I have other AI tools I am using which are really good but Merlin has been a really solid improvement as I hound the web for exploration, work and studies. Just having it right there as an extension helps so much. I can distill information much more quickly. The app responsiveness and ease of use got me using it a lot, which still could be improved. My review is only based direct chat use through Merlin (I use in-depth search a lot) - I have not tried and do not really need the other features related to social plugins and other things. Expensive for me, but I loved it enough to upgrade to tier 3.
Some points to note for Melin -
- minor glitches in the app I face at times.
- It would be great if we could improve in-depth search and specify parameters like the timeline , region, domains etc.
- Search improvement and UX for Chat history - Will there be support for FTS within the chat history ? - If not I would like an option to may be export all chats to a local database or even better that the extension itself keeps updating the chat history onto a local folder that I can search on.
- Despite some things being credit hungry like in-depth search it looks like there is a word limit you (Merlin) have imposed on the API, which you mentioned a direct LLM api would solve if I were to use through Merlin - could you provide the option of using more credits to utilize full token ability of the LLMs through Merlin?

In the end nearly all of the applications are wrappers (with prompt engineering) around Open AI/Anthropic/other GPT apis - it's a tough competition, and you need to keep have keep up an edge in terms of the user experience.