Ending soon on AppSumo, Primo offers a built-in AI chat interface that can be used on most desktop apps. Here’s my affiliate link - at $29 for Tier 1 for a lifetime deal, this one is a fairly no-brainer. Tier 1 gives you 2,000 queries per month while an upgrade to Tier 2 ($99) gives you unlimited.
They market Pismo in part as an alternative to Grammarly to improve your writing as well as an easy-to-use online text translator.
I’ve played around a little with Pismo on Windows, and I do find it useful for desktop apps like Microsoft Word that don’t otherwise have an AI interface built-in. (I’m not willing to shell out another $20/month for Copilot integration.) Otherwise, I have more powerful tools that have Chrome extension capabilities.
But with pretty much any desktop app, Pismo will work with your selected text, and you can also access it from a floating widget.
The pros:
Lightweight and doesn’t get in your way too much, except for the default widget placement (see below).
You can create unlimited custom prompts.
You can set keyboard shortcuts for prompts.
Works with Windows and Mac.
The cons:
The widget isn’t floating so much as stuck in the upper right hand corner of your screen (at least in Windows); you can’t move it around but you can turn it off completely.
Text selection seems a little finicky on my machine.
No option to select other language models; the AI appears to be their own tweaked version of GPT 3.5.
There are no options to increase the font size of the app, which is a problem for people like me with vision issues.
Your prompt outputs aren’t saved, which they market as a plus for your privacy, but I’m so used to my other prompt history being saved that I shut the app off once thinking something had copied when I didn’t, and I lost the output. So make sure you copy everything before closing the app.
No Linux app.
Pismo needs to work on a few interface improvements and add more options before this becomes a true AI Swiss Army Knife. But it is promising. The Tier 1 deal is a total steal at $29. 2,000 queries per month works out to 12.5 queries per hour in an 8-hour workday. So this is worth it, though the 2,000 queries could be limiting for power users. Unlimited is always best, if $99 isn’t too far out of the budget.
As always, these are startups in a very competitive environment, so whether the lifetime deal lasts an actual lifetime remains to be seen, but at these prices, Pismo is a decent risk.