Update your browser with a ChatGPT sidebar

Microsoft Edge, and only Microsoft Edge, uses artificial intelligence as your browser co-pilot thanks to the built-in Bing sidebar. But nothing prevents you or clever developers from adding a ChatGPT sidebar to any Chrome-based browser – a tool that helps you create summaries, ask research questions, find similar pages and much more.

The ChitChat ChatGPT sidebar extension is one such tool. The extension allows you to access ChatGPT features anytime without leaving the website you are visiting. You don’t have to copy and paste an article into ChatGPT for the AI ​​to summarize it for you: ChitChat summarizes it from the article itself. You can ask for help composing an important email as you write it, or request a number of similar websites to the one you’re browsing. Anything you already use ChatGPT for, ChitChat can always help you with that.

The extension is located in the lower-right corner of your browser for easy access. You can hit too command/control + P to pull it up at any time, and by default it shows a popup bar when you highlight text. (You can disable quick search via Ideas > quick search or turn off the sidebar icon sidebar > sidebar icon.)

Set up ChitChat in your browser

There are three ways to power the ChitChat extension, each with their own pros and cons. You can use ChitChat as-is, which gives you either 30 free queries per day or 3,000 queries for $10 per month.

If you’d rather not deal with query limitations, you can run the extension with your free OpenAI account, although this requires you to have an active ChatGPT window in the background at all times. If you go this route, ChitChat recommends that you pin the ChatGPT window to your browser, but developers say this isn’t the most stable method. You may need to refresh the ChatGPT window if you find that the extension is not working as intended.

The best way to use the extension might be through OpenAI pay-as-you-go plan, which provides reliable and consistent access to the ChatGPT service. Here you pay according to the characters used, which is still quite cheap. Even heavy users won’t see a bill exceeding a few dollars a month.

You can choose your specific method from the Generally section in ChitChat’s Ideas. However, if you decide to use API integration, just make sure to paste your OpenAI key in this section. Next, you can go to the Sidebar section to change the default prompts for each action (you can also add your own custom prompt).

Now that you’re done, click on the ChitChat icon to open the sidebar and select the action from the top dropdown. Here you can ask them to summarize, explain, translate, rewrite and more. Once you’ve selected an action, you’ll see the ChatGPT prompt right below it. The extension does a pretty good job of defining the prompt, but you’re free to edit it.

Here are three great use cases for the ChitChat extension:

• Summary: Press the Summary action, and the content of the entire page will be added to the prompt. (Here I suggest editing the prompt for a longer, more detailed answer.)
• Explain: This is a great way to learn more about a concept or expand on a paragraph. Highlight some text and choose the explain tool. The selected text is added to the prompt. Again, the default prompt is too simple; You can ask them to explain it as if you were 10 years old or as if you were a seasoned intellectual.
• Similar sites: We know ChatGPT isn’t a Google search, but I’ve found it works for specific purposes. For example, when researching software reviews, I can ask ChitChat to find similar sites (reviews) and it does a commendable job. My tests found interesting results that go beyond the scope of Google’s first-page search results.

If you want to do some research without going to the ChatGPT website, switch to the Chat tab from the top. Here you can chat to your heart’s content with ChatGPT using the standard GPT 3.5 Turbo model.

By default, ChitChat does not save your conversations or your results. To do this, you must register with the service. If you don’t want that, you can click Copy Button to quickly copy ChatGPT’s entire response, which you can then add to your favorite notes app.