OpenDocBot
bring your own model to Word, Excel and PowerPoint
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I got tired of the lock-in and black-box nature of AI inside MS Office. One vendor decides which models you can use, where your document data goes, and what the agent is actually allowed to do. And when it fails, you can't see the code or send a PR to add a feature you may need.Many people don't have that choice: they're forced to use these tools (MS Office) at work. For coding agents we already have open interfaces like OpenCode where you can bring your own key, swap providers and models, run local, inspect everything, etc. I thought "agentic Office" needs the same.So I built OpenDocBot: an agent that runs inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Bring your own provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Ollama, or your own endpoint / custom gateway). It's client-side, so document data goes straight to the provider you configure, and the source is public so you can always audit the code and self-host it.I added a few things I thought would be useful: human-in-the-loop approval before any action is applied; file uploads (e.g. building a slide deck from a PDF) with local OCR for scanned documents, and tunable model behavior.Caveat: it's early, and Microsoft Marketplace distribution isn't live yet, so today you have to sideload it. I know that's real friction, I'm fighting daily with the MS Support team to achieve MS Partner Center account validation. I wrote some scripts that automate the sideloading process, and recorded short videos to make it easier.If you use Office heavily, I'd love your feedback.Repo: https://github.com/opendocbot/opendocbotSite + docs: https://opendocbot.com
HN · launched Sep 16, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 87%) · 0 views
Niche: desktop ai assistants · 274 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▼ -20% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Agent / copilot
- B2B
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 274 launches in desktop ai assistants →
Could you build this?
Yes OpenDocBot is an Office JavaScript add-in that connects Office.js APIs to standard LLM endpoints client-side using user-supplied API keys.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 245 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #228 of 246 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 317 days after the earliest competitor.
- DocMason · hn · 2026-04-04 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- AgentRun · hn · 2026-11-12 · 137 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Brud Code · ph · 2026-10-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- DocBento · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Open Docy · ph · 2026-11-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- One Person Company · ph · 2026-09-30 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- dropto.run · ph · 2026-10-21 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- myCowork · ph · 2026-11-03 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
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