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Flowrite: Turn short lists of facts into well-written emails
- sixhobbits 6y agoThe fact that AI performs so well at "fluff" creation says far more about the lack of creativity shown by humans who usually create fluff than it does about the creativity of the AI.
- anotheryou 6y agowhy the fluff in the first place... I love short lists
- valiant55 6y agoI mean, I think such communication serves a purpose, how is it much different than boilerplate code?
- tyingq 6y agoThe example seems to indicate it could create issues. It's conjuring, for example "after weeks of hard work" from thin air. There's nothing in the input to suggest that phrase makes contextual sense. Though perhaps the example isn't a real world one.
- aequitas 6y ago> It's conjuring, for example "after weeks of hard work" from thin air. I think this is not that dissimilar from a human writer. Recruiter email's come to mind as an example of this as well.
- tyingq 6y agoI'd hope a human writer would have guessed the effort to create a startup company and product was more than "weeks of hard work" though.
- jacobr1 6y agoI don't know, I get both recruiter emails as a hiring manager and as a potential hire. The majority them try to be familiar, each seems to fail with a different detail. Some guess my location incorrectly, or talk about a product launch from a competitor (attributing it to us) or get our industry wrong, or present skill-sets we don't need in a way that it describes them as being a core part of our architecture, or congratulates us on vague recent successes that could potentially apply to anyone. I had one last week that congratulated me on having a recent child (not the case) from I presume some badly matched social media profile with someone sharing a similar name. I get 2-10 of these a day and I really don't see many that take the time to actual do any research. It is clear most of form-fills, based on some kind of automated data collection or just tossing a wide net.
- drewzero1 6y agoYeah, but what if I'm sending an email to say that I finished a big project the recipient asked me to work on a few days ago? I don't want my email to say I've been working for weeks when the reader knows that's not true. Maybe I'm missing the intended use case for this tool?
- jehb 6y agoAlternative view: "Soft" skills like writing are actually critical to the success of companies, but companies hiring practices and retention practices are so terribly broken, particularly in tech, that most can't seem to identify or retain people who have these skills. So now they're resorting to an AI to try to replace non-technical skills because they've utterly failed at identifying value in human beings.
- pbronez 6y agoThis is an interesting interface for a sophisticated machine learning model. The user input is a moderately structured prompt (a line-delimited list of facts) and the output is text crafted for a particular medium (email). This could be extended to support output for other mediums, such as Blog posts or social media updates. It does drive me slightly crazy that this system JUST INJECTS NOISE. You provide it with concise, readable information. It dilutes that information with additional words and scaffolds it over complex sentence structure. The resulting email has a flourish, but takes more effort to read. It's an inverse document summarizer! Perhaps there are benefits to this. Sometimes you want to make your reader invest a bit of effort in your message. I believe that can improve information retention. The email is also a generally-accepted human API. People might be more receptive to information presented as a letter than as a list. The biggest benefit is probably on the author's side. This forces you to actually think about what you want to say. The input is basically an outline! Paradoxically, I think Flowrite could improve communication by making authors and readers do MORE cognitive work rather than less.
- tyingq 6y agoIf the example is correct, it's injecting more than fluff and flourish. It injected "After weeks of hard work", which doesn't seem supported by anything in the input, and probably sets the wrong tone. Certainly it was at least many months of work prior to launch.
- crazypython 6y agoScroll up or go to https://www.flowrite.com/?ref=lbixer#examples https://www.flowrite.com/?ref=lbixer#examples to see more examples of what it can do.
- pbronez 6y agoThe additional examples seem to integrate external knowledge. How does that work? It expands "follow up" to "in person or via Skype / phone call" -- where did those platform preferences come from? when asked "How about a Zoom call on the following Tuesday at 2PM?" it replies "I'll be in a Zoom meeting on Tuesday at 2PM, so let me know if that works for you." Does this mean Flowrite looked at a calendar and detected a conflicting zoom meeting? Or is it trying to accept the proposed meeting time & venue? I do really like the Blog Outline example, where it expands a general question ("How to align your Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams to maximize revenue?") to a list of six other questions to dig into the problem more. That might be a powerful way to push people to think more deeply and question assumptions.
- alex_h 6y agoCan it turn a well written email into a short list of facts? That seems more useful.
- chris_st 6y agoThere was a pretty good sci-fi story in (IIRC) Omni, wherein someone figures out how to make a computer that can scan in a document and produce a clear, simple summary. The main character is a friend of the inventor, who can't seem to make any sales. Later, they run into each other again, and the inventor is HUGELY rich. Turns out he realized that the original idea was a flop, reversed the process, and sold it to law firms.
- bachmeier 6y agoI think that's something along the lines of this. (I don't know much about it, just listened to the podcast.) https://hanselminutes.com/763/tldr-extreme-summarization-as-a-service-with-isabel-cachola https://hanselminutes.com/763/tldr-extreme-summarization-as-...
- soheil 6y agoI think that'd be a much harder thing to do well. You'll have a lot of false negatives. Missing nuances in complex sentences can change the meaning significantly whereas when adding extra words to a list of facts as long the words are pretty neutral meaning-wise you'll be fine.
- visarga 6y agoHaha, text summarisation has been a traditional NLP task for ages. Google Scholar has 16,000 results just from the last year. More leads: https://paperswithcode.com/task/text-summarization https://paperswithcode.com/task/text-summarization
- dillondoyle 6y agoIt looks like Axios is launching something like this. I asked and they want 6 digits a month - way to much for us so I haven't demo-ed so maybe it's not AI but more simple suggestions https://www.axioshq.com/ https://www.axioshq.com/
- xkeysc0re 6y agoMadlibs - now coming to a Series A fundraiser near you
- zffr 6y agoMaybe I'm weird, but I kinda prefer the original "short list of facts". In general I prefer email to be short and direct.
- ASalazarMX 6y agoIndeed. Seems like having the needles and adding straw for aesthetics. Looks ideal to automate long writing, though.
- minikites 6y agoStep zero of writing is to know your audience. Short lists of facts for some, narrative "fluff" for others.
- chris_st 6y agoDo they have a solution to the (seemingly intractable) problem of people who only read up to the first question in an email, respond to that, and ignore the rest?
- ASalazarMX 6y agoProposal: include the short list of facts as the first paragraph.
- chris_st 6y agoWorth a try! I've also thought of adding, "There are three questions in this email, can you find them all?" but that seems a bit snarky.
- ArtofEmails 6y agoI find formatting can help. List each of your questions at the bottom of your emails, so they can go through them and answer them one by one. It's also harder for them to justify answering one question and ignoring the rest when you lay it out for them in one place. Depending on the questions and how much the answers matter, it may be better to ask each one after they reply to the previous one, so they don't feel overwhelmed being asked all of it at once and put more thought into answering each one.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- browningstreet 6y agoThis is the future of customer service. Not a good thing.
- jakearmitage 6y agoThis is a blessing for anyone stuck in a corporate environment that requires fluff on every single email/document you write.
- fudged71 6y agoBusiness Consultants rejoice!
- soheil 6y agoYes, this is incredibly useful for customer service chats and emails. Many times people feel shortchanged if you send a concise email with the relevant facts, I guess not everyone is an engineer. Adding warmth and extra reassuring words will go a long way to keep customers happy.
- teucris 6y agoI agree with this and will add that a similar thing can be said for non-technical colleagues. The humanness is critical for maintaining good relationships.
- soheil 6y agoIs there an API for this, I'd happily pay for that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jordn 6y agoThis does feel like a big part of the future. An AI coach, which expands on your text and tailors it to you're style and to the p̵r̵e̵f̵e̵r̵e̵n̵c̵e̵s̵ optimized for persuation of the recipient. Does feedback fine tune or customise the model behind this?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jampekka 6y agoAre there actual results of the system for evaluation, or even any system at all? All "demos" on the site seem prewritten, and done by hand for all we know, and in all probability are. A bit premature for HN?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoI always get nervous when an AI/ML demo doesn’t let you try with your own input. It is fairly easy to curate a set of examples in any ML model that work really well. However, a lot of them, quickly fall apart when faced with diverse, real world data.
- yosito 6y agoIs this just a GPT-3 demo applied to writing emails? Is there anything original about it that GPT-3 can't do out of the box?
- OliverJones 6y agoYikes! It seems to add "fluff" but it actually adds context. Where does it get the context? How is the context validated against ground truth? How does it know it took "weeks" of work to do something? How does it know to schedule a video call instead of, I dunno, an in-person meeting or a lunch date? Does it learn if the human user corrects what it comes up with? Somebody needs to rig this up like the old emacs "psychoanalyze-pinhead" hack and see whether two instances of this stuff can talk each other into some rhetorically wierd corner.
- techbio 6y agoWhile not in the sense of "this sentence is lifted from someone else's writing" also very much not "this writing is my own work": this seems like plagiarism without the copyright issues.
- woleium 6y agosign up form is broken :(