Disappointed by Nextcloud Assistant / Context Agent: what is it actually supposed to be able to do?

ℹ️ Support
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Hi everyone,

I have been trying to set up a serious local AI assistant with Nextcloud AIO, Ollama, and Context Agent, and I’m honestly quite disappointed by what the current AI toolset can actually do.

My setup:

Nextcloud AIO
Nextcloud 33.0.3
Assistant 3.4.1
AppAPI 33.0.0
Context Agent 2.6.0
Context Chat Backend 5.3.0
OpenAI integration 4.4.0
Ollama + Open-WebUI
NVIDIA Quadro P6000, 16 GB VRAM
Tested models: gemma4:e4b and qwen3:14b-q4_K_M

After quite a lot of debugging, I found and worked around one real problem: oc_appconfig_ex.configvalue was varchar(255), but Context Agent writes a tool_status JSON longer than 255 characters. This caused the config write to fail, and Context Agent crashed because tool_status came back as None.

Workaround I used:

ALTER TABLE oc_appconfig_ex ALTER COLUMN configvalue TYPE TEXT;

After that, the agent started working better and could list my calendars. So the basic tool plumbing is alive.

But the actual usefulness is where I’m struggling.

For example, one of the simplest things I expect from a personal assistant is:

What's in my calendars for next week?

But Context Agent apparently cannot list calendar events for a date range. It can list calendars, schedule an event, and find free time, but not tell me what events I already have next week.

Another example:

Find my WIZZ tickets or boarding passes.

Even with files/search/mail enabled, the assistant is very inconsistent. Sometimes it refuses and says it cannot access my files or emails. Sometimes it calls the search tool. Sometimes it chooses the wrong tool entirely. With qwen3:14b-q4_K_M, I asked it to list my calendars, and it returned my mail account instead.

Mail also seems very limited. “Mail enabled” does not seem to mean “search my inbox for a keyword and summarize the relevant messages.” It seems closer to listing accounts/folders/messages, but not doing the kind of email search people would naturally expect from an assistant.

So my question is: what is Nextcloud Assistant / Context Agent actually intended to be at this stage?

Is it meant to be a true personal assistant over my Nextcloud data, or is it currently more of a demo layer exposing a few narrow tools?

Some missing things that feel essential:

List calendar events in a date range
Search mail by keyword/date/sender
Read/summarize selected mail messages
Reliably search files by name/content/type
Inject current date/time into the agent context
Better tool-routing reliability
Clearer UI/docs about what each enabled tool can actually do
A built-in diagnostic page showing which tools are registered and callable

I understand local models vary in quality, but several of these issues are not model intelligence problems. If no tool exists to list calendar events next week, no model can answer that properly.

I really want this stack to work. I specifically added a 16 GB GPU to my server for local AI with Nextcloud. But right now the experience feels far more limited than the product naming suggests.

Is there a roadmap for making Context Agent genuinely useful for common personal-assistant tasks like calendar summaries, travel planning from email, and finding documents across files/mail/calendar? Or is the expected path to add custom MCP tools for everything beyond the current narrow toolset?

2

One could argue that clicking on the list or month view of the calendar is faster and easier than asking an AI assistant. :wink:

That seems like a more useful use of AI. However, the inconsistent answers are something I generally experience with LLMs. They are not at all deterministic. You can ask those models the same question multiple times and get a different answer every time.

Yeah, that might be part of the problem. There’s certainly room for improvement. You could open issues or feature requests on GitHub for specific things you think should be added or improved.

Well marketing and reality. :wink: