New: file uploads in Ask Lex chats, an API beta, & my take on Notion’s new AI
Howdy! Nathan here, founder of Lex (https://lex.page), the modern writing platform with powerful AI editing tools built in.
As usual, a few quick things for you this week:
1. File uploads in Ask Lex chats
We have a new feature in beta this week for Lex Pro subscribers, rolling out to everyone next week!
You can now add PDFs, Word docs, and more to your Ask Lex messages. These will only be added to the context of your chat, and won’t overwrite or replace your draft.
This has been a highly requested feature, so we’re happy to ship it!!
You can use it to…
Upload a PDF that holds information you’re writing about, and ask if your draft captures the ideas fully.
Upload an interview transcript and ask for the most interesting points.
Upload your notes or journals to see if there’s missing information that would improve the draft you’re currently writing.
We’re excited about it! If you use it, let us know what you think and report any bugs you find (please keep in mind, this just the beta version of the feature. It will only get better!)
2. Lex API v1
I wasn’t planning on building an API this week, but we had so many great submissions for the Lex Prompt Creator Program (launching next week!!) that I had to make a document creation API to avoid spending 5 hours copying submitted prompts from a Google Sheet and pasting into Lex docs manually.
If you want to use this API to create, read, update, and/or destroy your documents, just fill out this form for access next week: https://forms.gle/UaFGp4JqNQbztRSR8
3. My take on Notion’s new AI stuff
Conventional wisdom says not to draw attention to competitors, but A) most of you know Notion already, and B) they launched some new AI stuff this week that is cool—but headed in a very different direction from Lex.
I actually think our products are mostly complementary rather than competitive, and this is a good opportunity to define Lex and where it fits.
If I had to sum it up in one pithy sentence, it’d be:
Notion is great for project planning and OK for writing; Lex aspires to be amazing for writing and OK for project planning. We think of Lex as a power tool for “word design.”
Notion’s killer feature is having your team’s projects, wiki, CRM, and more in one place. It makes sense to chat with AI there and ask “what’s going on with XYZ client project?”
For this purpose, their “prompting not required” slogan is genius. When you just want a quick answer to a simple question, you shouldn’t need any sort of special prompt.
Lex, on the other hand, is designed to help with more complex writing challenges.
We’ve found that if you want AI to help you write something great—whether it’s a strategy memo, academic paper, essay, or sci-fi novel—the prompt matters a lot. If you just ask “how can I make this better,” the AI will come up with something reasonable, but you will get 100x more valuable advice if the AI has a detailed prompt written by an expert in exactly the kind of writing you’re doing.
We’ve designed our product around this understanding and are focused on two main tasks:
Build the world’s best system for storing and retrieving useful knowledge (in prompt form) that AI can use to guide you towards more effective writing and thinking.
Build the world’s best interface for exploring different possibilities for what a piece of writing could be, and narrowing down to the best possible final version—through collaboration with humans and AI. (Huge updates on this front coming later this year.)
These are of course very ambitious goals, but we’re just getting started!
Historically, software has treated the words on your screen as a black box. To the computer, it’s just an arbitrary sequence of characters. But of course getting the right letters in the right order is all that matters.
We named “Lex” after “lexicon,” because we don’t treat your writing as just an arbitrary string of letters. Our goal is to build a system that meaningfully understands and actively increases your odds of finding magic words, to help you achieve your goals.
The magic thing about writing, the reason we all do it in the first place, is that it’s possible to find a sequence of characters that changes the people who read it—and maybe even the world.
Magic words, literally.
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By the way, if you’re curious about the art of prompting in Lex and beyond (and why we’re so bullish on the role of writers even in the AI era) you can read more about it here: https://lex.page/read/e359fcf7-deae-47a5-bbfe-13159143bd15
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As always, thank you so much for your support and feedback, and for spreading the word about Lex. We’re still tiny in the grand scheme of things, but your encouragement keeps us going and means the world to us.
Until next week!
—Nathan Baschez, founder of Lex