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Lots of Add applications artificial intelligence For their products in the most in-your-face way possible. Companies like Google, Microsoftand dead All of them add colorful buttons and pop-ups to their user interface, inundate their customers with marketing emails, and all loudly implore users to try new AI features.
It was refreshing, in this context, to talk to indie app makers Omni Group About their approach to artificial intelligence. The Seattle-based company manufactures Omni Foxa powerful task management app that has long been loved by reviewers and enthusiasts for its extreme flexibility. If you can imagine how you’d like to manage your tasks, OmniFocus is flexible enough to enable it without it feeling too cluttered. The AI plan matches that: the development team wants to keep the AI private offline, and enable users to set it up however they want.
This means that the average OmniFocus user will not see any pop-ups prompting them to use AI in the app itself. AI is instead being added as a potential tool for anyone who wants to create automations, or anyone who installs an automation created by someone else. A few people have done just that; You can find quite a few such automations here. Here’s how to give them a spin.
OmniFocus works across multiple Apple devices.Courtesy of Omni Group
Setting up AI in OmniFocus
To get started, you’ll need to be running one of Apple’s “26” new operating systems, where macOS, iOS, and iPadOS are all supported. All of these operating systems support one of the less discussed systems New features in macOS 26—Third-party apps can now leverage Foundation, the large language model that powers Apple’s intelligence.
To use these new features, you’ll also need an updated version of OmniFocus, which is currently the only Omni app that supports AI. (These features will come to other Omni apps like OmniPlanner and OmniGraffle eventually, according to company representatives.)
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ScreenshotCourtesy of Omni Group
After that, head to Comprehensive automation guide And click on one of the productivity tools that looks interesting. You’ll see the source code for the automation process, but you can always click the Install Plugin button above the code for the plugin itself. (You may have to enable scripts from external applications before you can install anything.)
One, called Help Me Plan, can break down any task in your inbox into subtasks. I tried this out in an assignment titled “Write about OmniFocus Automation features” and several subtasks were quickly added below, from research to drafting to finalizing. Now, these steps are not exactly How I will continue to write an article, but the idea is to start with your own when you feel stuck.