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Flowrite: Turn short lists of facts into well-written emails

flowrite.com

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Flowrite: Turn short lists of facts into well-written emails

#21
post #5

This 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 conc…

This

> It does drive me slightly crazy that this system JUST INJECTS NOISE.

is actually an important service. What is noise to the sender is generally not noise to the reader. It would be awesome if at some point in the next few decades we only have to provide information that we need to think about and the computer could find a way to compile it into what the reader is looking for. In other words, if the computer could do what most every secretary was doing in the 1960s.

Re: Flowrite: Turn short lists of facts into well-written emails

#22
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

> 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.

I'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.

Re: Flowrite: Turn short lists of facts into well-written emails

#24
Yes, 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.

Re: Flowrite: Turn short lists of facts into well-written emails

#27
This 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?

Re: Flowrite: Turn short lists of facts into well-written emails

#28
post #7

Can it turn a well written email into a short list of facts? That seems more useful.

I 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.

Re: Flowrite: Turn short lists of facts into well-written emails

#30
post #5

This 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 conc…

Isn’t this just GPT-3 under the hood? Other similar things do exist (eg: copy.ai).

Not sure whether there’s much of a difference between all these GPT-3 powered services when all that distinguishes you from competition is some (slick) UI and the 500-1000 extra words of “training” you give to GPT-3.

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