How do I open HARPA AI?

After installing the Chrome extension and pinning it to your toolbar, click the icon or press Alt+A (Ctrl+A on Mac) to bring up the side panel.

Can I use my own API key?

Yes, all plans support bringing your own key. This is a more cost-effective approach if you want to control expenses or already have existing OpenAI or Anthropic accounts.

How do I set up price monitoring?

Switch to the AUTOMATE tab in the panel to create a monitor, specify the page and conditions to track (such as price changes or the appearance of specific text), and set your check frequency to receive notifications when changes occur.

What is a Megatoken, and how many will I use in a month?

One Megatoken equals roughly 1 million input tokens, which is about 750,000 English words on more economical models. Actual consumption depends on the length of the articles you summarize and the model you select, so we recommend starting with the lowest plan for a month to check your actual usage.

HARPA AI Guide: Turn Chrome into an Assistant That Summarizes and Tracks Prices Automatically

HARPA AI is the ultimate AI Swiss Army knife for your browser. This guide shows you how to press Alt+A to bring up the panel, use the "/" command to summarize web pages and YouTube videos, create custom commands, set up price monitoring for e-commerce operations, and honestly reviews token pricing and extension privacy risks.

A friend of mine who works in cross-border e-commerce used to have a daily routine that looked like this: open the browser in the morning, click through twenty-some product pages one by one to check for price drops, and copy the data into Excel. It took an hour, and usually, nothing had changed.

Things like this are meant for machines.

What is HARPA AI?

HARPA AI is a Chrome extension that overlays AI directly onto the web page you are currently viewing. It’s not just another chatbot tab; it’s built to "work right on the current page"—summarize this article, answer questions about this page, organize its content into a table, or watch it for changes.

It integrates with multiple cloud models and also supports bringing your own API keys.

What Can It Do for You?

Summarize web pages, PDFs, and YouTube videos without copying, pasting, or switching tabs
Ask questions based on the content of the current page (page-aware mode)
Create reusable custom commands, such as "organize the product specs on this page into a table"
Monitor web pages for changes and price shifts, sending alerts when something moves
Run specific commands on a schedule
Turn web pages into data sources via webhooks and Make.com

How to Use It: Five Steps

Step 1: Install and Pin

Go to the Chrome Web Store to install HARPA AI. Once installed, make sure to pin the icon to your toolbar—this is where most people get stuck. If it isn't pinned, you won't find the entry point.

Step 2: Remember `Alt+A`

Press Alt+A (or ^+A, which is Control+A on Mac) to bring up the side panel. This shortcut is worth committing to muscle memory because its primary use case is "I'm looking at this page and suddenly want to ask a question."

Step 3: Use "/" to Run Commands

Type / in the input box to bring up the built-in command list. A few frequently used ones include:

/article: Summarizes the current article
/rewrite: Rewrites selected text
On video pages, you can summarize YouTube content directly

To make it read and understand the entire page, remember to switch to the AI tab and turn on page-aware mode; otherwise, it will only answer based on the single sentence you typed.

Step 4: Build Your Own Custom Commands

This is where HARPA AI pulls ahead of ordinary AI extensions. Custom commands support parameter interpolation, where {{page}} is replaced with the text of the current page. For example, here is a use case for e-commerce operations:

Organize the product information in {{page}} into a table with the following columns:
Product Name | Specs | Price | Stock Status | Shipping Method
Only list information explicitly stated on the page. If it is not mentioned, write "Not specified"—do not guess.

Save it as a command, and from then on, whenever you are on any product page, just press Alt+A and call up this command. Make sure to include the phrase "If it is not mentioned, write 'Not specified'—do not guess," otherwise the model will make up specs that look plausible.

Step 5: Set Up Price and Content Monitoring

Switch to the AUTOMATE tab to create a monitor: specify the page to track, what to watch for (price figures, the appearance or disappearance of specific text), how often to check, and how to notify you when changes occur.

The three most useful scenarios in practice:

Competitor price drop alerts (for e-commerce)
Official website announcement page update alerts (for tracking policies or redesigns)
Restock alerts for out-of-stock items

Advanced Tips

Bring your own API keys to control costs. If you already have an OpenAI or Anthropic account, using your own key is more transparent than buying token packages—you can see exactly how much you've spent in the provider's dashboard.

Package repetitive tasks into a command library. My personal approach is to stop every time I find myself "manually organizing the exact same thing again" and write it into a custom command. Three months from now, you'll have a set of tools tailored exclusively to your workflow. For inspiration, check out our Prompt Template Library.

Don't set the monitoring frequency too high. Checking every five minutes won't help you find out any sooner; it will just burn through your credit quota faster and potentially get you blocked by the target website. For most scenarios, once an hour or once a day is plenty.

Pair with automation tools for follow-up actions. Via webhooks connected to n8n or Make.com, you can automatically chain "price drop detected" to "write to spreadsheet and send a LINE notification."

Important Considerations

Permissions are something to think about seriously. For a browser extension to read page content, it means it can see your data on those sites. If you use the same browser to log into company backends, online banking, and client systems, this risk is real.

My advice is to create a separate browser profile dedicated to running extensions of this type, keeping your work and daily browsing separate. Spending thirty seconds to switch profiles eliminates an entire category of risk.

Megatoken pricing isn't friendly to non-technical backgrounds. It's hard to estimate how many tokens a long article will consume. Practical advice: buy the lowest tier plan, run it for a full month, look at your actual consumption before deciding whether to upgrade, and don't jump into a lifetime plan right away.

Website redesigns will break your automation. Monitoring and scraping rely on page structures, and when the other site redesigns, they often break. Treat it as a "small utility that occasionally needs maintenance," not a stable data pipeline.

Chinese summary quality depends on the model you choose. For the same long Chinese article, the difference in summaries produced by different models is quite noticeable. Try a few out before settling on one.

TheAI Academy Review

There are already plenty of browser-based AI assistants out there, but what sets HARPA apart is that it also tackles "automation"—everyone can summarize a page, but not many can periodically check whether a page has changed for you.

Review: If you just want one-click summaries, this tool is too heavy for you; but if you spend every day manually repeating the same web-based task, it's worth spending an afternoon setting up.

Specific advice for readers: Start with one concrete repetitive task. E-commerce folks can set up price monitors for three competitors; researchers can set up update monitors for a few key websites. Scale up only after running it for a week and seeing real value. Trying to automate every workflow all at once usually results in giving up halfway through setup.

If you want to compare other options, take a look at Monica and Sider on our site; if what you actually need is "answers with citations" rather than page actions, Perplexity will be a better fit. You can also visit our Task Guides to see which scenarios already have ready-made solutions.

Sources

(This article is compiled based on public information and official instructions. Features and pricing are subject to the latest official announcements.)