log, store, or share your prompts to Scribe with third parties.
The downside is that Proton’s AI-powered writing tool requires a hefty 4GB download initially. It also requires a PC with at least 8GB of RAM. Scribe in Proton Mail is limited to the web and desktop; you can’t use it on Android or iPhone.
