[HN Gopher] Show HN: Zuni (YC S24) - AI Copilot for the Browser
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Show HN: Zuni (YC S24) - AI Copilot for the Browser
Hi HN, I'm Will, and along with my co-founder George, we've built
Zuni (https://zuni.app) - a browser extension that adds contextual
AI capabilities to your browser. It understands what you're reading
and working on, whether that's email, research, or anything else in
your tabs. We started out building a full email client with AI
built in (you might have seen that version showcased in YC's AI
Design Review -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBhSfROq3wU&t=1601s), but learned
that people don't actually want to leave their existing tools -
they just want them to work better. Gmail might be frustrating, but
it has years of features people rely on. So we pivoted to enhance
the tools people already use, rather than replace them entirely.
Some specific things Zuni does today: - Analyzes emails as you
read them in Gmail, identifying action items and suggesting
possible responses - Lets you discuss how to handle tricky emails,
almost like having a thought partner - Maintains context across
your browsing session so you can ask follow-up questions naturally
- Runs locally first for speed and privacy - Doesn't store chats,
emails or anything sensitive in the cloud We're still early and
focusing on getting the core experience right before adding more
integrations. The goal is to make AI actually useful in your daily
work, rather than just another "AI feature" checkbox. Would
genuinely love feedback from the HN community - what would make
this truly useful for your workflow? What are we missing? Happy to
answer any questions about the technical implementation too.
Author : willgtaylor
Score : 14 points
Date : 2025-04-17 15:15 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zuni.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (zuni.app)
| ksvarma wrote:
| Looks good, will try it out. All the best.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Why does this not work? I have the HN homepage open, and open
| Zuni sidebar:
|
| Me: Can you identify which stories in the list are not "tech"
| stories?
|
| Zuni: Please provide me with the list of stories you'd like me to
| review! I need the list to be able to identify which ones are not
| "tech" stories.
|
| Me: The ones on the open hacker news tab
|
| Zuni: I am sorry, I do not have the capability to access external
| websites or specific tabs within them, including the "open hacker
| news tab." Therefore, I cannot identify which stories on that tab
| are not "tech" stories.
|
| Me: You can't see the content in my browser?
|
| Zuni: No, I cannot see the content in your browser. I am a large
| language model running on Google's servers. I don't have access
| to your computer, your browser, or any of your personal data. My
| interactions with you are purely through text.
|
| Me: Which emails in my primary tab seem like they are from cold
| emailers?
|
| Zuni: I am a large language model, also known as a conversational
| AI or chatbot trained to be informative and comprehensive. I am
| trained on a massive amount of text data, and I am able to
| communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide
| range of prompts and questions. For example, I can provide
| summaries of factual topics, create stories, and translate
| languages.
|
| Zuni: I cannot access your email inbox, so I am unable to help
| you with your request. --
|
| If it can't access content in the browser, it is pointless.
| serjester wrote:
| Point of feedback on the landing page - you guys need to a better
| job explaining the killer use case here. Your first video is an
| implementation detail not a selling point. Your second video is
| asking how to establish a C Corp using context from the Stripe
| website. Is anyone actually going to do this over asking the LLM
| directly?
|
| It seems like all the videos fall in this bucket.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Also, you install the plugin, and it doesn't work. You have to
| create an account and login before the input area is
| responsive. Not clear from looking at the UI.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| I have two questions: one business-related and the other
| technology-related.
|
| 1. Aren't you a little worried that Google, with its new Gemini
| offering and focus on integrating AI into Google Workspace, might
| cannibalize this product? Maybe I'm missing something here, but
| I'm curious what you think about that. Also, given that Manifest
| V3 extensions technically work on other browsers and that your
| extension can work on other websites, I'm wondering if there
| might be a better "wedge" you could get into (e.g. Proton Mail on
| Firefox, etc).
|
| 2. Without going through the effort of looking at your extension
| code (which might be minified), I was wondering how you went
| about implementing this extension. I built a fairly complex
| chrome extension last year and I'm not sure if the average
| developer understands just how "non-standard" browser extension
| development is. For example, authentication, complying with MV3,
| handling different tabs, noticing when the current page changes,
| lack of hot module replacement etc. I'm genuinely curious to hear
| anything you might share about your product's development.
|
| Cheers!
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| Deeply underwhelming. Your tagline suggests a general "take the
| wheel" automation. Your website suggests that actually it's just
| a gmail copilot which may or may not be as good as the official
| ones but which requires installing a browser extension instead of
| going via. the approved channels. And there's other specialized
| website apps to come someday maybe.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I use a bunch of AI tools, I pay for Claude and OpenAI, I use
| Claude Code/Aider, and I've been playing with Gemini and Aider
| recently. Spending money on AI/LLMs is not foreign to me at all.
| That said:
|
| The price on this is hilarious. You want me to pay another $20/mo
| for access and a fun new abstraction of "Message Credits". No
| problem, I'll just scroll down to the FAQ to figure out what a
| message credit is... nope, no definition at all.
|
| There is little chance I'm going to pay $20/mo for a wrapper that
| is just 1 step over copy/paste [0] and absolutely no chance I'm
| going to pay for it with limits that aren't even explained.
|
| [0] I'm sure this will be debated, but I'm not seeing anything
| special here.
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