My Product of the Week: A Formless Form-Builder Powered by AI

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

Hi all!

This week is a whirlwind as both of my kiddos started in new classes at their daycare. Drop off has been much more…exciting…to say the least.

In this week’s issue:

• A formless form-builder is my product of the week

• An AI notetaker for your video classes

• Therapy and AI…a match made in heaven or hell?

• Plus, a recommended read on why most experts were surprised by progress in language models in 2022 and 2023

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK

After testing dozens of new AI products this week. Here’s my top pick.

Formless: Collect information via a conversational interface instead of a traditional web form.

Typeform, a leader in creating simple and visually appealing online forms for years, announced in July that it would leverage AI to create a conversational form for lead gen, customer feedback, engaging your audience, or recruitment. I was intrigued and signed up for the waitlist. This week, I gained access and was impressed with the results.

Below is a video where I walk you through creating a form and the resulting user experience.

What’s cool about the conversational nature is that as you answer the questions, the form acknowledges your response before moving on. It felt very personal and even though I knew it was an AI I wanted to be helpful and give full in-depth responses to the questions rather than one word answers.

To use formless, simply tell the AI what type of form you want to create, and it will do the rest. Even in its early stages, Typeform offers a variety of customization options after the form has been created, so you can make adjustments until it's perfect. Additionally, you have the ability to upload your own resources or wikis to train the AI if you expect customers to respond in a specific way. This feature is super cool.

Once respondents finish the formless form, Typeform generates a summary of the highlights of the conversation. However, Typeform is missing one key feature: the ability to aggregate responses and view trends, especially for rate 1-10 type questions. They are working on this feature, so hopefully it will be added soon. Right now, it's best for surveys of small audiences because reviewing 1,000 responses would be just a bit tedious…

Overall, formless is a promising product and I expect this type of conversational survey to become the norm across the web in the next few years.

See it in action: take my newsletter feedback survey

RUNNER UPS

More AI products that is worth your time.

Snipo: AI notetaker for your video classes. I think Snipo is going to be popular with college students returning to school this fall. It works with YouTube videos and various learning platforms. Snipo syncs with the video and generates notes structured according to the video's chapters. It can also create AI flashcards and capture screenshots. The notes are time-stamped and directly integrated into a Notion document, making it a convenient tool. Snipo also enables you to pull a snippet of the video transcript directly into your notes.

AI and Mental Health. This week, two AI therapists are entering the world of therapy. Is this a good thing? I'm still on the fence. The first app that caught my attention is Plutis, a startup that offers an app connecting you to a licensed therapist and an AI companion that you can chat with whenever you want. They seem to focus more on guiding people to talk with a licensed professional, and the AI is more of an onboarding tool.

The second app, Deepen, is focused on building a 24/7 AI therapist in your pocket. As they describe it: "The ultimate self-care companion on your journey to mental well-being. A space to explore and understand yourself."

They are using ChatGPT, but they’ve tuned it so that ChatGPT responds more like a therapist would and they are also including your conversation history as context so that it feels more like someone that remembers what you’ve spoken about in the past.

Anyway, I can see AI being used in mental health to provide more affordable and accessible coaching and therapy. However, the question remains: will it actually be effective? Reply and let me know what you think.

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news and product launches from this week

According to The Information, Apple has been increasing its computing budget for the development of artificial intelligence to millions of dollars per day. One of the company's objectives is to create features that enable iPhone users to automate tasks involving multiple steps using simple voice commands.

Over half of the team behind Meta’s Llama — their open-source chatGPT alternative — have quit since March… Yikes.

Intuit will be releasing “Intuit Assist” a digital assistant that offers personalized recommendations embedded across Intuit’s platform and products, such as TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp.

Zoom is updating and rebranding some of its AI-powered features, including the generative AI assistant formerly known as Zoom IQ. This assistant can answer questions, summarize meetings, draft action items, and provide presentation feedback.

WHAT I'M READING

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

Language models surprised us by Ajeya Cotra

"If you read media coverage of ChatGPT — which called it ‘breathtaking’, ‘dazzling’, ‘astounding’ — you’d get the sense that large language models (LLMs) took the world completely by surprise. Is that impression accurate? Actually, yes. There are a few different ways to attempt to measure the question ‘Were experts surprised by the pace of LLM progress?’ but they broadly point to the same answer: ML researchers, superforecasters, and most others were all surprised by the progress in large language models in 2022 and 2023. ML benchmarks are sets of problems which can be objectively graded, allowing relatively precise comparison across different models…" PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

Until next week!

-✌🏻 Tyler

P.S. Have tips or suggestions for next week's issue? Reply to this email and send them my way.

P.P.S. Interested in having me give you private feedback about a product that you are building? Learn more here.