IKI.AI - Plus Exclusive Reviews

When this offer came out, I was like awesome, a LTD for a Perplexity replacement with team support, however that was only based on the writeup. The actual implementation of this tool is unusable.

First, the site takes a while to open with the loading screen. Sure 2-5 second load time doesn't seem like much, but compared to other tools that immediate load and you can ask your question, it actually is a productivity killer and you lose your track of thought making this tool subpar compared. Once it does load, it's fairly responsive.

The extension is buggy.

The actual quality of using documents and collections to search your library seems to only read the first thousand characters of text and completely misses context of anything else. If you ask specific questions about a document, it does not have the awareness of tools like perplexity or notebooklm.

They promised features like teams and other things on their roadmap that were supposed to be addressed months ago and are still "in-development". Their team responsiveness on Discord or other channels is next to nothing, with the same cookie-cutter response and no actual output. I got negativity on discord for giving them feedback and stating that I planned on refunding in 1.5 months if things did not show progression. Well, things have not shown progression and I am counting the days before I refund this pretty useless LTD.

It looks good on paper, but it's implementation is sub-par and returns poor results. You're better off with free or cheap offerings by third parties or even the LLM providers themself. I have tried giving this plenty of chances to at least see it progress to a partially usable product, however it's just nowhere where it should be.

It also seems to be buggy on even keeping track of chat context.
For the longest time, it would not recall anything from previous chats, that has been fixed, but in discord and support they denied anything relating to it. This alone was an irk thing that made me lose initial faith in even using the product.

I think this product was marketed incorrectly and was created to look like a solution, but they didn't realize the actual limitations of LLM context. Save yourself time and try something else.

We wanted to like this and give it a fair shot but after watching the founder's webinar w/ AppSumo and using the app we have the following thoughts:

The performance overall was lacking, especially when it came to logging in and loading the web app. This not only leaves lots to be desired it creates a bit of doubt regarding stability.

The library and collection feature is really nice, especially given the size limits or lack thereof, but we can do this in Merlin (limited) and Socrates.

The web search feature would be cool but we have Perplexity access in Straico, and with their saved chats finding old answers isn't at all a challenge.

The video transcriptions would be worth it if we hadn't grabbed Maekersuite and Alphana.

Given we've tried or have Humata (refunded), Socrates (have), Merlin Projects (have), and Straico (have), it doesn't make much sense given the overlap. Where IKI shines vs. anyone of the above, another does well enough or better. So, we'll be refunding this and putting the funds towards another app, sooner or later.

I was excited to try this software out. I added a video from my YouTube channel and it did a pretty good job at extracting info and summarizing. I then tried a video that wasn't mine and it wouldn't add to my library. I emailed customer support and it took them 2 days to respond. They had a question about my account, which I answered, but I haven't heard back regarding my initial question and it's been another 2 days. If I don't hear back from them this week, I'll be returning the software.

Pros:
1) Beautiful UI/UX Design: I love the fact that it 'does' look like my own digital library. I can name "collection" on the left side bar. Very intuitive and easy to navigate.
2) Video transcription: It can access Youtube, produces transcription, and you can 'chat' with the video.

Cons:
1) Free alternatives: NotebookLM and ChatPDF. In fact, I tried the same exact prompts in NotebookLM (Gemini) - they produced better summary, insights, blog content, and even podcast.

As my purpose is only on 'chatting with documents', NotebookLM is sufficient for me.

I really like the user interface of IKI.AI though. If they integrate with Gemini I might return.

The product has al lot of potential to be a second brain, a vary wide brain, to do (internet) research en writing on things, but is is not an finished product yet. It misses an app, but that is coming and the extension could use some extra possibilities. The Ai is on par with what people can expect and the possibility to choose between LLM's is a good get. I do not know if there is some additional prompting is going on in the backend, but there is a clear understanding of language in reading notes and well given responses.

Like with any Ai it is important to know how to ask the right questions. To me the interface is a bit more for alpha minded people than beta's like me that likes Fabric a that more, but that has lesser Ai possibilities. It works just as good in English to me as it does on Dutch text and responses. It can give good advice on writings of my own to improve writing skills and artikels.