There are three main ways to use Raycast AI:
- Quick AI: It’s the fastest way to get answers to your questions directly from within Raycast. Ideal for one-off questions. Here’s a video to see it in action.
- AI Chat: A standalone chat window to ask AI anything. Ideal as an assistant during your workday.
- AI Commands: Pre-built or custom instructions, ideal for common tasks such as improve your writing.
Examples
Below are a few examples to familiarize yourself with Raycast AI. The examples show how to ask AI something, use the built-in commands, create your own custom commands, and interact with the AI Chat window.
Example 1: Quick AI
Follow the steps to ask AI anything:
- Open Raycast
- Type your question, f.e. “What were the specs of the first Macintosh?”
- Press
Tab
to switch to Quick AI - Perform your next action, e.g. press
⌘
J
to continue the conversation in the AI Chat
Some more noteworthy features:
- You can press
Tab
after opening Raycast to switch to Quick AI. This way you can access your previous question. - Quick AI is only for one-off questions. If you want to ask a follow up question, continue in the chat.
- You can hide the Ask AI
Tab
hint via Settings → Extensions → Raycast AI. TheTab
key still works.
Example 2: AI Chat
Follow the steps to interact with the AI Chat:
- Open Raycast
- Search for “AI Chat” to open the spearate chat window
- Type in any question you want to start a conversation
- Continue the conversation with follow up questions
- Press
⌘
K
, select “Ask AI” and search for “Make Shorter” - Raycast applies the AI Command to shorten the previous message
⌥
J
) via Preferences → Extensions -> Raycast AI -> AI Chat
to open the chat quickerExample 3: Explain Words
Follow the steps to explain the selected word:
- Select the word “philosophy”
- Open Raycast and search for “Explain This in Simple Terms”
- Raycast AI responds with the definition of the word “philosophy”
Example 4: Translate Text
Follow the steps to create a new AI Command that translates selected text to any language:
- Open this article and select the three paragraphs
- Open Raycast, search for “Search AI Commands”
- Type in “translate to english” (or any other language) and hit
↵
- Raycast opens a new chat with the translation of the selected text
To add the AI Command to your Raycast Root Search, continue with these steps:
- Go back to “Search AI Commands” and search for “translate”
- Press
⌘
E
to edit the AI Command - Give it a title-case title, e.g. “Translate to English”, change the icon to
Flag
, and the creativity to low - Press
⌘
↵
to update the AI Command - Now you can use the AI Command from your Root Search
Placeholders
You can make your AI Commands dynamic with
Limits
From OpenAI: A helpful rule of thumb is that one token generally corresponds to ~4 characters of text for common English text. This translates to roughly ¾ of a word (so 100 tokens ~= 75 words).
GPT-3.5 Turbo
- 10 requests per minute
- 200 requests per hour
- 16k tokens context size (4k for GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct)
GPT-4
- 10 requests per minute
- 50 requests per 3 hours
- 150 requests per 24 hours
- 4k tokens context size
Note: We also send some context together with the user's prompt. So do not expect exact numbers.
Note: “Submit Without Generating” does not count towards your request limits.