If you’ve logged in to your LexBlog Platform blog recently, you’ve likely seen our call for volunteers to join our our beta test for trying out our AI Assist. We’ve had people naturally ask “Well, what is it?”
In part because of that and in part because it’s fun to talk about what we’re working on, I’ll share here what we’ve built thus far and where we’re headed.
To start, credit to OpenAI for empowering folks like us with a quality API we’re able to use to hook into ChatGPT.
That’s why you’re starting to so many companies integrate AI—specifically, ChatGPT—into their existing products. OpenAI did a lot of the hard work in building a language model and now software engineers at companies like ours will play a big role in where this whole thing goes next.
But you have to start someplace. So we did.
Link to What we’ve built so far What we’ve built so far
We started where we could get something done quickly and put it in folks’ hands so we could start learning how bloggers want to use it.
Got it done, we did.
To start off our beta, accepted users will see a box on the post editor page where they can directly access ChatGPT without opening another tab or new account or anything.
It’s right there, like a sheet of scratch paper on the side to help flesh out ideas. At least, that’s how we looked at it.
On the subject of looking at things, here’s what I’m looking at as I write this post.
Like our Snapshots image library, you can move this to the sidebar if you like. But it’ll be there—next to the post editor—if and when you need it.
I’ll be honest though, as I was with our Product crew and other members of the company, this may not be a big part of our AI Assist feature longterm. It may not be part of it at all.
We’ll see how it plays out after what we build next.
Link to What we’re working on now What we’re working on now
Now we look at how we can make the integration more seamless—but not too in-your-face. Nobody wants Clippy back.
Where we start is with a new tool in our holster thanks to updates to WordPress—those being blocks, with this being the Block Editor and all.
Before too long, our beta users will be able to—in the post editor, just hit the backslash key and then a term like “ai” and it will call up options for blocks utilizing our AI Assist.
It’s similar to like what would happen if I typed “/video,” a feature for calling up blocks that we should’ve been better at highlighting.
Like this:
Right now we’re working on a few purpose-built blocks, tools aimed at delivering a very specific outcome—strategies we think could help bloggers.
One of those is a very simple outline tool, just to get a few words on the page to get folks started towards publishing.
So you’d, say, open the post editor to start a new post, punch in a title, insert the outline block and then, based on your title, you’d get something like this:
Pretty neat, huh?
That’s just one possible use.
On top of that, we’re also working soon on more of a freestyle block. You go to access the AI Assist, enter something, we fire it off to ChatGPT and whatever we get back goes right into the post editing pane.
Like I mentioned above, we need folks’ help to understand how you want to use this. We think it can be valuable, we think it can be helpful, but we’d love to have you show us what you want it to do.
If you’re a LexBlog Platform user and want to give this a shot, let us know and we’ll follow up with more details.