Google Chrome Goes AI

gm legends. It’s Sunday funday.

In this edition: 

• A rundown of agentic AI browsers 
• Our review of a new AI assistant that’s actually helpful
• How one founder got in to YC after 11 rejections
• The most popular new products this week 

Get the carafe, grab a seat, and go on—read up, legend.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

Who wants to meet people, am I right? Let’s just wear Friend necklaces, chat with Elon’s AI companions, and call it good. But it is occasionally necessary to network. What if there was something like a dating app for it? (Wait for it…) There is! This app, which hit #1 on the Product Hunt charts this week last year, matches “like-minded professionals” for 1-on-1 conversations “without the shallow connections, small talk and professional bullshit."

It’s not enough to have a web browser these days. You need a browser on cocaine—or, at least, the middle two letters: AI.

To that end, Google announced that Gemini in Chrome is going straight into every US user’s browser, no membership required. The agent will be able to grocery shop, make appointments, and grab you a dinner reservation. Google says it’ll also integrate with its other products, like YouTube and Maps. (Maybe Gemini can figure out how to organize Google Drive while it’s at it.)

So, where does this leave you in terms of agentic AI browser options?

• OpenAI released its web-browsing ChatGPT Agent in July
• Perplexity came out with Comet in August
• Firefox allows for multiple chatbots, and its most recent update includes Microsoft Copilot (which also integrates with Microsoft Edge)
• Opera released its “fully agentic” Neon browser in March
• Atlassian-owned Dia is in beta
• Safari is adding agents via the Apple Intelligence system
• and Internet Explorer is—just kidding.

By Farhan Hossain, founder of Blue

I almost didn’t apply again. 

I’ve spent my career making physical products. I worked on the Apple Vision Pro, I invented a robotic basketball trainer for Hoopfit, and I created analog tools at Noble Crafters. But every time I applied to YC, I heard back “no.”

Eleven YC rejections felt like enough. Besides, I had recently started a job at Amazon, where I liked the people and the work. And I had already learned a lot about businesses by starting them (and failing many times). My guiding principle is to live a life worth living. I had that, YC or no.

So when I filed application #12 for Blue, a voice assistant that can use any app on your iPhone, I had already let go of getting in because I didn’t think YC would accept me. We filed mere hours before the deadline. And then I kind of forgot about the application. I was building regardless.

No, this isn’t about Facebook trying to make “pokes” a thing again. Rather, there’s a brand new AI assistant on the market, called Poke, and we think it’s worth, ahem, poking you to let you know about it. 

We know, we know. In the time it’s taken you to read this sentence, eight more AI assistants have already been released, and some are about as helpful as a receptionist who doesn’t answer phones. But our man in San Fran says Poke’s “proactive automations and integrations” help it stand out where other AI assistants stand pat.