GSoC Project Proposal: AI-Powered Assistant & Intelligent Troubleshooting

[psbuilds]

Hi Vorta Team and @m3nu hope you are doing well ,

I’m proposing the integration of an AI-powered assistant layer into Vorta. While Vorta is excellent at making BorgBackup accessible, users still occasionally struggle with technical Borg errors or finding specific archives in complex backup sets.

Integrating an AI assistant could transform Vorta from a "GUI for a CLI" into a proactive, intelligent backup manager.

1. The Core Vision

The goal is to provide two high-impact features:

Intelligent Troubleshooting:
A context-aware assistant that interprets Borg error logs (e.g., repository locks, SSH handshake failures, or segment violations) and offers actionable solutions(something like gemini in google colab is what I had in mind).

Management Chatbot:
A natural language interface to trigger actions like starting a backup, checking schedules, or searching for archives semantically.

2. Proposed Implementation

(This is based on a quick run through of the codebase so please do feel to correct me if I'm wrong)
Here is how we could approach this:

UI Integration:
Assistant Tab: A new tab in the MainWindow leveraging the modular structure of src/vorta/views/.
Contextual Buttons: Adding an "Explain Error" button to the exception_dialog.py or the log viewer.

Logic Layer:
A new AICommander controller to interface with the VortaApp instance, allowing it to read state and emit signals (e.g., app.create_backup_action).

Privacy & Backend:
Preference for Local LLMs: To respect Vorta's focus on privacy, we can prioritize local inference (e.g., via llama-cpp-python) for users with capable hardware, with optional API-based providers (OpenAI/Anthropic/Groq) for others.

Scope & Philosophy

This assistant would be entirely opt-in, non-blocking, and designed as an assistive layer, not a replacement for existing workflows, As I do know that vorta does not follow an AI-first approach but instead focuses on simplicity and reliability.
The goal is to enhance discoverability and troubleshooting while keeping Vorta’s core behavior deterministic, transparent, and privacy-first.

3. Benefits

• Lowering the Barrier to Entry: Makes Borg's power accessible to non-technical users.
• Faster Troubleshooting: Reduces the need to search forums/documentation for common Borg errors.
• Power User Insights: Quickly query complex stats (e.g., "How much space did I save across the last 10 backups?").

I would love to hear your feedback on this and if this would be something the team is looking forward to as a Potential GSoC 26 idea. If you do find it useful it would be extremely helpful if you could guide me on further steps I should take to take this up as a proposal.If at all the team has something else in mind for this I would love to hear that as well

Looking Forward to a response
Thank you:)