Hello Pierre-Gilles, hello everyone. It’s been a few years now that I’ve been using/testing Gladys. I want to clarify that I am not a Gladys Plus subscriber (as a tenant, I can’t really push its use). I used to launch scenes or view camera snapshots from the discussion page or from Telegram. It was very convenient, it allowed me to know the weather in the morning when I woke up, or to know if a family member had come home, or even to follow the course of Bitcoin by launching a scene. In short, very practical and super effective. But here’s the thing, since the last update, instead of the usual response I have a forced message: « The chat uses Gladys Plus AI and is only available with a Gladys Plus subscription. [Subscribe to Gladys Plus] ». I suspect this is not a bug or a configuration error. My question is, why remove a very practical feature and instead « force » a subscription to continue using a function that was once so simple to access? I understand that you need to find a way to make money, and with free software that’s not easy. It is indicated on the website: « Gladys is self-hosted: your home automation data stays on your machine. No mandatory cloud, no tracking. » By using an AI, this is no longer the case. Gladys is a self-hosted and autonomous solution, using an AI cuts all that principle in my opinion. It can be useful in some cases, but it shouldn’t become an automatism, and, I think, it shouldn’t cut access to historical features in favor of all AI. Am I the only one in this situation? In any case, a big thank you for having had this crazy idea one day, to invent Gladys Assistant.
Hello @ZoLTRoN, and welcome to the Gladys community 
Thank you for using Gladys all these years, and especially for taking the time to write this detailed message. This is exactly the kind of feedback that helps me make better decisions for the project.
The feature to chat with Gladys you mentioned has been around since the early days of v4, long before the arrival of modern LLMs. It was based on a relatively simple system, with only a few predefined commands and very little flexibility in phrasing.
Recently, with the arrival of modern AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, I realized that this interface often gave new users a bad first impression. Used to being able to converse naturally with these tools, they expected to find a similar experience in Gladys. As soon as they deviated from the few planned commands, Gladys would respond that she didn’t understand, giving the impression of a limited, or even “broken” assistant.
I also received a lot of feedback from people discovering Gladys (especially users coming from Home Assistant or content creators testing the product) who found this tab useless or disappointing compared to current standards.
On top of that, there was a technical constraint: this feature required loading and training a local model at startup, which consumed resources and extended Gladys’ launch time.
For all these reasons, I decided to remove it in favor of the AI assistant. Honestly, I felt that this old feature was hardly used anymore. Your feedback shows that I was wrong about that 
Regarding the self-hosted aspect, Gladys’ philosophy hasn’t changed: the entire home automation part continues to work locally and without mandatory cloud. The AI features are an additional service, but they don’t replace Gladys’ autonomous operation.
In your case, I see a solution that might meet your needs: the MCP server (Documentation). It allows you to connect Gladys to an AI client of your choice to control your home and retrieve information exactly as with the built-in AI assistant.
You can use ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, or even a self-hosted solution. For example, I made a video where I used OpenClaw on Telegram, connected to Gladys via MCP. This feature doesn’t require Gladys Plus!
I don’t know if this would fully meet your needs, but if you’re interested, I can help you look at this solution in more detail.
Thank you again for your feedback, and thank you for using Gladys for so long