Aspire AI Office

Office add-in install

This is the dedicated Office add-in host. Use this page for Word and PowerPoint installation. The Aspire dashboard URL is not the add-in host.

1. Click Download Word Manifest.
2. In Word, open Home or Insert -> Add-ins -> My Add-ins -> Upload My Add-in.
3. Select the downloaded XML (manifest) file. Office installs the manifest, not a DLL.
4. Open the add-in once, then use Enable Auto-Open inside the pane for that document.

If desktop Word cannot open the add-in pane in a local development environment, ask an administrator to enable the Office WebView local loopback exemption, then restart Word.

Alternative

Manual / developer sideload (no admin)

For desktop Word when you cannot use Upload My Add-in or a shared-folder catalog. It registers the manifest under your user account (no admin and no network share) and points the ribbon icons at a directly-served URL so the Aspire logo renders on desktop. Run in a normal (non-administrator) PowerShell:

$base     = "https://ai-app-prod-officeaddin.icyplant-acd85f2c.uaenorth.azurecontainerapps.io"
$dir      = "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AspireAIApp\OfficeAddIn"
$manifest = "$dir\AspireAIApp.Word.xml"

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path $dir | Out-Null
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "$base/office/manifests/word.download" -OutFile $manifest

# Desktop Word does not follow redirects for ribbon icons - point them at the direct host:
(Get-Content $manifest -Raw).Replace("https://ai-app-prod-officeaddin.icyplant-acd85f2c.uaenorth.azurecontainerapps.io/assets/icons/office/", "https://ai-app-prod-webfrontend.icyplant-acd85f2c.uaenorth.azurecontainerapps.io/assets/icons/office/") | Set-Content $manifest -Encoding utf8

$dev = "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\WEF\Developer"
New-Item -Path $dev -Force | Out-Null
New-ItemProperty -Path $dev -Name $manifest -Value $manifest -PropertyType String -Force | Out-Null

# Then fully close and reopen Word, then open Home / Add-ins (or the Aspire AI ribbon button).

To remove it later:

Remove-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\WEF\Developer" -Name "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\AspireAIApp\OfficeAddIn\AspireAIApp.Word.xml" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

For PowerPoint, download that manifest instead and save it as AspireAIApp.PowerPoint.xml. If an old icon stays cached, delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Wef and reopen Word.

Localhost dev only: only browsers resolve *.localhost names, so when this page is served from a *.localhost host the snippet above downloads via curl.exe --resolve automatically (no DNS or admin needed). For the ribbon icon to render in desktop dev, also add the dev hostnames to your hosts file (Office fetches icons through the OS resolver, which does not know *.localhost); and for the pane, trust the dev cert (dotnet dev-certs https --trust) and enable the WebView loopback exemption (CheckNetIsolation LoopbackExempt -a -n="Microsoft.Win32WebViewHost_cw5n1h2txyewy"). A deployed host needs none of this.