Calibre Now Integrated With AI
An Anonymous Coward writes:
You can ask questions about any book in your library and run AI models locally via LM Studio:
A few months ago, Calibre introduced its first AI feature, letting users highlight text and ask questions directly in the eBook reader. It was a good start but relied entirely on cloud-based AI providers.
Now, Calibre 8.16.2 has arrived with some pretty handy upgrades to those capabilities, adding support for running AI models completely offline on-device. There are plenty of other new refinements too!
Thanks to LM Studio integration, Calibre can tap into AI models running locally on your machine instead of needing to rely on user data-hungry cloud services. If you didn't know, LM Studio is a desktop application that lets you run large language models on your own hardware without much technical know-how.
Beyond that, this release introduces two additional AI-powered features. The first one is a book discussion feature where Calibre can answer questions about any book in your library through a simple right-click menu, and the second is a reading recommendation system that suggests similar books based on your selection.
Both of these work locally or via any configured cloud providers.
[...] I tested out two of the new AI-powered features, and I must say, they work really well. First up was the book discussion feature, which can be accessed from the "View" menu either by right-clicking and selecting "Discuss selected book(s) with AI" or the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Alt + A.
I told it to summarize Dracula, a book by Bram Stoker, and the output it provided was pretty good; I got a quick rundown of the happenings in the book without needing to fully read it. This could be handy if you have forgotten how a book ended or when you are deciding whether to commit to reading something.
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