BLUF

BLUF is an AI-powered web page assistant that's designed to get you to the point faster with answers, summaries and explanations of web pages. It's designed to cut down on time spent reading information you don't need and to get you to the meat of the matter.

BLUF has a few tricks to make it more useful:

• Ask: Use the AI to narrow down what you're looking for.
• Summarize: Get a quick rundown of what's on a page, and you can follow up with more questions.
• Explain: Break down complicated topics and try to reduce dense documents to plain English.

BLUF is available right now as a Chrome extension and a Firefox extension, but other browsers will be supported later. The service counts each prompt or request as a single prompt, whether it's a text prompt or a summarize or explain request. If BLUF can't fulfill a request, that doesn't count as a prompt. You can also highlight parts of a big document to process, because the "words/page" restriction refers only to the number of words in the original document.

BLUF logs usage information, but it doesn't keep a record of prompts or responses. However, in order to fulfill requests, it passes prompts to OpenAI, which keeps data for up to 30 days, according to its data retention policy.

For people trying to get a handle on what's on a website, BLUF is a useful tool that can help you get the information you need with less work. It's an example of how AI can be used to cut down on the drudgery of reading and thinking. Check the BLUF website for details and to try its service.

Published on June 13, 2024