Nicheloom

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OpenDocBot

bring your own model to Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Details

External ID
49729683
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
OpenDocBot
Website domain
opendocbot.com
Launched
Sept. 16, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
5
Upvotes percentile
0.12998405103668262
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 20, 2026, 5:44 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 20, 2026, 5:44 p.m.

Description

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

Enrichment

Theme
developer tools for AI agents
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Agent / copilot
Audience
Prosumer
AI stance
AI-native
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
byom ai assistant for microsoft office apps
Manually corrected
False

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 — 99 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #89 of 100 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 309 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.