How To Respond To Gmail Emails With AI For Free?

Four days ago I’ve written an article about the first release of AI Responder. The Chrome extension that lets you answer any message, tweet, review or e-mail with the help of AI. Today I’d like to walk you through the installation process.

How To Install AI Responder?

First, you have to use Chrome browser. If you don’t use Chrome browser, you have to open it to follow this instructions. After opening the Chrome browser on your laptop, navigate to the AI Responder extension page in Chrome Web Store. The link is provided above.

You’ll see AI Responder page, there will be a logo, name of the extension, and on the right you’ll see the “Add to Chrome” button:

Click it. Before the extension is installed, Chrome will ask you if you accept permissions:

AI Responder needs the access to pages you visit and the ability to change them. The reason for the reading permission is to actually read the message, e-mail you’d like to answer to. When you select a message, the extension have to access it. That is why the read permission is needed.

The modification permission is needed to show a AI Responder button on the page. So after you select a message, or review, or anything, there’ll be a button that lets you answer the message or review with the AI. To accomplish it, the button has to be added to page you browse. That is the reason for the modification permission.

Accept the permissions by clicking “Add extension”. When doing it, you’ll see a popup informing you that AI Responder is installed:

It has a nice icon in the address bar. However, after a second or two the popup and icon will disappear. What you want to do is click the extension icon:

And pin the extension to the address bar. That way it will be accessible from the address bar for easier access.

This is how the address bar will look like, notice the AI Responder icon:

It’s the astronaut icon. Now, click it:

As you can see the design is very human. There’s a place to paste the ChatGPT API key, a save button, info about your trial period and model used.

Below you’ll find also some useful information. For example my e-mail address, actually I’ve noticed it’s bad, so I’ll have to update that (it’s contact (at) tomasz-smykowski.com.

Also you’ll find the instruction, terms of service and privacy policy.

To get the ChatGPT API key you have to navigate to the OpenAI website:

And create an account. You can do it with your e-mail, with Google account, Microsoft account or Apple account as the time of writing. After creating the account and logging in, you have to go to this page: OpenAI Api Keys. It is the page where you can generate an API key.

Click the “Create new secret key” button:

Type anything as the name, for example “AI Responder”, and click “Create secret key”:

You’ll see a popup with your newly generated API key and a “Copy” button:

I‘ve hidden my API key from the input field, but you’ll see random characters there. Just copy it clicking the “Copy” button.

Now, click the AI Responder icon in the address bar, right click the input field, and choose Paste, or CTRL+V:

Click the “Save” button to save the changes.

Now AI Responder is ready to go.

What’s important, OpenAI gives you $5 to play around with their API, so you can use it for a quite a while for free. The AI Responder is also free for 30 days.

To try AI Responder visit any page. If you’ve had it opened when installing AI Responder, it’s great to refresh it just in case with the refresh button:

How To Use AI Responder?

I’ll show you how it works on the example of Gmail. I’ve opened Gmail in my browser, and checked for new messages.

Surprisingly I got an e-mail from a colleague:

Let’s see what is Jake up to:

Well, I’m quite busy writing a new report, but want to be polite and answer swiftly, so I’ll use AI Responder to assist me.

What I do, is I select the message:

As you can see, in the upper right corner there’s a AI Responder button waiting. When hovered, it becomes active and you can click it:

After clicking it, you’ll see the following message:

The “response in clipboard” means that the selected message was sent to OpenAPI API and the answer is now stored in your clipboard.

Now I want to answer to Jake. What I do is click the standard Gmail “Reply” button:

Right click the reply field and choose “Paste” or use CTRL+V shortcut:

As a result the AI generated answer appears in the answer field:

I can send it right away with the standard Gmail “Send” button.

But I’ll add something, because the next Dodgers match is in a week, and I want us to go there:

The e-mail is ready and I can send it.

Now, since AI Responder is installed, you can use with every Gmail email you want to reply to.

Moreover, you can use it on Slack, on Google Reviews, Shopify Reviews, Twitter (X), Microsoft Teams in your browser and literally everywhere else. You just select a text you want to answer and hit the “Respond” button.

The extension doesn’t contain any tracking code and is very light, so you can enjoy AI to respond to messages, slacks, tweets, e-mails and everything else.

Enjoy your free trial and share your feedback!

If you’d like to read more articles from me follow me here on Medium. I’m writing about programming, open source and tools for programmers. Also, about productivity tools like AI Responder!