Bearly works in your own Chrome

The Bearly extension for Chrome has been rebuilt. It does two jobs now. The first is what you'd expect: a side panel that summarizes, questions, and explains the page you're on. The second is newer — with the Bearly desktop app running, a chat can work directly in your own Chrome tabs, using the sites you're already signed in to.

The side panel

Select the Bearly icon and the panel opens beside the page. Summarize gives you an executive summary and the key takeaways. Action items pulls out tasks, owners, deadlines, and open questions. Select text first and Explain selection works on just that passage. The box at the bottom answers a question about the page rather than from general knowledge, and follow-ups continue in the same panel.

It reads structured pages properly, not just article text. Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive files work through the document text your signed-in browser can already download, so there's no separate Drive connection to set up. On YouTube it uses the published transcript.

Bearly sends nothing until you pick an action. Then it sends a cleaned copy of the readable page text — or only your selection — plus a picture of the visible part of the tab as supporting context. That picture includes whatever is on screen, which is worth knowing before you run an action on a page with an open inbox behind it. Nothing is saved to your Bearly account; the recent turns live in the browser only while the tab is open.

Your Chrome, from a chat

The larger change is that the extension now connects to the Bearly desktop app. Once both are running, a chat can open and switch tabs, read pages, click, type, scroll, navigate, and inspect console and network activity — in the Chrome profile you actually use.

That last part is the point. Bearly Browser, which we shipped in July, is a separate browser with its own profile and its own logins. It's the right tool when a task doesn't need your credentials. But plenty of work does:

In Chrome, open the invoice list in my billing tab, find every invoice
still unpaid after 30 days, and give me a table with vendor, amount,
and due date. Don't pay or cancel anything.

That works because the tab is already authenticated. No cookie import, no second sign-in, no screenshots pasted into the chat.

The DevTools access is a real part of this, not a footnote. Bearly can read request and response bodies, inspect storage, evaluate JavaScript, and run a trace. If you've ever tried to explain a failing network call to someone over chat, you can now ask Bearly to go look at it in the tab where it's failing.

What it asks before it acts

Bearly asks in the chat before touching Chrome, at one of three levels: read your tabs, control Chrome, or use DevTools. You allow the single action, or keep the level for the current response or for now. The prompt names the level and what it covers, and approving a higher level covers the lower ones while the grant lasts.

Two things are worth saying plainly. This is your real browser, so at the DevTools level Bearly can see request contents and stored session data for whatever tabs it's attached to. And page text, console output, and network responses are untrusted input — a page can contain text written to steer an assistant. Say what's off limits in your request, and keep the tab where you can see it. Chrome shows its own debugging banner the whole time Bearly is attached, and everything detaches when the response ends or you quit either app.

Available now

The extension is in the Chrome Web Store. The side panel works on its own after you sign in.

Chrome control also needs the Bearly desktop app on macOS, Windows, or Linux, version 5.2.6 or later. Install the extension, keep both open, and check App Settings → Desktop → Chrome Extension until it reads Connected to Chrome. The two connect locally on your machine and stay paired across restarts. The extension's own sign-in isn't required for this — that's only for the side panel.

Team admins can turn Chrome control off for managed accounts under Code & Automation in a policy. Full details are in Control Chrome from Bearly.