I bought this to add to my arsenal of AI tools to help me with research. I had super high hopes and it seemed quite promising. The roadmap looked good and the pace of development initially was high.

At first, it looks like it delivers on the promise of citing sources.

When I actually tried to use Afforai's output, however, it fell short. I thought it was because I was not prompting it the way Afforai specifically needs to be prompted. So I tested, tweaked, and refined. But the issues only seem to get worse.

I've come across countless issues (a few of which I'll describe), and it mostly collects dust now where other AppSumo tools like Voila and Triplo are my daily drivers.

It's quite a bit faster for me to query PubMed myself and manually research.

Con #1: You cannot export citations.
When you copy Afforai's output, the source hyperlink doesn't copy! I tried to create a tampermonkey script to fix this, but the website's styling makes it incredibly tricky.

So basically I must manually open each source in my browser and copy it to clipboard and then paste it into Notion. Huge pain. But that's not all.

Con #2: The inline highlight showing the fact's source is very buggy and often inaccurate.
For example, I know sleep research well. I saw a surprising fact, and looked into the source. Afforai didn't understand that the source it quoted was actually *debunking* the "fact" that it displayed. So totally inaccurate. Sometimes it's unreadable. Sometimes it just points to another citation in research.

Either way, I cannot trust the output much more than other AI tools.

Con #3: The AI is hard to query & doesn't respect requests.
When I ask it to modify the output to be "longer" or to "emphasize X", or to "find me more stats/facts/quotes", it doesn't. Just repeats the same exact thing.

Con #4: Querying documents isn't as robust as hoped.
I don't use this feature much, but when I do, it doesn't do a great job scanning through documents and actually synthesizing information. I've gotten a number of inaccurate responses. It works just okay for this.

There's also no Chrome Extension, no ability to query particular websites, and no mobile/desktop app.

Supposedly, the Feb 1st update will bring the (very) long-awaited feature of a Google Scholar integration. But if history is any indicator, I imagine this rollout won't work as expected.

Overall, I was very excited and optimistic about the launch of this app. Even recommended it to a friend based on my early usage.

Afforai has a TON of potential. Sadly, it seems that other AI tools will overtake it before it matures into a fully usable product.