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This free Chrome automation tool is a superpower for your browser

A clever Chrome extension called Magical lets your tabs handle time-sucking tasks for you—and it takes all of 20 seconds to set up.

This free Chrome automation tool is a  superpower for your browser

[Source illustration: CSA Images/Getty Images]

BY JR Raphael6 minute read

Online automation tools always sound incredible. They’ll do all the hard work for you! They’ll cut endless steps out of your day! They’ll save you 77 minutes a week and let you focus on what really matters!

But then you actually try to use the things, and more often than not you practically need a degree in engineering to get them up and running.

So what if there were a way to get the benefits of online automation without all the headaches—to automate the automation, in a manner of speaking? What if online automation could be a touch more, well, magical?

That’s exactly what Harpaul Sambhi, CEO of a startup called (wait for it . . .) Magical set out to achieve. “This idea’s been brewing in my mind for the last decade and a half almost,” he says.

Magical is very much designed to live up to its name: All you do is install the service’s Chrome or Edge extension, and boom: Seconds later, it starts showing you all sorts of tedious tasks it can take over for you.

The types of feats Magical is capable of performing are fairly specific, but if you do a lot of work in web apps—services like Gmail, Google Sheets, Zendesk, or Zoho—it might just be the added layer of intelligence your online experience has been missing.

The Magical formula

To fully understand what Magical’s all about, it helps to step back a bit and consider how the service began.

Sambhi, one of four Magical cofounders, previously created a company called Careerify. It offered personal recruiting software that tapped into your various social networks and surfaced people connected to you who might be well-suited for a specific role.

Perhaps not surprisingly, LinkedIn saw value in that concept and snatched it up back in 2015. Sambhi ultimately joined LinkedIn as a part of the deal and spent about three years there as a product manager.

And that’s where he discovered the need for a smarter way to handle everyday, time-consuming actions in the browser.

“I saw the repetitive tasks that tens of millions of people had,” he says. “And that sparked the idea of Magical, which is to really empower anyone to eliminate those soul-crushing mundane tasks.”

Sambhi teamed up with his wife—Rosie Chopra, a former executive at productivity software company Atlassian—along with two other colleagues to come up with an answer.

And that brings us to what Magical does today.

One service, two spells

At its core, Magical revolves mostly around data entry and messaging. Both of those areas are easiest to understand through examples.

So first things first: With data entry, let’s say you’re looking for a new person to hire, and you’ve got 20 different LinkedIn profiles open as tabs in your browser. You want to save certain types of info from those pages into a spreadsheet for future reference—maybe, say, each person’s name, location, current company, job title, and profile URL.

Normally you’d have to go through the hassle of copying and pasting all of that info over one piece at a time—but with Magical, you simply open up a Google Sheet and type two slashes (//) into the first cell to summon the service. From there, you look through Magical’s pop-up menu to select which type of data you want in which column. A couple of clicks more and, shazam: All the info from every profile you’ve got open gets zapped over into the appropriate place within the sheet.

And it’s not just for LinkedIn, either: The same approach will work with virtually any website you’re looking at—hotel pages at TripAdvisor, home listings at a realty site, or even influencer profiles on Instagram if you’re doing marketing-related research.

“You don’t actually have to go to a separate app to set up any automations,” explains Claire Maynard, Magical’s head of marketing and another Atlassian veteran. “It’s what we’re calling ‘user-enabled ambient automation.'”

What’s especially interesting is that since the whole thing’s browser-based, there are virtually no limits to where Magical can perform its tricks. Sambhi says he’s seen the tool used for everything from wedding planning to online dating—maybe the most amusingly unexpected situation the team has encountered so far.

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But beyond the basic sorts of sites where you’d expect Magical to work, the software can also function on internal company content. In fact, Sambhi says well over half of the integrations set up with Magical take place within private corporate systems that don’t offer any manner of API access. In non-nerd terms, that means they offer no formal connections to external services and consequently end up being clunky, awkward, and limiting to use.

“These things are built by an engineer or maybe they’re very legacy-build products, and they have no interoperability whatsoever,” Sambhi says. “There’s no API, and you have this end person—the consumer—copy-pasting, slogging away over and over again.”

As long as Magical can see the data you need, it can pull it over for you systematically into any other actively open tab. And remember: That data-entry part of the process is only the first of Magical’s powers.

Magical’s messaging prowess

Collecting information can be a real time-saver. But Magical really excels as an ultra-intelligent text-expansion tool.

The foundation may feel familiar: Just like Text Blaze, the browser-based keyboard shortcut service I wrote about last December, Magical lets you create custom shortcuts for inserting all sorts of text anywhere in your browser.

So, for instance, typing /intro might insert your standard three-paragraph introduction message into whatever text field you’re typing in. And typing /sorry might summon your go-to rejection letter.

That’s all pretty conventional. Where Magical takes things up a notch is with its awareness of all the data from the other tabs you have open in your browser. Just like with the data-entry examples we went over a minute ago, specific sorts of info from any of your open pages can be programmatically pulled into play.

So maybe you’d have Magical insert someone’s first name and company name into that standard intro message, for instance—brought over automatically from that person’s LinkedIn profile and placed in the exact right spot within your message. When you’re sending out a couple dozen such emails a day, that type of assistance can add up to some serious seconds saved.

Critically, it all happens without any code wrangling or complicated configuration on your end. It’s quite literally just a matter of typing out the templates you want once and picking from a dropdown list of available variables during that initial creation.

“We really are trying to build for that nontechnical user who doesn’t want to do a ton of setup,” Maynard says.

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about this sort of tool without tackling the thorny topic of privacy. Magical’s stance on that is simple: All of the actual processing takes place locally, on your own computer. The only data that’s shared with Magical is metadata—in other words, categorical descriptions of the types of variables you’re using but not the actual information itself.

And as the company’s privacy policy promises, the data that Magical does see is never sold or shared in any eyebrow-raising way.

That raises the question of how the company intends to make money. The answer is through subscriptions—particularly ones targeting more advanced team-oriented uses (something the service is currently testing). Sambhi and Maynard expect premium plans to appear as an option within the next year, though they say the service will take a freemium approach and continue to allow individuals to enjoy its foundational features for free.

Already, half a million people are putting Magical’s magic to use, according to the company’s internal metrics. And Sambhi and Maynard are convinced they’ve only just scratched the surface of what the service can offer. In the future, they see Magical taking an even more proactive role by anticipating the types of tasks you’re likely to automate and then handling them from start to finish—without any interaction required.

“It’s really about how do we . . . use technology to conform to the person versus the person having to conform to the product and trying to figure out how to work with it,” Sambhi says.

They’re certainly off to a promising start. And if they manage to meet those more ambitious long-term goals, their creation might just feel—dare I say it—magical.

For even more eye-opening productivity insight, check out my free Android Intelligence newsletter and get three things to know in your inbox every Friday.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JR Raphael is obsessed with productivity and finding clever ways to make the most of modern technology. Check out his Android Intelligence newsletter to get tasty new tips in your inbox every Friday. More


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