A Privacy-Respecting, Modular, Vendor-Neutral Natural-Language Interface for Operating Systems
This paper presents OS-NLI, a privacy-respecting and modular natural-language interface for operating-system tasks. Unlike vendor-bound assistants, OS-NLI separates intent interpretation from command execution through an architecture comprising a web interface, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer, an API, an encrypted datastore, and a local execution worker. The LLM is treated as an untrusted suggestion engine: only pre-approved command templates with validated parameters may be queued, and execution requires explicit user confirmation. Sensitive data are protected with TLS in transit and AES-GCM at rest, while the threat model explicitly excludes hosts that are fully compromised at runtime. A prototype was implemented across Windows 11 and Fedora Linux. Evaluation on 60 natural-language queries shows strong task performance for application and utility identification, median answer latency of 1.4 s, and median post-confirmation command-execution latency of 285 ms. Preliminary malicious-input checks indicate that non-allowlisted outputs are rejected before execution. The current prototype still relies on vendor-hosted components for the UI host and LLM, so it is not yet end-to-end auditable; however, the architecture isolates these dependencies and provides a practical migration path to self-hosted deployment. These results support the feasibility of a safer, auditable design for naturallanguage OS interaction.