Improve your productivity with this Chrome extension that enables always-ready AI

It’s been about 18 months now since OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm and since then, many other chatbots have hit the market, including Google Gemini and Inflection’s Pi. On Android you can just hold the home button and have Gemini appear and you will be able to do something similar in iOS 18 with Apple Intelligence. On desktop, however, things aren’t as intuitive, but this guide will show you how they can be.

Most AI chatbots have web app versions that you can access through browser tabs, but this requires you to keep returning to those tabs when you want to use them. Ideally, you should be able to just have a chatbot sitting and waiting on the screen when you need to use it. With a certain Chrome extension you can achieve this configuration.

The first thing you need to do is go to the Chrome Web Store and install the Page to Sidebar extension. Once you tap Add to Chrome, it will download and install and navigate to the Collapsible Extensions menu. At this point I would right-click the extension in the menu and pin it for easier access, as you will need to tap it every time you start your browser if you want AI.

With the page in the pinned sidebar or menu you need to right click on the extension and hit options, you will need to adjust a few settings at this point to get things set up nicely. First, you want to set the website address. Unfortunately ChatGPT doesn’t seem to load with this extension so I entered pi.ai which loads Inflection’s Pi chatbot, this is good because it focuses on empathy and it can read its responses out loud .

If you’re not interested in a chatbot as such, you can opt for you.com, which is more focused on finding answers to your questions on the web – it’s very similar to Perplexity if you’ve ever tried it this (Perplexity also didn’t work for me in the extension). The third option I tried was Google Gemini, just enter gemini.google.com in the field.

Under Mobile/Desktop View, it’s up to you, but I chose Desktop: Default View because the pages are responsive anyway and fit in the smaller side panel. I left the Ads and Scrollbar boxes unchecked, but I checked the box next to the toolbar to make it hidden because I thought it was a bit distracting.

Once you have set your preferences, you can close the tab and left-click on the extension. This will open your browser’s side panel and load your chosen website. If you chose Pi, like I did, you can go to the top right and press the microphone button. Now, every time you type a query, the bot’s response will be written but also read aloud. This is very powerful if you want to continue working in the main part of the browser while waiting for a response.

This setup will obviously be better for people working with a wider screen due to the amount of space the sidebar takes up. That said, I use it on a laptop and it’s fine, if you need more space. , you can simply close the sidebar and reopen it later.

Did you find this guide helpful, let us know in the comments!