What is the purpose of the CKEditor AI bubble button

The CKEditor AI bubble button (version 1.1.0-beta1) appears to serve as an alternative way to access AI-powered features, alongside the automatic contextual bubble that appears when text is highlighted.

Key Observations:

• Automatic Bubble vs. Toolbar Button
• The AI bubble appears automatically when text is selected.
• The toolbar button seems redundant at first glance since the bubble already provides quick AI actions.
• Possible Purposes of the Toolbar Button
• Access AI without text selection – Useful if no text is highlighted but AI features are needed.
• Additional AI functions – May offer extra options not in the contextual bubble.
• Visibility & discoverability – Makes AI features more noticeable in the editor.
• Fallback option – Helps if the automatic bubble fails to trigger.
• Beta Version Behavior
• Since this is a beta feature, the button might be:
• A work-in-progress UI element.
• A placeholder for future expanded AI tools.

The button was introduced in this issue ✨ Make "AI Assistant" functionality available through contextual (baloon) menu Active . Probably something went wrong when merging all the issues together and the bubble menu is displayed when it is not supposed to, this was not the case when it was still in MR. Changing this to "Bug".

@Artem - What is the purpose of the Baloon Menu appearing in the Toolbar? Does it do anything if its there? Could it instead be a setting inside the CKEditor Assistant Toolbar?

It can be a setting in AI CKEditor plugin itself, but to have it completely separated it was decided to use a separate plugin for this, that has its own toolbar item and JS file. This way nothing is changed for existing sites (also the balloon code will not be even loaded), and if the users want balloon menu they just add the corresponding toolbar item.

What is the purpose of the baloon menu CKEditor Toolbar Button itself? Does it do anything?

Toolbar button only enables or disables the plugin, it is not even displayed in the CKEditor toolbar itself, this button is only visible in the "Text and format" admin UI page.

Code looks good, would you prefer the other solution @yautja_cetanu - this would however by default mean that you can't just install the balloon menu, which some people might prefer (unless we fix it).

ah ok! I thought this was what the UI would look like to the end-user.

Could we get a screenshot of what the UI looks like now with this change? Could we get something that explains the difference between "Balloon Menu"

Should it becalled "In-Context Menu" or something? That suggests it is what you get when you right click? Is "Balloon Menu" a commonly understood term?

It seems like there were two issues:

- Reporter felt they didn't understand why these two exist and what the purpose of the second one was.
- There was a bug that made the graphics look off if you had both.

I feel like the second has been fixed but do we think the first has been fixed? (If we could get a screenshot, it would be good to know if this makes sense to sirclickalot)

It was already in sirclickalots screenshot, but I'll add one more that is a little bit zoomed out:

I see the discussion has gone back and forth a bit and there are two threads althoigh I am not clear about the distinction.

To be clear from my perspective as a someone with a bit of experience training content-editors, I think ...

1. The button should need to placed explicitly in the backend Text format configuration for the 'bubble' to popup at all
2. It is not really contextual in the strictest sense because it pops up anyway on a highlight and therefore the original naming as 'bubble' should stand.
3. Getting caught up in the configuration of a 'right-click' (truly contextual) will open a whole can of worms because most users demand a context menu as defined by their own browser and it's whatever other widgets they have installed suxh as Lorem ipsum generators and they won't thank you for overriding.

I hope that is useful.

Sorry I mean can we post screenshots of any changes to the UI. (I think its the other issue though.

Ok happy to go with what you've suggested:

- Can we confirm the bubble only pops up when its placed explicitly in the backend? (If we want it to appear by default I think maybe we could put it as a default on setting in the general toolbar).
- Ok makes sense. Looking online it seems like "Bubble" is not commonly used outside of CKEditor, but this is a CKEditor Admin screen and as you said, contextual suggests other things that this is not.

The fix in the MR makes sure that the contextual (balloon/bubble) menu that appears on text selection is displayed ONLY when the corresponding button is added to the toolbar (though it is not visible in CKEditor toolbar itself, only in admin UI when you configure the toolbar). If the button is not in "active" toolbar items, the menu will not appear on text selection (also when the AI CKEditor features are enabled).

Seems like everyone is in agreement, so this is getting merged. Thanks everyone!