Show HN: AirmailAI, a BYOK LLM chat app with a browser extension backend

airmailai.net

4 points·blake__dev··7 comments

Hi everybody! I recently launched AirmailAI: a fast, secure, and private bring-your-own-keys LLM chat app that uses a browser extension as the backend. FAQ and design/security info is available on the website. Happy to answer any questions!

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Do you envision this taking context from the webpage the user is on, similar to how Chrome's Gemini extension works?

Not particularly, this is more designed to be a separate chat app than a chat-with-the-webpage extension. Also, parsing webpages for LLM ingest is not the easiest thing in the world in my experience. You could dump the whole html but that's a LOT of tokens to be spending if you're using your own API key (vs using a subscription model like with first party extensions).

What is the difference between this Chat application and the others...what does this aim to achieve

Before I started work on it, I looked around at all of the available options, and none of them really fit what I wanted:

- easy to use

- fast

- not a huge desktop app

so I decided to make my own! AirmailAI (if you're not running it locally) is a one-click install from the Chrome Web Store, the TTFT overhead is within 50ms of raw https API requests, and the install size/memory requirements are very reasonable (<2MB on disk, ~60MB RAM while running).

Hmm I see...it's clear now, it would be better if you addedthis moto to the description However great initiative

name some examples. easy to use is opinioned,

Sure. I tried Open WebUI, SillyTavern, AnythingLLM, etc. I wasn't a fan of installing a 500MB desktop app, or having to run a webhost locally, or having to configure a bunch of settings just to chat with the newest LLM.

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