Elephas: A Digital Second Brain That Supercharges AI Productivity on Your Mac

AI assistants and productivity tools are dime a dozen these days. However, many of them fail to provide you with actionable assistance and insights. Even when they do, they don’t integrate very well with your Mac. It is in this context that Elephas claims to make a difference. It aims to be a second digital brain that can help you with research, productivity, and a context-aware chatbot.

What Is Elephas?

Elephas works as a digital assistant app that can help you with many productivity-oriented tasks, such as research, brainstorming, and content creation. However, unlike ChatGPT or Perplexity, Elephas is designed to prioritize context.

Therefore, instead of relaying information between you and an AI service, Elephas understands the resources you provide and comes up with actionable responses. More importantly, Elephas creates a Brain, which is a knowledge base. It lets you have multiple brains that you can use for various projects.

You always have the option to chat with these brains or a mainstream LLM like ChatGPT or Claude. Elephas also packs additional utilities such as system-wide writing tools and grammar checks.

Core Features

Let’s look at the core features of Elephas for Mac:

• Create smart AI brains that you can use to feed information and chat with. These digital brains can access information from versatile document formats like PDF, DOCX, images, and videos.
• The Super Chat function allows you to engage in a semantic chat with your brain and documents. It’s also designed to show references and connections whenever appropriate.
• The Super Command functionality of Elephas can help you with dictation, book summaries, creating presentations, etc.
• Elephas also brings a system-wide AI writing assistant, helping you fix grammar mistakes, rephrase, summarize, and chat with webpages.
• An offline mode allows you to use local-run LLMs to power Elephas and ensure that your documents never leave your premises.

As Ayush Chaturvedi, co-founder of Elephas, notes:

“Elephas today has a range of powerful features, but its core appeal is in its ability to provide a layer of AI anywhere you need on your Mac.”

Elephas Review: A Deep Dive into Features & Benefits

Setting up and getting started with Elephas does not take more than a few minutes. You can get the official app from the website or Setapp. After the installation, you can configure Elephas in different ways. You get to choose between efficiency, privacy, and performance.

One, you can pick one of the integrated service options or connect an existing API for services like ChatGPT or Grok. Alternatively, you can run an LLM on your Mac and ask Elephas to use it.

Once set up, Elephas offers powerful features that transform how you manage information and tasks.

# Super Brain

Super Brain is at the core of Elephas’ functionality. Either way, you can start interacting with Super Brain to interact with complex information from different parts of your Mac. For instance,

• Writing Assistance: As you draft an important email, you can summon Elephas’ writing tools with a quick hotkey. It helps you refine the language, ensuring the message is clear and impactful.
• Research and Summarization: When you’re working on a project that requires extensive research, with Elephas’ Super Brain, you simply feed it with relevant documents, web pages, and your own notes. Then, you can chat with this brain to quickly extract key insights without manually sifting through all the material.
• Content Creation: While brainstorming ideas for a blog post, you can use Elephas to generate outlines, expand on concepts, or even help with writer’s block. Its AI-powered suggestions often spark new angles you hadn’t considered.
• Email Management: When faced with a full inbox, you can leverage Elephas to draft quick replies or summarize long email threads. As Ayush explains:

“Let’s say you want to answer an email, you can bring up the Elephas shortcut menu, and get it to reply to the email. You can even give it a prompt based on how you want the reply to be. And it works right there inline, inside your favorite email app, no need to go to a different browser tab and copy pasting long emails.”

“This is why we built the super brain feature in Elephas. It’s where we integrate with a wide variety of note taking and personal knowledge management apps, and help them bring all their data from different sources into a single ‘brain’.”

# Super Command

Super Command is another game-changing feature that brings almost all of Elephas’ capabilities to your fingertips. Let’s say we need to quickly understand the key offerings of OpenAI. We navigate to openai.com, then activate Super Command by pressing Control + /. From the command palette, we select “Summarize webpage.” Within seconds, Elephas provides us with a concise summary of OpenAI’s main products and services, saving us the time of reading through the entire website.

Additionally, you can use Super Command for tasks like:

• Generating and fixing content directly in emails, notes, and documents.
• Accessing AI features through customizable hotkeys.
• Creating custom AI commands tailored to our specific workflow needs.

Elephas integrates seamlessly with other services we use daily, such as Notion, YouTube, Bear, and Obsidian, making it a central hub for our productivity needs. Plus, with its cloud-sync feature,  you can access your digital brains from your iPhone as well.

# Workflow Automation

Elephas recently introduced a powerful Workflow Automation feature for Mac users, currently in beta. This new functionality allows you to create custom AI-powered workflows, automating complex tasks across your applications. The feature includes a library of pre-built workflows for common use cases such as summarizing brain files, finding files that discuss specific topics, web searching, and drawing mindmaps or charts.

Users can trigger workflows from the Super Chat by typing “@” followed by the workflow name. For example, you can filter specific files using the filter icon in the Chat tab, then type “@Summarize Brain Files” to quickly summarize the selected documents. This feature significantly enhances Elephas’ ability to streamline work processes and boost productivity.

# Our Take

Considering the features it offers and the value you get, Elephas for Mac is an effectiveway to leverage AI for productivity and research. Its context-aware nature improves the accuracy and reliability of results. We also loved the options for using custom AI engines and running the entire thing locally and the newly introduced Workflow Automation feature, which takes task automation to the next level.

Pricing and Plans

Elephas offers a free version that you can use for as long as you like. However, you won’t get some features like Integration.

If you want the complete feature set, you need to purchase an Elephas license, which starts at $7.50 per month. If you are looking for unlimited AI credits, you have to pay $15.83 per month. An alternative option is to grab the basic plan and hook it up with your OpenAI API key.

If you have a powerful Mac (16GB RAM), you can try running the LLMs offline as well.

Folks can check out Elephas from its home page, and note that Elephas requires minimum macOS version of 11.