  Ab initio approaches to the nuclear many-body problem have seen their reach
considerably extended over the past decade. However, collective excitations
have been scarcely addressed so far due to the prohibitive cost of solving the
corresponding equations of motion. Here, a numerically efficient method to
compute electromagnetic response functions at zero- and finite-temperature in
superfluid and deformed nuclei from an ab initio standpoint is presented and
applied to $^{16}$O, $^{28}$Si, $^{46}$Ti and $^{56}$Fe. This work opens the
path to systematic ab initio calculations of nuclear responses to electroweak
probes across a significant portion of the nuclear chart.
