Issue #562 (Voilà Review, CSS/HTML, Media, Mobile)04/25/24
The following is a paid product review for Voilà, an AI assistant for the browser that enables you to improve your writing, coding, brainstorming, and research all in one place.
The AI and ChatGPT app space is certainly growing by the day and there are a lot of good options I've been able to feature in this newsletter. One that I'm introducing today is called Voilà.
Voilà is a personal AI assistant that can help you streamline daily tasks associated with writing, research, email, coding, and more. Voilà is available as a browser extension for all Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc.), Firefox, and Safari. Voilà is also installable on mobile by adding it to your home screen on iOS or Android.
Some of the basic features of Voilà are:
- Use ChatGPT-3.5 or ChatGPT-4 on any website
- Access to a predefined library of expert prompts
- Besides English, available in 50+ languages
- Ability to create custom prompts for your own use cases
Downloading and Installing Voilà
To get started with Voilà in the browser, navigate to their website and click the "Try Voilà" or "Get Started" button. You'll be prompted to create an account and/or sign-in, after which you can install the extension for your browser. You can also go directly to the download page without creating an account.
Downloading the Voilà extension for different browsers
Once the extension is installed, you can access Voilà in one of three ways:
- Clicking the icon in your pinned or unpinned extensions
- Using a custom keyboard shortcut
- Via the right-click (context menu) on any web page
Once it's open, you'll instantly see ways you can ask questions, interact with the current page, use one of the prebuilt prompts, and more.
After installing and opening Voila
Customizing Voilà
It's best to ensure your browser has added a keyboard shortcut for accessing Voilà. To see if your browser has one, click the Preferences icon (cog wheel) in the bottom right area of the Voilà window.
Here you'll see a number of settings you can customize including light/dark modes, output language, some options on how Voilà behaves, and of course the customizable keyboard shortcut to access it quickly from any web page.
Customizing Voilà's preferences
Now that you have a basic overview of what Voilà is all about, let's dive into some of the ways you can use it in your day-to-day work.
Improving Your Writing with Voilà
Firstly, if you're using a web-based writing app, you can use Voilà via the browser context menu to improve anything you've written. Select some text then right-click and choose one of the available options in the Voilà menu.
Using Voilà to improve your writing in the browser
The menu includes options to improve the grammar, change the length, summarize, simplify, and more. You can also send the selected text to the Voilà app itself to allow you to interact with it using one of the built-in prompts.
Using Voilà on Gmail and YouTube
Voilà also gives superpowers to your email-related tasks by adding a small icon in your Gmail compose window, making it easy to generate message replies and customize the replies to suit your needs.
The Voilà icon added to Gmail's compose window
In addition to those common everyday tasks, you can also quickly summarize a YouTube video by opening Voilà on any YouTube video page. Select the "Summarize YouTube Video" option that automatically appears at the top of the list of options when you're viewing a YouTube video.
Custom Actions in Voilà
One of the more powerful features of Voilà is the ability to create your own library of Custom Actions. To create a Custom Action, open Voilà and choose "My Actions" then select the "Create New Action" button.
Creating a new Action in Voilà
This brings you to a settings page in your browser. Select the blue "Create new Action" button to open the window that lets you customize your action. From this page you can also edit any existing Custom Actions.
In the "Create new Action" window, you can name the Action, describe the prompt you want to use, categorize it, choose the conversation style (balanced, creative, or precise), etc.
Customizing an Action in Voilà
Using Variables in Custom Prompts
You'll notice a few advanced features associated with creating Custom Actions that will come in handy when editing these according to your own needs. First, when you click inside the "Prompt" text field, you'll see instructions for entering your prompt.
The prompt instructions explain that you can use two types of variables:
- Custom variables with square brackets (i.e. template tags)
- Built-in system variables using curly braces
The square bracket variables work as placeholders so when you trigger the specified Action, all you have to provide is the missing variables and Voilà will do the rest. An example is shown in the screenshot below where my prompt requires two bits of info when I initiate it.
Using variables in a prompt in Voilà
Similarly, the variables in curly braces are predefined in Voilà. These are essentially system variables. There are currently three available:
- {PAGE} for the current page’s content
- {DATE} for the current date
- {CLIPBOARD} for the clipboard contents
You can easily see how powerful it is to be able to use these system-wide values in your custom prompts.
You'll notice that the Create Action window includes a button called "Add custom instructions". This allows you to expand on your basic prompt instructions and create your own custom AI assistants. You can add any requirements you want here such as tone, brevity, types of explanations, and so on. This would be a great way to create your own custom coding assistant, an example of which is found on the linked docs page above.
In conclusion, Voilà has lots to fiddle around with out-of-the-box in their library of prompts and AI assistants that cover everything from marketing to coding to research. And the UI is easy to get accustomed to as it's similar to many of the 'drawer' or 'command' menus that exist in many apps today.
Voilà includes a limited free plan that allows up to 250 requests, so you can easily try out its features with no commitment. After that, you have the option of two reasonably priced plans to continue using it.
So check out Voilà today and see if this powerful and easy-to-use browser extension can help streamline your productivity.
Now on to this week's tools!
