- This was not on my Bingo card
when I woke up yesterday morning
but there is now AI inside of our Notion Workspaces.
Yesterday notion announced the launch of
Notion AI, which is a currently alpha program
that adds text generation
and other AI magic into your notion workspace.
And in this video I'm gonna give you 10 examples
of what it can do from translating text to other languages
to outlining blog posts,
writing pros and cons lists
to even writing working programming code based
on a text prompt that you give it.
But let's just jump right in to what this can do.
I'll give you more details about the wait list
and the costs and privacy things later on.
But I wanna show you exactly what it can do.
So here I've got a page
in my Notion workspace called AI Playground.
And now that I have the AI assist features on
for my account, I now have a few different AI archetypes
on this new page here and I can even click more
and see other archetypes that I can use to
basically like I guess set the mode
of the AI for the prompt that I'm going to write.
So the first example I'm gonna give you here
is outlining a blog post.
And right now my team is actually working on a bit of a GTD,
Getting Things Done tutorial for the main channel.
So let's type in what is GTD
and how can I use it and let's see just how good
of a blog post outline AI can give us here.
So what does GTD and how can I use it?
There's our H1.
GTD or Getting Things Done
as a popular productivity method that helps you
organize your tasks and get them done more efficiently
created by David Allen.
That is correct.
And let's see if it gets the steps correct.
So we have the collect step,
we have process step, we have organize.
It does seem to have created a pretty decent outline
for blog post.
So pretty interesting example.
The next one I wanna show you is how it can generate lists.
And while I'm getting that ready
I do wanna mention that if you are new to this channel
this is a completely Notion focused channel.
So if you are new to Notion
or you want to get deeper into it
and learn how to become a power user, definitely subscribe.
I've got database tutorials, I've got formula documentation.
So make sure you're subscribed if you aren't.
Okay, so I'm gonna come down to one
of these other archetypes and let's use to-do list here.
But I'm actually not going to give it a to-do list prompt.
I wanna give it just a different prompt.
So let's see what happens
if I tell it to give me a list of games.
So give a list of the 10 Best Super Nintendo games
and if Super Mario Brothers Three is not on there
then that'll be correct
'cause that's an NES game. (laughs)
Of all time.
And let's see what it gives us here.
All right, we got Super Mario World,
we got Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past,
we got Super Metroid, Corona Trigger.
And this was interesting to me because
as somebody who likes to make listical videos
or likes to just be
very comprehensive with topics that I'm covering
my immediate thought with this list generation
tool here is can I use this to basically generate lists
of things that I might not know about regarding a topic?
Okay, onto example number three, I wanna show you
how the AI can actually generate comparison tables.
So let's create a page for that, call it a table.
And we could do this pros and cons list
but I found that normally this just creates
like a bullet list of things.
So I'm gonna do an empty page
and then I'm gonna do slash help me write
and this you'll notice is a change to the block menu.
If I scroll down
I have all the blocks that I normally have,
but at the top I have all my AI assist options
and I can go to more for all these archetypes as well.
So we're gonna do help me write
and then I'm gonna do a comparison table.
So I'm gonna tell it to create a table actually comparing
let's do mountain bikes, road bikes, and I wanna see
if I can get an additional column out of it.
So let's do unicycles as well. (laughs)
Clearly the best option
if you are a clown.
Okay, so yeah, we get suspension,
no on road, no on unicycle, that is correct.
I wonder if there's like unicycles with suspension
and if people who do like downhill off road uni-cycling.
(lively rock music)
So yeah, you can actually generate a table
with the AI and I wonder what happens if we try again
if we're gonna get more detail here.
Let's see, that time I actually didn't even create a table.
So it does look like this is not an exact science.
Oh, here we go.
The third time I tried it, I did get more detail.
I think I got fewer rows but more detail per row.
And that's actually gonna lead me
to the fourth example I wanna go through in this video
because there is a continue writing option
which can add even more detail here.
So the first little, I guess sub example
of that feature is I'll just see what happens
if I hit continue writing for this table here.
And it looks like, yeah, I've got a new sentence
about this table here and it looks
like it adds a bit more detail
than was in the table earlier.
Okay, so let's go into our fifth example here
where we are going to fix some poor grammar and spelling.
And I'm gonna need an example of poor grammar and spelling.
So let's create a brand new page for that.
(keyboard clicking)
And actually (laughs) I like that better.
Let's leave that there.
And let's say I've had one too many
before I film videos this morning.
So I type a sentence like this.
All right, we're keeping the er here.
I is the bst spellar in the world.
So now if I highlight this
and I'll show you two tricks here.
If I highlight it I now have this AI assist
little context menu.
Now I've got a few different options in here,
fix spelling and grammar, summarize and translate.
I'll show you these in a few minutes.
But also I can access the AI assist menu
from the block menu here and I can do the exact same thing.
So let's see what happens
if I fix spelling and grammar for this sentence.
I'm the best speller in this world
and I'm also very good at grammar with an ar.
So that's pretty good.
And we have a few different options here.
We can try again if we don't like this
but we can also replace the badly spelled sentence
or we can insert it beneath, which will keep our original.
And sometimes you might actually wanna do that.
Okay, example number six is gonna be translations
and we're gonna do something here
called translation roundtripping.
So I'll create a page, let's call it that.
And essentially we're gonna have the AI translate a sentence
into multiple different languages.
And then from the final, and we'll go back to English.
And I'm gonna do it this way because I personally
do not speak anything other than English.
And I guess guess kind of JavaScript at this point.
And I wanna see just how good it is
at translating a sentence into multiple languages.
And then back to English.
So gimme a second, I'll type up a sentence here.
(keyboard clicking)
All right, so now I have a sentence here.
If I highlight it, just like before
I can go to our little AI assist menu
and now I can translate it to any of these languages.
So let's first go to Japanese and see what it gives us here.
Like I said before
I cannot read any of this for a while back, 10 years ago,
I actually was able to read katakana and hiragana,
but all this kanji can't read it at all.
So let's go with insert.
So we keep our original sentence.
And now let's send this to let's do Spanish and
we'll do maybe five languages total or maybe four.
And then English will be the last one.
So we'll insert there.
And then let's round trip that one.
Or I guess translate that one to German.
Just picking these at random here.
Let me know if you speak Japanese or what was this one?
Spanish or German, if these are correct.
But the one I am very interested in now is what
happens when we basically send this back to English.
So my name is Thomas Frank
and I like weightlifting and programming computers.
I have special skills that make me the worst nightmare
of all clowns in the world.
So yeah, I mean it's not the exact same phrasing
but it's got all the same meaning
and pretty much nothing is lost in translation
which is extremely impressive.
So I'll go ahead and insert that.
And let's move on to our next example
which is going to be the one I'm super excited about
writing programming code. (epic electronic music)
So let's call this one programming code.
And something that I'm working on right now
is getting information from service called PokeAPI
which you can find over at pokeapi.co.
And I'm using this as the basis for a notion API tutorial
which we are actually editing right now,
it'll be out next week.
So I wanna see can Notion AI write code
that will pull information about a Pokemon
and can we actually run that code.
So I have an instance of a glitch project.
This is basically an online programming environment
where you can write code and then actually run it.
So I'm gonna delete everything that's here
and we are going to write a prompt
inside of Notion and see just what we can get.
So I know that I want to make a call to the Pokemon api
I wanna get information
about let's say five different Pokemon.
And then I want it to output the name, the weight,
and the height of that Pokemon in the terminal.
So let's do help me write
and I know this works 'cause I've tested it before
but we're gonna go
through the prompt writing process together
so you can see how I'm actually thinking through things.
So one thing that I will mention up front
is you have to be a little bit specific
with what you want it to do because if you're very
vague it may not give you a code that's actually gonna work.
So for example, if I write
give me JavaScript code
that gets information about Charizard.
In my experience, this is too broad
and I might actually get something here
but this is like literally just getting information
about Charizard, which means
that the AI model's data set actually has information
about Pokemon, but this isn't what I want.
I want an actual JavaScript code that is gonna
be able to make this API call.
So once again, help me write is what I'm gonna use here
and let's get a bit more specific here in JavaScript.
First thing I'm gonna do is actually require an API
calling library and I'm gonna use Axios.
So let's just say define a constant Axios
and set its value to require Axios.
And I found that this is the only bit
of like actual kind of coding I have to do.
The rest of it I can literally type out in plain English.
So the next thing I wanna do is create a function.
And because we're using Axios
I do know it has to be asynchronous.
Don't worry if you don't know anything about that
I'm just going to say create an asynchronous function
and then inside it create a for loop.
I basically want to create a loop
that will call the Poke API five times
so I can get information about the first five Pokemon.
So I'm gonna say create a for loop with an initial value
of one and a max value of five inside that loop.
Use Axios to call the Poke API
and get information about the Pokemon
whose number corresponds to the value of i.
So what this should do is basically call the PokeAPI
for whatever the current number in the loop is,
which is pretty sweet.
And then finally we'll say console log
that Pokemon's species.name value,
it's height and it's weight.
Run the function.
And I want this to be outputted in a code block
so it's formatted correctly
and so I can easily copy and paste it into Glitch.
So this is a really useful trick here.
I can actually say start with and then in quotes
I'll do three back ticks and end with same thing.
Quotes three back ticks.
I'm gonna copy this to my clipboard just in case I lose it.
But let's go ahead and generate and see what it gives us
(magical bells)
And look at that.
So I'm not gonna go through what this code does
but I'm looking at it right now
and I'm fairly certain that it is going to work.
So let's go ahead and copy it and we'll go back over
to Glitch and we're gonna paste it in our little area here.
And now I'm gonna open the terminal
and let's do a full page terminal actually.
So I'll clear this.
And if I run node index.js
it's basically going to run the code
that we have on this page here.
And if it is correctly written, we should get information
about the first five Pokemon.
So let's see what happened.
And there it is, Bulbasaur, height seven, weight 69.
Ivysaur, height 10, weight 130.
This is amazing.
I mean I can literally in plain English tell it what I want
and as long as I have a decent understanding
of the structure of the code, it's going to
create the actual code with the correct syntax for me.
And that is gonna bring me onto
onto I believe example number eight
which is the most finicky one, but it does work sometimes.
And that's solving math equations.
So we'll create a a page for math equations
and if you give it a very simple math equation
it's going to do just fine.
So value two plus five times eight, this is fairly simple.
So let's do what is this should work.
Let's just see for a second
Two plus five times eight is 42, so that's correct.
But I have found in my testing
that if you give it more complex problems
it doesn't always know the answer
and it won't tell you that it doesn't know the answer.
It'll just very confidently output like the wrong answer.
So I guess right now the AI model is a proud member
of the sub reddit confidently incorrect.
And let me give you an example of that.
So let's do help me write
and I'm gonna do what is the,
let's do surface area of a sphere with radius,
let's do radius of 20 and we'll generate this
and then we're gonna check it against Wolfram Alpha here.
So surface area of a sphere with radius 20
is 1,256 square units.
So let's go over to Wolfram Alpha
and type in the exact same prompt.
Let me zoom in a little bit here first
so you can see what I'm doing.
And then we'll type in surface area.
All right, and Wolfram Alpha is never wrong.
So our result is 5026.55
or 1600 times Pi, which is not 1,256.
Now one thing that notions CTO actually told me is
that the prompt engine can often be more accurate
if you tell it. Let's think in steps.
So let's see what happens if I tell it.
Let's think in steps.
It may not be correct on this run,
but it should actually give me the steps
that it's gonna be using.
Here we go, okay.
Plugging the values we get.
We got the actual answer here.
So it does seem that if you tell it to think in steps
you are gonna get a more accurate answer
and you can go even further than that.
So let's do it one more time.
I'm gonna do surface area of a sphere with radius 20.
Let's do what is, because this is Jeopardy today.
I'll do let's think in steps
and format the answer as a list.
So this is an example
of additional information you can provide
to the prompt to get it to output the way you want.
And we should get, yep, there it is.
Bullet list answers
which are much easier to read though, once again,
we got this answer that doesn't really match up
to the answer we're getting here.
And I'm not quite sure
if this is a correct answer that is just expressed
in a different way.
I'll do it, try again here just to see
or if it is actually wrong.
But I guess my conclusion here is sometimes
you are going to get the right answer
the more complex the problem
the less reliable the answer is going to be.
Okay, let's go onto our next example
which will be summarizing long bits of text.
And I am going to pull some text from one of my blog posts
and let's just copy this entire how memory works subsection
of the article here.
So I'm gonna bring this into Notion, call this memory,
and at the bottom of this we can type slash summarize
and we should get a summary
of the entire article right here.
So we have brain has three types
of memory processes, sensory, working memory, long term,
and yeah, it's got a pretty decent
three to four sentence summary of the entire article.
But what's even cooler.
What's even cooler is we can summarize specific sections
of our text as well.
So right now we've got a summary of the entire article.
What if I just want a summary of long-term memory
well I can select that text and
in this AI assist area I can summarize just this selection
and I can get a summary specifically on long-term memory.
So I'll go ahead and insert right there.
That's my summary and that my friends is really cool.
And that is actually going to bring us
over to our final example, which is on my list here.
And that's going to be getting answers
to questions that you have directly inside a Notion.
So this is kind of like a more of a maybe a novelty example
but let's just call this one, I dunno, oracle.
And we can now use the AI assistant to
get information that we don't really have right now.
So for example, what if I write something like
who won the 2018 US Open Men's Division?
And this should be Novak, so let's see if it gets it right.
Oh, and it actually gives us quite a bit more information
than I was expecting, but this is another good example
of what you can do with these AI generation tools.
If you are in your workflow, your writing stuff,
and you're like, I don't know the answer to this question
you could always go over to Google, you could search it up
but it looks like you could also get pretty
decent information directly from Notion AI.
And that means you can stay in the same context
you can stay in Notion
you can keep doing your writing workflow
and if you need to you can go verify information later.
But this is a great way to pull information
in on the fly again, without leaving Notion.
Let's go through a few of the different FAQ's
and questions you might have about Notion AI.
So right now, again, this is an alpha
so there is a wait list.
Apparently the wait list is pretty long right now
but if you wanna get access to it, I would recommend getting
on that wait list sooner rather than later.
And at the bottom of this page
which I will have linked the description down below,
there is an FAQ.
So a few of the questions that I had,
number one is this gonna cost money.
Right now they say that it is free and alpha
but it's likely gonna cost extra in the future.
That is not surprising to me given
that I believe they are using Open AI's GPT3
and that is not an open source machine learning algorithm
and it costs money for them to use the API.
So definitely makes sense
but hopefully it's gonna be something that's not
too expensive or maybe it's even rolled into paid plans
and you just get like a certain amount of credits.
That would be pretty cool.
The other one I was specifically curious
about myself is how is data going to be used?
So I'll break that down really quickly.
I actually talked to them directly about this.
First and foremost, you actually have to opt-in
to use AI in the first place.
I'll show you that really quick.
If I go over to Notion, say you get access to the feature
you would actually have to go
to your settings and members here.
And then in the upgrade or plans area
there is currently this add-on for Notion AI.
So you actually have to turn it on manually
if you want it to work in your workspace.
And even once you do, they do state
that they don't allow third parties or partners
to use data for training their models for any other purpose.
And also they will not use your data to
train their own models
unless you give them express permission to do so.
I was specifically looking for that when I got access
to this feature, so I'm very glad to see it.
And there are program terms, again
you can check this page out in the description down below
if you are curious about any of the other FAQ's here.
So that is about gonna do it
for this little first look video.
Hopefully you found this interesting.
Let me know in the comments below
or over on Twitter at TomFrankly,
if you have any other questions
about this or Notion in general.
And if you wanna learn Notion, if you are a Notion beginner,
or you're looking to level up your skills
become a Notion power user
definitely go over to ThomasJFrank.com/fundamentals.
That's where you're gonna find my completely open,
free, and comprehensive Notion beginner's course
that will take you from the complete basics of
making new pages and writing text
to more advanced things like page layout
and linking pages and even Notion databases.
The Notion Databases lesson in particular
is extremely comprehensive,
goes through filters and relations
and templates and formulas, all kinds of good stuff.
And if you wanna go even further at NotionFormulaGuide.com
I have complete documentation.
Took me four months of my life this year to write this up.
Complete documentation on every aspect of Notion Formulas.
Literally every function, operator, and constant
has a page with their syntax
and example formulas and even an example database where
you can see all the formulas working in action.
And if you wanna make sure you never miss anything
that I publish about Notion,
any of these kind of cool guides
or new templates I'm creating
you can go over to my website, ThomasJFrank.com
and in the Learn Notion area up here in the header
there's a newsletter link
and you can get on my Notion Tips newsletter
to get infrequent updates about
new templates that I'm working on,
new tutorial releases, and lots of other cool stuff.
So join that if you like.
Thanks again for watching.
Make sure you follow me on Twitter @TomFrankly
if you wanna interact with me there
and I'll see you in the next video.
(upbeat outro music)