The Ask AI panel in Publish by Zaweba, with your own AI

AI is entirely optional here. Publish by Zaweba works exactly the same whether or not you ever touch it, and nothing to do with AI is built in. If you'd like help drafting or polishing text, the AI menu and the Ask AI panel (Ctrl+J) connect to an AI account you already have, or to a model running on your own PC.

That approach is called bring your own AI. Publish doesn't come with a service, doesn't need a Zaweba account, and doesn't send anything anywhere unless you ask it to.

What you can connect

The list is broad. Online services include Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Azure OpenAI, Mistral, Grok and DeepSeek, among others. If you'd rather keep everything on your own computer, Publish can use models running locally through Ollama, LM Studio or llama.cpp. And if you don't want to connect anything at all, there's a copy and paste route: Publish prepares the request, you paste it into a chat website you already use, and paste the answer back.

With no account set up, the AI actions are simply greyed out. Nothing nags, and the rest of the app carries on as normal.

Privacy and control

Nothing is sent until you ask. When you do use an AI action, the panel's Context sent shows exactly what goes to the model, so you can see whether it's the selected text, the text box or the page, rather than guessing. That's worth a glance the first few times, particularly with anything personal such as names and addresses in a mail merge.

Keys for online services are stored encrypted for your Windows account, so another person signing in to the same PC with their own account can't use them. Choosing a local model through Ollama, LM Studio or llama.cpp keeps everything on your machine.

What the AI is for

The AI tools in Publish are about words and pictures on the page. You can ask it to write copy for a text box from a few words, rewrite selected text to be shorter, punchier, more formal or friendlier, proofread in UK English, translate, suggest a headline, fill every empty text box on a page from a short description, describe pictures for alt text, and generate a picture for an empty frame. Each of those has its own article; the panel is the place they all start.

Every AI change is a single undo step. If a rewrite doesn't suit the page, undo puts the original back in one go, and you can try again or carry on by hand.

Using it well

Treat the AI as a quick first draft or a second pair of eyes, not the final word. It can't know your club's history or the exact price of today's special, so read what comes back and correct the facts. Keep requests short and specific. A request such as a friendly two-line welcome for a village fete flyer gets a better answer than a vague one.

Pick a model that suits the job. A capable online model may give the most polished writing; a local model keeps everything private and works offline once it's set up. Some actions, such as describing pictures, need a model that can see images, so check the one you choose supports that.

The design choice behind all this is simple. Publish by Zaweba stays a free, offline page layout app with no account, and AI is there only for people who want it, on their own terms, with their own account.