Feature Question (AI)

My personal use case would be for sorting invoices. I already detect most of them by name or source, but I'd love if Hazel could extract the invoice number and rename the file to that while moving it. With all of the different formats, I think AI would be the most reliable way to understand each individual document and extract the right information. I still need to do this manually every month.

Any more news on what this might look like post-WWDC? If seems like the on device models showed a lot of improvements. Any thoughts on this and the future of Hazel?

It's being investigated.

Long-time, very appreciative user. I'll also weigh in that I DO NOT want AI doing my sorting/naming etc. If it becomes an added feature, please ensure it can be turned off completely.

However, AI help with rule definition sounds great.

One case could be when docs (bank statements) that used to match a rule no longer do, or only sometimes do. It would be helpful if AI could suggest a change to the rule instead of me having to hunt down the slight variation in the documents. A little method to say "hey, this doc should match that rule, suggest the update I should make to the rule.)

Also as a rule-builder: to give Hazel a doc (or group of similar docs) and have it make me a (suggested, editable) rule that solves what this document is and offers me a bunch of info fields it finds in it. Fields like invoice number, dates, companies, addresses, account numbers... stuff like that which Hazel can do now if configured correctly. I prefer that to letting AI look at each document every time and try to figure it out.

I have plenty of cases I'd like to extract more info but don't because it's too hard to nail down the definition. For example some medical documents have my birthday and visit date and future appointment dates, not always in the same order. So finding the right date is prohibitively complex for me to put that much time into, but I imagine AI could figure it out pretty darn quick. Or get pretty darn close.

Strongly believe AI can be good help, but not trusting it to do specific stuff reliably, especially unsupervised.

My personal opinion would be that there is a great difference between using a cloud based AI, like ChatGPT or Claude, and the use of local models for this purpose. An example of a current app that seems to have used local models well is Cotypist, something that I have integrated into my daily workflow. I would not use a cloud based AI with Hazel due to privacy reasons, but would certainly be open to using the vast options of local models than can now run on Mac hardware.

I realize that AI brings up some strong opinions in both directions, and so the option of turning off the AI features, or making them opt in, might work...

Thanks for maintaining an app that does things for me each and every day.