Iki.ai Review: Your AI-Powered Personal Research Assistant

What Is Iki.ai?

Iki.ai is a new lifetime deal on AppSumo that positions itself as a personal AI-powered research assistant. At its core, it lets you create a digital library where you can save just about anything from around the web — YouTube videos, blog posts, tweets, Figma files, PDFs, and more.

What makes it more than just another bookmarking tool is the AI copilot baked into the platform. Once you've saved content into your library, you can ask the copilot questions about it, get summaries, extract key ideas, and even generate new content based on your saved materials. Think of it as a combination of Pocket's save-for-later functionality with an AI layer that actually helps you do something with all that information.

The tool supports both dark and light mode out of the box, and the interface is clean and simple. It's the kind of app that doesn't overwhelm you with options on first launch, which is a refreshing change from some of the more complex knowledge management tools out there.

Ask Iki: The AI Search Engine

The Ask Iki feature is essentially the tool's search engine, and it works across three different scopes. The first is a straightforward web search — you type a question, and the AI copilot goes out to the internet, gathers information from multiple sources, and presents you with a direct answer along with citations. It's similar to what you'd get from a tool like Perplexity, and it's genuinely useful for quick factual lookups without having to click through a dozen search results.

The second scope is a library search, which queries everything you've already saved into Iki. This is where the tool really starts to shine, because you're essentially building a personal knowledge base that you can have a conversation with. If you've saved dozens of articles about a particular topic, you can ask a single question and get an answer that draws from all of them.

The third option searches Iki as a whole — combining web results, your personal library, and content that other Iki users have made public. The AI copilot is powered by GPT-4o mini by default, but you can switch to GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet from a dropdown menu, which is a nice touch for anyone who has a preference.

The Social Component: Community and Peers

One of the more unexpected features in Iki is its social component. There's a full community section where you can browse collections and profiles from other users. You can follow people, see what they've saved and made public, and even interact with their shared content using the AI copilot.

The Peers tab functions like a social media feed, showing you what people in your network are sharing. You can click into any shared item and engage with it using the copilot, asking questions or generating content from someone else's publicly shared material.

Now, whether you actually want a social media layer baked into your personal knowledge base is debatable. It's not something everyone will love, and it does feel a bit out of place for a tool that's fundamentally about personal research and organization. The good news is that participation is entirely optional — you don't have to share anything publicly, and you can keep your entire library private if that's your preference.

Organizing Content with Collections

Collections are how you organize your saved materials inside Iki. Creating one is simple — hit the plus button, give it a name, optionally upload a cover image, and add a description. If you don't set a cover image, Iki will pull one from the first piece of content you add to that collection.

Here's where things get a bit frustrating, though. The privacy toggle for collections is confusingly worded. Instead of a simple "Public" or "Private" label, it reads "Not Private Collection" — which means public, but requires you to think about it for a second. When you toggle it, the label updates to "Private Collection," but the initial wording creates unnecessary cognitive load. Even worse, public appears to be the default setting for new collections, which feels backwards for a personal knowledge management tool.

There's also a bug worth mentioning: once you add an item to a collection, there doesn't appear to be a way to remove it. The interface shows checkboxes when you open an article and navigate to collections, but unchecking doesn't actually work. This is something that definitely needs to be fixed in a future update.

Adding and Managing Your Materials

Getting content into Iki is straightforward. You can add items directly from the library by clicking the plus button and pasting in one or more links, or you can upload PDFs, CSVs, and TXT files. There's also a Chrome extension that lets you save content from any webpage with a couple of clicks, which is the faster workflow for day-to-day use.

When you save a link, Iki processes the content and brings the full text into its built-in editor. This means you can read entire articles without leaving the platform — a genuinely useful feature since web content can change or disappear over time. Having a local copy as your source of truth is a smart approach.

The right-hand sidebar gives you quick actions once you've opened a saved item. You can extract key ideas, generate a tweet, or ask custom questions about the content. One particularly nice feature is the ability to save AI outputs as notes. If you ask the copilot to extract key ideas from an article, you can save that output directly as a note attached to the item, creating a layered system where your AI-generated insights live alongside the original content.

The tool also suggests related links based on what you've saved, which can be handy for going deeper on a topic. And if you ever need to get back to the original source, there's always a link back to the original URL.

A Possible Workflow with Iki

Where Iki really comes together is when you start using it as an active research tool rather than a passive bookmark manager. The workflow looks something like this: save articles, tweets, videos, and documents as you come across them throughout the day. Let Iki process and index everything. Then, when you need to write something or answer a question, use the library search to query across all your saved materials at once.

For example, if you've been collecting articles about a specific topic over several weeks, you could ask the copilot to write an essay pulling insights from all of them. The AI doesn't just summarize a single article — it synthesizes information across your entire library. You can also create notes on the fly, either from AI outputs or from scratch, building up your own annotations alongside the saved content.

The notes system does have one UI annoyance worth mentioning: when you create a new note, the article you're referencing gets hidden. Ideally, you'd be able to see both the article and your note side by side, which is how most people actually take notes.

Library View and Bookmarks

The library page gives you an overview of everything you've saved, but it mixes collections and individual items together in one view. This can feel a bit cluttered — your curated collections appear alongside standalone saves, and there's no way to filter the view to show just one or the other.

Iki automatically tags your saved content, but the quality of auto-tagging is inconsistent. A detailed article about Cal Newport's productivity philosophy might only get tagged as "social media," which isn't particularly helpful for finding it later. Each item does get an AI-generated summary, but these tend to be quite brief — more of a one-liner than a useful excerpt.

There's also a bookmarks feature that acts like a favorites system. You can bookmark individual items or entire collections, and they'll appear in a dedicated Bookmarks section for quick access. It's a bit redundant given that you could just create a "Favorites" collection to achieve the same thing, but it's there if you want a quicker way to flag content you access frequently.

Plans, Pricing, and the YouTube Problem

The AppSumo deal starts at $39 for the Tier 1 plan, which is what this review is based on. However, Tier 1 only gives you 200 copilot uses per month, which could run out quickly if you're using the AI features regularly. Tier 2 bumps the price to $129 but unlocks unlimited copilot usage and adds support for up to three team members — that's the plan worth considering if you're serious about using Iki.

Tier 3 is where things get a bit confusing. The listing mentions a "private space for a 3-people team" but also says it "includes 5 users." It's unclear what those extra two user slots are for, and it reads like a typo that hasn't been addressed yet.

The elephant in the room is YouTube transcription. Each tier includes a certain number of transcription hours (5, 40, or 100), but this feature is currently not working due to what Iki describes as a "global problem affecting all YouTube parsers." Since the ability to save and query YouTube videos is one of the tool's biggest selling points, this is a significant gap. If YouTube integration is your primary use case, it's worth waiting until this is confirmed working before committing.

Iki.ai vs. SaveDay

The inevitable comparison here is with SaveDay, another AppSumo deal in the same space. Both tools let you save web content and query it with AI, but they have different strengths. Iki offers a traditional username and password login, which is a plus over SaveDay's requirement to authenticate through Apple or Google. On the other hand, SaveDay's Chrome extension is significantly more capable — you can mark specific points in videos and highlight sections on pages, giving you more control over what you save and how.

Both tools have their rough edges at this stage. Which one works better for you will depend on which tradeoffs bother you least. If you didn't know the other existed, you'd likely be happy enough with either one.

Final Verdict

Iki.ai earns a score of 7.6 out of 10. It's a genuinely useful concept — a personal digital library with an AI research assistant built in — and the core functionality works well when it works. The interface is clean, the copilot is responsive, and the ability to query across your entire saved library is powerful.

However, it's held back by some notable issues. The confusing privacy toggle on collections, the inability to remove items from collections, the weak auto-tagging, and most importantly, the non-functional YouTube transcription all drag the experience down. The social features feel tacked on for a personal knowledge tool, though at least they're optional.

If you're looking for an AI-powered research assistant to help you organize and make sense of web content, Iki.ai is worth considering at the current AppSumo price — just go in with realistic expectations about what's working today versus what's promised for the future.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.