AI actions

An AI action runs a prompt of your own over whatever text you have selected, in any application, and shows the answer. The prompts are ordinary menu entries, so they sit beside your snippets and searches, are edited in the same Library Editor, and can have keyboard shortcuts attached.

The starter set covers the everyday ones: ask a question in any language, translate (Dutch to English, English to Dutch, custom pair), localise, explain, proofread, rephrase with five options, make it sound better, summarise, expand, and summarise a GitHub issue. Every one of them is a few lines you can change.

Writing one

In the Library Editor, add an entry of kind AI and give it a prompt:

{
  "kind": "ai",
  "label": "Translate (Dutch to English)",
  "prompt": "Give ten possible translations, technical to general.",
  "effort": "high"
}

The selection is appended to the prompt. Optional per-entry overrides: system (a system prompt), provider, model, effort (low, medium, high, xhigh, max – Anthropic only) and maxtokens. Anything not set comes from the [AI] section of settings.ini.

Providers

The default provider and model are set under [AI] in settings.ini; keys live in the shared key file and are entered through Settings → AI providers & keys… – see Installation. Anthropic and OpenAI are supported as AI-action providers; the request and response shapes for each live in one place in the code, so a further provider is one entry rather than a rewrite.

Requests do not block. The rest of Sidekick keeps working while an answer is on its way.

Sharing prompts with the Trados plugin

Supervertaler for Trados keeps its prompts in a library with QuickLauncher shortcuts. Sidekick’s AI actions are the same idea outside the CAT tool, and today they are a separate list. Letting the two share one prompt library, so a prompt written for the Trados editor is also on the Sidekick menu, is planned.