Sidecar: A Yantra Chat Beside Every Tab
A walkthrough of Sidecar, the Yantra chat in Chrome's side panel: one conversation per tab, dictation, site helpers, price checks and recorded tasks.
Yantra Team3 min read
On this page
Most questions about a web page start with copying it somewhere else. Sidecar is the Yantra chat in Chrome's side panel, next to the page, and the agent can read and drive the real tab using the logins you already have.
Open it
Install the Yantra browser extension, click its icon to open the side panel, and sign in with your Yantra account. The empty panel offers starting points such as Research this topic in depth, Extract all data from tables on this page and What's the key takeaway of this page?
One conversation per tab
Each browser tab gets its own conversation. Switch to another tab and its thread loads; come back and the first one is still there, even after closing the panel or restarting the browser. Unsent text in the composer is kept per tab too. History lists your past chats with their message counts, and a session that gets stuck recovers on its own.
Pick a model, talk, choose an output
The model menu has three choices: Yantra Haiku (fastest, lightest), Yantra Sonnet (balanced, the default) and Yantra Opus 5.5 (for long and complex work). Your pick is remembered when you close and reopen the panel.
Dictation puts what you said into the draft rather than sending it, so you can fix a misheard word before the agent sees it. Output mode chips switch the reply to a Mindmap, a Mermaid diagram or an Artifacts page. After an HTML artifact, the panel offers Publish artifact.
Decide what Yantra can see
Settings open on Access, with three choices:
- Only tabs I pick: nothing is read until you add a tab to Yantra's group. The safest choice.
- The tab I'm looking at: Yantra reads the page in front of you, and nothing else.
- Every tab in this window: Yantra can read all your open tabs.
The same tab holds Follow my cursor while recording, which notes where your mouse moves and clicks so a recording can zoom in on the action. It never reads text or what you type.
Connection has the switch Let Yantra use this browser. While it is off, Yantra can still chat but cannot open, read or click anything. If the switch does not link, Advanced lets you paste a setup code from your Yantra computer.
Helpers on the sites you use
Apps lists site helpers for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sheets, LinkedIn, Notion and Slack. Helpers has the Highlight-to-ask bar (select text anywhere for Summarize, Translate and Ask), a YouTube helper and a Gmail helper.
Shopping has Check prices while I shop. On a product page at Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target or eBay, Yantra looks for the same item for less. Sub-options start the check on its own, let Yantra open quiet background tabs to read a price, and fall back to Google Shopping when the quick check finds nothing.
Sign-ins shares a site's login with the browser on your Yantra computer, so it arrives signed in. Payments holds Let Yantra pay for what I ask for, which lets the agent finish a checkout you asked for with a wallet card.
Record a task once, run it again
The Skills view turns something you do by hand into a skill. Under Record a task, press Record this tab, do the task once in a tab you shared with Yantra, then Stop recording, name it and Create skill. Passwords and card numbers are never recorded. Your Recorded tasks each have Run in my tab, with a short form prefilled from what you did. All skills lists the rest of your skills.
What the agent will not do
Draft, write and compose mean fill in and stop. The agent does not click Post, Send or Delete unless you tell it to publish in the conversation. The one exception is a checkout you asked for with a wallet card. See Agentic checkout.
What it is not
Sidecar works in your own Chrome. A cloud desktop with its own browser, terminal and files, driven by the agent while you watch, is Computer. Searching and watching prices across stores from the main chat is Shopping. Recording and sharing a screen video is Clips.