Jumping in this thread real quick to let you know that Mozilla's Innovation Studio has kicked off a discussion here on Connect about AI tools, chatbots, and more:
I could imagine this feature being implemented in several years, when consumer devices include AI accelerator chips, and language models are optimized for personal devices, and operating systems begin to support standard API calls for common AI functions... but it seems impractical to deploy a dedicated language model with Thunderbird at this time, due to hardware requirements. If you want to use a cloud-based model today, that represents a privacy risk and should only be deployed in TB as an extension with proper warnings.
There is a huge backlog of bugs in TB, and trying to support all of the available language models seems like a waste of developer resources: there are too many competitors in the text-summarization market already, and we dont want to play favorites (unless they sponsor bug bounties.) 😉
Most e-mails are short and dont need summarizing, so this is a rather specialized application. We dont need to add AI to everything simply because we can: Just my opinion -- but I think most people would probably rather have more "total makeover" themes (and a GUI theme editor).