Best Free and Paid-For AI Extensions for Google Chrome

Chrome extensions are a quick, easy way to improve your internet experience. How do AI tools fit into the mix?

The best uses of AI keep things simple, which makes Chrome extensions a natural fit for the technology.

After all, generative AI tools have plenty of flaws. They might hallucinate nonsense, and the biggest ones are built off of allegedly stolen copyrighted material. No one’s recommending them for nuclear power plant operation or brain surgery, either. However, Chrome extensions are low stakes: They’re designed to function as small tools that occasionally deliver on a simple, time-saving task.

Best of all, most of these extensions won’t cost you a cent, and all of them offer a functional free option. That’s something that you can’t say about ChatGPT Plus’s suite of apps, which require a $20-per-month paywall to access at all.

Here, we’ve collected the top AI-based plugins, so you can judge their worth for yourself.

Grammarly

Ask enough AI extension lovers which one they use the most, and you’ll likely see Grammerly come up as one of the most frequent answers. That’s because most people don’t have perfect spelling and grammar skills, but they know that they’re taken more seriously when people think they do.

The Grammerly extension in action

More specifically, this extension flags a wide range of writing issues, with features that cover:

  • Spelling
  • Grammar
  • Punctuation
  • Clarity
  • A generative AI bot that will spin up entire drafts, replies, and idea brainstorms.

A lot of extensions seem cool at first but are then forgotten about within a week. Good grammar, on the other hand, never goes out of style. That’s probably why Grammarly has 30 million daily active users

Grammarly has a free plan as well as a Pro plan available for $12 per month and an Enterprise plan for businesses. While the free plan is perfectly serviceable, Grammarly will nudge you to upgrade by identifying areas where your copy could be grammatically improved, and then blocking your access to its suggestions.

You can check out Grammarly here.

Scribbl

Summarizing things is one of the most common uses of AI, and Scribbl is one of the best at handling all summaries relating to Google Meet. With it, you can handle all the note-taking tasks you might need to cover for your job.

The Scribbl extension in action

Those tasks include:

  • Video recording
  • Auto-transcribing
  • Generating meeting summary notes
  • Searching across all meetings to find specific past meetings

You can even transcribe the meeting in another language (in real time, so anyone can follow along), and the platform can handle over 40 different languages. Check out the free tool on the Chrome store.

Perplexity

If you’re ready to dive into a full AI helper bot, Perplexity is among the most popular picks. It’s a ChatGPT-and-Google-powered assistant that will create automatic summaries in answer to any questions you ask it.

The Perplexity extension in action

According to the bot developer, the benefits include:

  • Instant Page Summaries: Make sense of any article or webpage at a glance.
  • Quick Queries: Ask any question directly from your toolbar—no need to jump between tabs.
  • Contextual Understanding: Get answers relevant to your current page or even specific to your current domain.
  • Shareable Insights: Easily share your discoveries with a clickable link.
  • Dynamic Conversations: Click to ask follow-up questions for deeper understanding.

This tool comes with its own website as well, for those who can’t handle the extension’s lack of a dark mode. Everyone else can head over to the Chrome store to try this one out.

Glasp

Here’s an app that proves summarizations are the height of modern AI’s abilities: It aims to help users become better readers by curating their reading experience for them. You’ll start by highlighting your favorite passages from any website or PDF file that you’re paging through.

The Glasp extension in action

Glasp then collects and organizes all these snippets, quotes, and thoughts on your personalized homepage, giving you a collection that you can tag, search, link and share. To sum up, this extension helps you:

  • Collect quotes
  • Organize by theme or content
  • Share your thoughts with others

You won’t be getting any full summaries with this service, but that’s not a bad thing: AI summaries don’t actually help you become better at the process of reading itself, since they do it for you. With Glasp, you’ll actually be flexing your brain. Try it here.

NaturalReader

If you need a text-to-speech app, this one will work. It offers “realistic AI voices” that can handle any online text that you care to throw at it, from emails and Google Docs to Kindle ebooks, PDFs, and any webpage you run across.

The NaturalReader extension in action

Additional features include:

  • Different listening speeds
  • Multiple voices
  • Save to your phone
  • Download as an MP3
  • Light and dark mode

Plus, the tool can identify and skip any elements that you won’t want to read, from page headers and footers to citations, and image captions. This one does come with a catch, though: It’s only 20 minutes a day, with a paid plan needed to unlock more time. Check it out here.

Copyleaks

One big downside of AI that any English teacher can rant about for hours: Students everywhere are using it to cheat on their tests and essays. You can fight AI with AI by downloading this extension, which monitors written content to determine whether it was written by a human or an AI chatbot.

The Copyleaks extension in action

This extension says it can:

  • Detect ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other LLMs
  • Detect AI content in 30 languages
  • Detects AI-generated source code
  • See past human-added paraphrasing 

This tool claims a very impressive accuracy rate of over 99%, with just a 0.2% false positive rate, which makes it among the most accurate examples of this type of tool. Still, we’d be remiss not to highlight that these tools aren’t mind readers: Even Copyleaks can never determine for sure that writing is AI-generated.

Over the past few years, it has been named in a host of publications, including CNET, VentureBeat, Vanity Fair, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

Check it out here.

Todoist

This AI-powered to-do list functions as an internet-connected organizer for your life. If you’re familiar with a to-do list, you already know how this extension works. Within your Chrome browser, you can add tasks, shuffle them around to prioritize your day, and check them off easily without disrupting your flow.

The ToDoist extension in action

Free features include:

  • Add websites as tasks themselves – reading lists, wishlists, etc.
  • Task organization tools
  • Integrate with over 90 other tools, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack, and others
  • Task reminders
  • 1-week activity history
  • Recurring tasks

This tool also comes with paid plans that add additional features for $4 a month or $8 a month, but the core to-do list functionality is free. Check it out here.

StayFocusd

Sometimes the best addition to your online life is the removal of a lot of it: Stayfocusd will block any websites that are taking up your time, freeing you from the (admittedly pretty tough) task of managing your own attention span.

The StayFocusd extension in action

The service offers some granularity, too. In addition to blocking entire websites, you’ll be able to single out specific subdomains, paths, or pages, as well as specific content on a page, like videos or images. Other features include:

  • Statistics covering your daily website usage history
  • Active days and hours, allowing you to pick the specific times during which you can’t access a site.
  • “The Nuclear Option” — a tool that removes the option to cancel your block on a website
  • A feature that requires you to complete a challenging task before it lets you adjust any settings, giving you more time to reverse course.
  • Data privacy protection

This one isn’t for everyone, but if you need it, you really need it. See if you’re among those who need it by checking it out on Chrome over here.

Data Scraper

If you’re willing to get a tiny bit more technical than the average joe, this is a fascinating extension to experiment with: It allows you to automatically scrape datasets from HTML web pages and convert that data into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

The Data Scraper extension in action

Who needs it? Recruiters or job searchers can analyze job postings, small business owners can manage online reviews, and growth hackers can collect leads or contacts. Features include:

  • Automated crawling of paginated websites
  • Scrape single-page or multi-page pagination and crawl
  • Automatic navigation to the next page
  • Extract emails with RegEx (regular expressions)
  • Download completed pages complete with images
  • International language support with UTF-8
  • Form filling using xls

There’s one catch, though: You’ll only get 500 free page credits per month, and you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan, starting at $19.99 per month, for more. Head over to the Chrome extension for more information on how it all works.

Quizizz AI

Point this tool at any web page, and it can generate a simple, interactive quiz that reproduces the information from that page.

The Quizizz extension in action

It’s aimed at teachers, giving them a quick tool to grill their students with after giving them that website as their assigned reading. However, it works just as well for anyone trying to learn something online: You’ll be able to quiz yourself on anything, helping you lock in the information.

This extension can:

  • Create quizzes
    • Multiple choice or reading comprehension
  • Create assignments
  • Work with Google Slides or Google Docs just as well as with webpages

Plus, if you only want to create a quiz from a specific passage of text, you can highlight it and create a targeted quiz. Hop over to the Chrome store now to try out this tool.

Top Tips for Using AI Chrome Extensions

Don’t install all these extensions willy-nilly! Think about which ones you’ll really use frequently. You don’t need three different summarization tools when one of them will do the trick.

Whatever you do, don’t download an extension you’ve never heard of if it isn’t highly rated or used by a lot of people. Any unknown and little-used extension is a potential security risk — and the same is true for some of the more popular ones as well, sadly.

Finally, understand the limitations that you’ll be faced with: AI tools aren’t magic, and they can’t compete with a human being, as much as every AI startup out there wishes they could.

Don’t trust any of these AI extensions to have the final word on anything they transcribe, sum up, or highlight: Doublecheck to see how your own opinion might differ. Ultimately, these are all just tools.

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Written by:
Adam is a writer at Tech.co and has worked as a tech writer, blogger and copy editor for more than a decade. He was a Forbes Contributor on the publishing industry, for which he was named a Digital Book World 2018 award finalist. His work has appeared in publications including Popular Mechanics and IDG Connect, and his art history book on 1970s sci-fi, 'Worlds Beyond Time,' was a 2024 Locus Awards finalist. When not working on his next art collection, he's tracking the latest news on VPNs, POS systems, and the future of tech.
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