This is a fully customisable AI assistant I've been using for a few months now. I made a video
about it before, but there are more awesome things it can do now. So let me show you how to use it.
This video is sponsored by TextCortex.
So this is a personalised AI assistant. It's not just for writing, but also for
reading, researching, note-taking, brain-storming or just a casual chat.
You can use it as a web app, a browser extension or as a desktop app. I like the desktop app
because I can use it anywhere on my computer. But since I'm on my browser all the time,
I use the browser extension more. Anyway, it comes with many features
like Zeno Chat, Zeno Assist, Toolbar, Templates, Personas and Knowledge bases.
Just like ChatGPT, TextCortex lets you talk to AI. But what makes it different is how customisable
it is. You can tweak how it responds to your queries like which model and language to use,
which persona and knowledge base for it to use - I'll get in to that in a bit - and also which
source of information to use. So if you want it to find the latest information on a topic,
you can let it to use the Internet. I often use Reddit because there's lots of useful information
there. So by setting the source to it, it can find me relevant information from there which saves me
a lot of time. If I need to see the original source, I can just click the reference to see
it. The same goes for Youtube. There's so much useful information there, this is a big time-saver
because you don't have to switch between different platforms or remember those google search tricks.
Also, if you're a student or academic, you can choose Scholar as the data source so it can
find things from academic journals and papers. This will not be enough for proper researching,
but at least it will give you an idea of what's out there.
To make things even easier, it also has a marketplace for templates you
can use right away. There are ones for almost everything - from marketing,
sales, content creation to education. Say, you want to write SEO optimised
articles for your website. There's a good template for that. So you can install it
and just follow the instructions. And you will have a nice looking article in a few minutes.
If you like, you can create your own templates. For example, I often use this prompt to break
down a topic I want to learn into smaller chunks and turn them into a study plan. So instead of
typing this in each time, I can just create a template and reuse it whenever I want. Now,
all I have to do is to select the template and enter the subject I want to study.
But this is pretty standard and many AI apps can do it already. What TextCortex does differently
is that you can personalise your AI. That's where the Personas and Knowledge bases come in.
Essentially, personas are the different roles that the AI can play depending on your needs. If you
code a lot, you can get some help from Linus the programmar. Or if you write a lot of blog posts,
you can choose Hemingwai. If you need someone to vent to, you can pick Theresa the therapist.
There are many more for different purposes. This way, you can get the best results for
what you want to do. But if you want to create a new AI persona you can talk to,
you can just create a new one. You can even choose the tone such as persuasive,
eloquent, technical and so on, as well as reading ease and sentence length.
What this means is that you can even create a persona that sounds like you. You just need to
provide some examples of your writing style and describe how you communicate. This is kind of a
trial and error process. You want to give it a try a few times and tweak the persona setting until
you're happy with the results. And once you're done, you can pick your persona whenever you want
to generate some text that fits your style. So remember we talked about using a template
to create SEO optimised articles? Well, by combining the template with your own persona,
you might be able to generate articles that don't look like they were written by an AI.
Now, to personalise your AI even further, you can use the knowledge base. I made a whole video about
this before, so I won't go into a lot of details. But it's a very useful feature that allows you to
create custom information sources for your AI. Most AI apps give you only pre-made information
sources like Wikipedia, Reddit and Youtube. But TextCortex goes one step further by letting you
train it with any data you want. It can be a specific website, PDF files or markdown files.
So if you give it your notes from your note-taking app,
it can learn what you know and become your study buddy or research partner,
or even write an article based on your notes. This is great because it's not going to generate
super generic writing like most AI apps do because it's based on your own knowledge.
Anyway, there are so many useful ways to use the knowledge base, so make sure to
watch my last video about it. What You Can Do with them
So by changing the combination of these parameters, you can get the best results
for what you want to do, which was previously difficult to do because you had to know good
prompts and also it wasn't possible to personalise your AI like this. But TextCortex simplifies this
process so anybody can get the most out of it. To give you an idea of how useful this can be,
let's say I'm writing a new Youtube script about TextCortex. What I can do is, first choose my own
persona to set my tone of voice; second, pick the knowledge base that has my notes
about TextCortex and their website; finally I can use a template that lets me enter the
topic of the video and generate a full script. The result is pretty good and it's very close
to what I would have written myself. So I just need to edit it a little bit to make it ready.
I don't think you guys would use it for writing Youtube video scripts, but there are so many ways
to use this, from writing company documents, doing research to building a landing page. It
might take some time to learn how to use it, so you might want to tinker with it a little bit.
By the way, this sidebar is not everything. On any website,
you can highlight any text to use the assistant. It can be useful when you
want to rewrite something, check grammar or spelling errors, summarise and many more.
Alright, that's all for today. Make sure to give it a try and let me know what you
think about it. If you're curious, you can check out the previous video I made about TextCortex.
Thanks for watching till the end! See you in the next one. Bye!