A Quick Look at Merlin AI Assistant
An AI Chrome extension with text and image generation
One of the problems with buying lifetime deals at AppSumo is that AI startups often go out of business. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a great product at an insanely cheap price. For AppSumo Select products, if the company goes out of business within a year, you’ll get a full refund. Otherwise, you gambled and lost.
Last year, I bought an AI website product, Webullar, which is now going out of business due to the impact of the Gaza war. With a refund provided, I had a choice of many great apps to get on AppSumo. Did I really need another generative AI tool? No, but Merlin, an AI assistant, enticed me with a Chrome extension that offered the ability to generate not just text but images quickly.
(I also got an automation tool, ZeroWork, which I haven’t used yet but will review soon.)
I didn’t really need Merlin. But my Poe subscription recently expired and I was deciding whether to renew it or not. I love Poe, but money is tight at the moment.
I also have Voila, one of the best deals I ever got on AppSumo. Voila is a generative AI tool that is primarily a Chrome extension but now it includes a desktop app as well. Voila is one tool I use constantly. I snagged unlimited credits and so I use it all the time for research, article writing, product descriptions, and more. It works very well and has custom prompts available. I love it.
Merlin is like Voila, only it has more options. Voila only does text. Merlin has image creation built-in. Here’s an image generated from one of their prompt suggestions: “Dystopian city in Mars”:
Not bad for a first go.
Mainly, it was Merlin’s image generation ability that sold me. I have numerous websites and blogs I manage, and I’m constantly using AI to generate royalty-free images as illustrations. Having the ability to do so quickly via a Chrome extension / sidebar is a productivity tool for me. Otherwise, I need to open up a new tab, login to an image generation tool, and then copy that image over. With Merlin, I was able to generate the image in the same tab, right-click to “copy image” and then paste it here. Easy peasy.
Merlin also seems to have a number of other bells and whistles that Voila does not have. If you want to create an article, it will save it into an online editor for you, for example.
Merlin also integrates with Google Chrome and inserts a button so you can use AI to generate email drafts. You can even set up personas for them. Nice!
Merlin also offers more AI models than Voila, including GPT 3.5, 4, and 4o, three versions of Claude, and Gemini. Voila offers GPT 3.5, 4, and 4o. It also offers Mistral Large and the open source Mixtral, with “less content moderation.”
While my lifetime license for Merlin does not offer unlimited credits like Voila, at 12,000/month (at Tier 2) it’s hopefully more than enough, especially because I can still use Voila as my everyday text generation workhorse.
AppSumo’s lifetime deal for Merlin won’t last forever, so snag it now if you are interested. Otherwise, the monthly charge for Merlin unlimited is $29/month as of this writing. This is a bit pricy but it is discounted if you purchase a year in advance. Voila has two monthly premium levels, $8/month for 3,000 credits and $16/month for unlimited, but remember, it’s text only, no image generation.
If you are looking for a middle range between the two, the uncensored Gab AI service offers both text and image generation but does not have a Chrome extension yet.
PS This article includes affiliate links.