Lumi vs Toki: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Lumi and Toki — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Lumi
A Google PAIR prototype that adds AI-powered annotations, granular summaries, and custom Q&A to arXiv research papers.
Key features
- Granular Summaries: Generates summaries at multiple granularities (section- or paragraph-level) to surface key ideas and make long papers easier to skim and comprehend.
- Inline Annotations: Attaches contextual, sentence- or paragraph-specific annotations directly onto the paper text to explain terminology, methods, or results in place.
- Custom Q&A: Lets users ask targeted questions about a paper and receive context-aware answers derived from the document content to clarify methods, results, or motivations.
- arXiv Integration: Built specifically to work with arXiv papers, enabling quick access to preprints and their metadata while preserving original paper structure.
- Open-Source Prototype: Source code available under an Apache-2.0 license on GitHub, allowing inspection, reuse, and community-driven improvements.
- Research Navigation Aids: Provides tools to jump between sections, references, and highlighted insights to streamline literature review workflows.
- Contextual Highlighting: Highlights important sentences and phrases based on AI analysis to draw attention to key contributions and claims.
- Collaboration-Friendly Outputs: Produces shareable annotations and summaries that can be used to coordinate reading lists and group discussions.
- Inline annotations layered on top of arXiv papers
- Granular and multi-level summaries for sections and full papers
- Custom Q&A over the paper content (user-driven queries)
- Lightweight AI layer integrated into the reading interface
- Browser/web-based reading experience (lumi.withgoogle.com)
- Open-source codebase on GitHub (Apache-2.0) allowing local integration and extension
- Designed for improved paper navigation and comprehension
Best for
- Rapid literature review: Quickly generate section-level summaries across many arXiv papers to triage and prioritize reading lists.
- Clarifying complex passages: Ask focused questions about specific paragraphs or figures to get concise, context-aware explanations.
- Teaching and learning: Instructors and students use inline annotations and summaries to make advanced papers accessible in coursework.
- Collaborative annotation: Teams annotate papers with AI-generated notes to share insights and discussion points during journal clubs or research meetings.
- Relevance triage: Determine whether a paper contains needed methods or results without reading it end-to-end by scanning AI-highlighted passages and summaries.
- Research discovery: Identify related work and key contributions faster by surfacing dominant themes and claims within a paper.
- Accelerating literature reviews and paper digestion for researchers
- Explaining complex methods or equations within academic papers
- Creating Q&A study aids from research articles
- Annotating and sharing insights on arXiv papers within teams
- Prototyping integrations that enhance document-based workflows
Toki
Orion Arm
AI executive assistant that reaches out to attendees to book meetings, architects your day, and tracks tasks across synced calendars.
Key features
- Attendee Coordination: Toki contacts meeting attendees itself to find a time that works for everyone, removing the availability back-and-forth entirely.
- Scheduling Links: Calendly-style booking links for cases where a shareable link is simpler than having Toki negotiate a time.
- Proactive Day Architecture: Toki plans the day ahead of time, balancing protected deep-work blocks against urgent demands rather than just recording events.
- Natural Multimodal Input: Voice notes, screenshots, quick texts, and half-formed requests are all accepted and connected into the right events, reminders, and tasks.
- Personal Preference Memory: Toki learns how you work, how you plan, and what you prefer, improving its scheduling decisions the longer you use it.
- Triggers: Tell Toki a condition to watch — a price, a deadline, a release date — and it monitors and pings you when the condition is met.
- Conflict Resolution: Smart scheduling detects and resolves calendar conflicts across synced calendars instead of double-booking.
- Call Me Alerts: For things you truly cannot miss, Toki escalates from a notification to an actual phone call.
Best for
- External Meeting Booking: Getting a meeting with several outside attendees on the calendar without a chain of availability emails.
- Deep Work Protection: Having an assistant proactively reserve focus blocks and defend them against incoming requests.
- Multi-Calendar Consolidation: Keeping personal iCloud, work Google, and Outlook calendars coherent in one view without manual duplication.
- Capture on the Move: Sending a voice note or a screenshot of a flyer and having it become a dated event or reminder.
- Deadline Monitoring: Setting a trigger on a stock price, a product release, or an application deadline and being pinged when it fires.
- Critical Reminder Escalation: Receiving a phone call rather than a dismissable notification for appointments that cannot be missed.
