Become the productivity GOAT šŸ

Plus: ChatDox lets you talk to your documents, Demoleap gives salespeople real-time objection rebutals, and a recommended read on how AI pop culture is already here.

A weekly newsletter that highlights new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

Hi all - welcome to the weekend!

This week, I've been using ChatGPT-4 as my co-pilot for a fun little side project: a chatbot that recommends e-bikes. As a passion project, I run an e-bike blog where I review and recommend e-bikes. I wanted to see if I could fine-tune a chatbot on my reviews and on posts and comments from Reddit's r/ebikes.

So far, I've been incredibly impressed with how detailed and helpful ChatGPT-4 has been in getting my scraper script set up and running. I'll be sure to share more details when I finish the project.

Now, onto this week's issue, which covers:

  • My product of the week, Bloks, helps you become the productivity GOAT šŸ

  • ChatDox lets you talk to your documents

  • Demoleap gives salespeople real-time objection rebuttal scripts

  • Allo gives you a better way to track your teamā€™s progress

  • Plus, a recommended read on how AI generated pop culture is already here

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK

After testing dozens of new AI products this week. Hereā€™s my top pick.

Bloks: An AI-powered productivity assistant. Their tagline, "We want to make you the productivity GOAT" caught my attention. Bloks has two main components: First, it uses AI to take your meeting notes, create summaries, and action items. Second, you can use Bloks to organize and manage your to-doā€™s. But hereā€™s the kicker, theyā€™ve integrated AI to make it easier to actually accomplish your to-dos.

One of my biggest issues with to-do list apps is that they simply become a long list of things Iā€™m never going to do and I have to eventually declare to-do bankruptcy and start over. I really like how Bloks is integrating AI next to each of the to-dos so that itā€™s easier to ask the AI to help you accomplish each one. I expect this to get even more powerful as AI is able to do more things, such as book a reservation, make a phone call, etc.

Bloks can also act like your personal CRM by automatically organizing information by companies, contacts, or topics to give your notes and to-doā€™s more context. It also will remind you, during a meeting, of any previous follow-ups that need to be discussed. Basically, Bloks is your very own AI-version of Gary from Veep, but way more effective.

https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExNzc5NmYwMzVhMzBmYmUzMDcwZTNlYjliMmRkMzEyOTIxMTkwZjI1ZSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZzX2dpZklkJmN0PWc/l46CzE9WKiDRsX4sw/giphy.gif

Lastly, itā€™s worth mentioning Bloks has a Mac app, Chrome plugin, iOS app, and Android app. Most tools these days only launch with support for one platform, so kudos to the Blok team for supporting them all.

If you're looking for a new productivity app give Bloks a try. [Beta | Freeā€¦for now]

RUNNER UPS

Three more AI products that are worth your time.

ChatDox: Talk with your documents. ChatDox is an AI tool that allows you to interact with your own documents via a chatbot. All you have to do is upload your docs (PDFs, CSVs, Google Docs, etc). Since my spouse works as an HRBP, one of the obvious use cases for ChatDox is for an HRBP to upload all of their HR resources, benefits wikis, employee handbook. Then when they get a basic question from an employee that they know is somewhere in the internal docs, they can ask ChatDox and quickly get the answer, rather then spend time searching. Even better if you let employees interact directly with ChatDox, reducing the amount of wasted time for HRBPs. [Public Launch | Free or Paid Plans]

Demoleap Mastermind: An AI-guide for your sales team. This is something that would have been immensely helpful to me back in my sales days. Back when I was making 50 calls a day, I would keep papers scattered across my desk with sale scripts along with the common objections and the rebuttals that the top sales people had found to be most effective. But I struggled to actually use them in real-time when I was on a call with a prospectā€¦leading to lots of long pauses on my sales calls while I frantically searched my notes and sweated through my shirt. Demoleap solves the stumbling and stammering by using AI to listen to your sales call and automatically identify the prospectā€™s objection or question and pull up the ā€œbattle cardā€ with the appropriate response. If you end up trying it out on one of your sales calls, please let me know how it went for you. [Public Launch | Paid]

Allo: A better way to track your teamā€™s progress. This one is for all of you engineering and product managers. Allo gives you a centralized hub that aggregates and organizes all of your team's data from applications like Slack, Zoom, Asana, Confluence, and Jira. The dashboard gives you a customizable view of tasks, projects, and features in one place, helping you understand the full context of every project at a glance. Another neat feature is Allo's global search, which allows you to search for something across all of your teamā€™s app. [Public Launch | $12 per user per month]

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news from this week.

Data for LLMs is valuable: Reddit plans to charge companies for access to its API as tech giants such as Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft use Reddit's conversations to develop their AI systems. This is a smart move and, as a former-employee, Iā€™m glad to see them do this. The data used to train LLMs is becoming very valuable and sites like Reddit and others that have a large collection of human conversations are becoming well positioned to leverage that valuable data. A day later, StackOverflow followed Reddit's lead and announced that they'd begin charging for API access as well.

Atlassian: A new AI-powered virtual teammate is coming to Atlassian products, one of the most widely used toolkits of product development teams. The Atlassian Intelligence tool will help write documentation, summarize decisions and action items from meeting notes, and create test plans for tickets in Jira. Iā€™m curious to see how teams adopt this.

Webflow and Builder.io: No-code website builders have been around for a decade or more, and AI is making them even easier to use. Two popular ones, Webflow and Builder.io, both announced a slew of AI enhancements this week. By adding conversational interfaces to their products you can now just tell the AI what you want to change about your website and it will go do it. Very useful since most no-code website builders have a thousand nested menus and buttons, giving them a steep learning curve. Now you can just say something like, ā€œadd a landing page to my site to collect emails for the new product launch of X, and it should feel like it was designed by Nikeā€ā€¦and seconds later, itā€™s built.

Muir AI: This Seattle-based startup is combining satellite technology with artificial intelligence and machine learning to tackle the challenge of carbon accounting. Muir hopes to provide corporations with the data they need to adjust their supply chains and reduce their carbon footprints. Muir is currently demoing its technology with early customers, and hopes to have a publicly available product out later this year.

Human or Not?: Can you identify a human from a robot? Try this fun little social experiment where you chat with another user (or bot) for 2 minutes and afterwards have to guess whether you were chatting with a human or not. I played it and alas it was relatively easy to identify the human because they immediately began to harass and insult me as if they were a 12 year oldā€¦

AI Content Going Viral: The song ā€œHeart On My Sleeve,ā€ which used AI generated voices of Drake and The Weeknd went viral this past week. It was eventually taken down by Youtube and Spotify, but after reaching close to half a million plays in two days. Expect to see more of this happen.

WHAT I'M READING

If you only read one thing this week let it be this.

AI Pop Culture is Already Here by Kyle Chayka

"Weā€™re living in a world in which every style, every idea, and every possible remix can be generated as fast and frictionlessly as possible. Last month, a YouTube user named demonflyingfox uploaded a video titled 'Harry Potter by Balenciaga.' It showed characters from the Harry Potter filmsā€”Hagrid, Ron, Hermione, Snape, McGonagall, Dobbyā€”as gaunt models with aggressive cheekbones (slightly yassified), dressed in gothic capes and leather jackets. Set against a catwalk-worthy electronica beat, the actors blink, nod, and speak lines from the books which have been remixed with fashion references. 'You are Balenciaga, Harry,' Hagrid says, instead of breaking the news that Harry is a wizard. The video is strange and hilariously sinister. In three weeks, it has received almost five million views..." THE NEW YORKER

Until next week! āœŒšŸ»

-Tyler

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