Launch HN: Zenfetch (YC W23) – Turn notes/browser history into an AI assistant
How it works: (1) Optionally import your existing saved web browsing through one of our integrations or through a URL CSV import. (2) Click the Zenfetch icon in a tab to save any PDF, YouTube video, note, article, email, forum post, etc. Zenfetch can save almost anything across the internet. (3) Zenfetch indexes the text or transcript and adds that information to your personal knowledge assistant. This is done on your computer so you don’t have to worry about paywalls, logins, etc. (4) Use the dashboard or side panel to search your knowledge or chat with your personal knowledge assistant.
We built Zenfetch to solve our personal problem: we were reading tons of content but using little to none of the information. While searching for solutions, we found that most tools were good at storing information but not at retrieving it. We even found that search functionalities on existing read-later tools got worse the more content we saved.
A few examples of how our users use Zenfetch: “What was that article I read on the new nuclear fusion company?”, “Analyze this strategy based on the Lenny Rachitsky article I read”, “Summarize Karpathys video introducing LLMs”, “Which research papers mentioned the increase in carbon emissions?”, “Compile the different perspectives I’ve read on climate change”, and more.
Zenfetch is free for the first 14 days and then costs $14.99/mo (No credit card needed for the trial).
We’d love for you to try it out and let us know what we can do to improve your experience! While we only work on Chromium-based browsers right now, we’re actively working on browser compatibility and integrations. Let us know which ones to prioritize!
98 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadThere are many other GPTs from outside OpenAI, such that GPT is the contemporary Escalator
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38787892
[2] https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/rem
[1] https://github.com/justshare-io/justshare
1. We're not trying to become your personal knowledge management solution, we want to be the layer on top that helps you retrieve and use the knowledge you've stored.
2. The biggest reason we don't do this locally is we've found hosted models are much more powerful for the knowledge retrieval and synthesis use cases. However. we do hope to move more local over time.
Fast forward to today, I've been using Zenfetch for a few months now. Basically, everything I read, or wish I had the time to read / watch (they support Youtube too) gets saved on my Zenfetch library.
Being able to ask for summaries of stuff you are browsing in real time is great for picking up new knowledge.
Chatting with your entire library with 1,500+ saved articles and drawing correlations between different subjects + never forgetting anything, is next level.
Don't be the 'bookmarking this for later' guy.
As a statistician by training, I appreciate how the traditional inference techniques were helpful way before LLMs became mainstream for these tasks :)
Is that your browser of choice?
Just like IE 6 I refuse to touch it if I can at all prevent it.
(Feel free to join in folks. We can do this, IE was much better entrenched at its worst.)
Hear you on the safari request and we will definitely expedite that release
Also find myself having a pretty severe allergic reaction to websites (Gem is a recent example) roadblocking anything but Chrome (seemingly both because of their web app literally not functioning properly in Safari, and their browser extension being Chrome-only):
a) essentially forcing me to use Chrome for one task, whilst deal with password management in two places, etc., and
b) giving me the nagging worry that the design of the app or extension might contravene some non-technical standard imposed by Apple which Google does not honor…
The process for exporting chromium based extensions to safari is not super straightforward (HN Community please prove me wrong!), though glad to hear it's a priority
If mobile saving is what you're interested in, we can likely get that shipped even faster :)
How do you see this comparing to Pocket, Readwise, and Dewey? I think many Read Later apps will add AI search on top
Then you can click on the zenfetch extension popup to still save a tab :D
I'm definitely going to give it a try. However, for it to become a permanent part of my routine, it would need a Safari browser extension and an iOS app (compatible with both iPhone and iPad) to allow easy sharing and saving of content from within other apps. Stuff that Raindrop supports.
Additionally, is there an API available so that I can manually script or route content from currently unsupported sources?
No API just yet, but if there's an integration you're looking for let us know and we will prioritize that. Thanks!
[1] https://www.rewind.ai/
We simply found that there were things we didn't want in our first brain, let alone in our second brain. That's why we've taken a curated content approach.
Rewind captures everything, while Zenfetch only stores the content you've explicitly saved to signal there is value.
I don't need to be reminded of the accidental clickbait article I've opened :)
I’ve been collecting bookmarks in Evernote and now obsidian for about a decade. I try to add as many tags as I hope will allow me to find an article again later. It’s often many months before I need to find something. My success rate at remembering a term from the title or the right tag is not great. I’ve been pretty impressed with zenfetch’s ability to search and find exactly what I was looking for. And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what it can do when you want it to synthesize answers from many articles for you.
They’re also working on indexing your saved tweets which I’m excited about. It’s a giant pain to try to find liked tweets.
It is an ongoing effort to ensure truly factual answers and this is one of our top priorities :)
Eg. Let’s say I adopt Zenfetch, and start using it as the sole place where I keep bookmarks. Then, something happens such that I want to retrieve that original, principal, bookmark data.
How do I go about retrieving/exporting that?
Our goal is not to become a vendor lock-in play. Instead, Zenfetch is a layer on top of your knowledge base goaled on helping you activate information that you forgot about.
If you're referring to being able to revisit bookmarks: from the dashboard, you can click on any of the articles to see the original article
Let me know if more clarity is needed
Say I mark a page that contains really usable information. For some reason, 2 months later that page goes offline because the domain was not renewed (or whatever). Some time after that happened, I need that information. Will I still be able to see the original content, or not?
Similar thing, I mark a page. The author updates the url with different content 2 months later. Some time after that happened, I need that information. Will I still be able to see the original content, or will I just find the new updated content?
I guess the question is: is a snapshot taken from the actual content at the time I mark it as interesting and can that snapshot be shown, or not?
If you were to chat with the article from the dashboard, it would be preserving the snapshotted content and leverage that information in the final answer (same with using the search functionality).
I did not test it yet, but it looks like something that would be very useful for me. So, I will definitely try it.
I will add that me too, I have some concerns regarding the data being "locked" in your service, but I read in other comments that at some point it will be possible to create an export of some sort. When using this to carefully craft a knowledge base during months, it would be very painful if that is all lost when stopping the service for whatever reason.
As others asked, I would appreciate an Android/iOS app to register new content when reading something on the phone.
Regarding the pricing, it mentions a fixed price per month, but is there any limit on the amount of data that is uploaded (for example when uploading PDFs) ? Is there any limit on the amount of content in the knowledge base?
We are using a fixed price today and have no restriction on storage. This might change in the future if costs scale, though it’s not an immediate priority and we’d be sure to communicate those changes well in advance.
Once you’re onboarded, feel free to message us with the in app support widget. It’s a direct line to the team slack and we tend to respond almost immediately
It might take a couple of minutes. Would recommend checking spam or trying again in a bit
Also any support for importing from pinboard archives?