Product Labs🔬: Decoding Notion AI

What is Spark and Trouble’s favourite product? The unanimous answer is Notion. Their entire workspace is on Notion.

Notion, the popular all-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, and collaboration, just got smarter. Notion AI injects of course AI (the answer is in the name) to enhance your writing, brainstorming, and information retrieval within the platform.

What’s in it for you?

Notion has been a long-standing versatile productivity tool that combines note-taking, task management, and collaboration features, allowing users to create and organize documents, databases, wikis, and more within a single platform.

Notion AI is a built-in set of artificial intelligence features in Notion that helps you write better, brainstorm ideas, and find information faster.

Let’s start with the simple but super useful stuff before unveiling the total game-changer feature.

Notion AI provides a host of tools to help improve your writing or even provide you with a much-needed kickstart if you are facing writer’s block.

To trigger Notion AI, simply click “Ask AI” at the bottom of a new page or simply hit the “spacebar” at the beginning of any block.

There are five sections of AI assistance features:

• Generate from the page: Uses content already on the page

• Edit or Review in the page: Improves the content on the page

• Draft with AI: Pre-built templates to jumpstart your writing

• Insert custom AI block: Your personal AI writing assistant for any prompt

• Recents: List of your most recent prompts

Diving deep into our experience with each section

Generate from the page

This feature allows you to use what you have already written on a page and create new content. You can Summarize, Translate, Explain this or even Generate Action Items.

Edit or Review in the page

This is your perfect writing assistant. You wrote your thoughts, and need some AI flare to improve them…

You can ask Notion to Improve your writing and check Spelling/Grammar. If you have let your pen get away, writing a long piece and need to Make it short (or on the other side, Make it long), Notion AI is there at your service. You can also conveniently Change the Tone or just Simplify the Language.

Draft with AI

Notion provides a good list of most possible options for text content, to help you jumpstart your thinking. There is a range of options - from blog posts & press releases to meeting agendas or even brainstorming ideas.

Insert custom AI block

Want to spread your creative kicks beyond, the template options? Use the AI Block to write any prompt of your choice.

Though Notion is a productivity tool and does a lot beyond just a regular text editor, one of the main functions remains writing. Notion AI has clearly identified each step in the user journey to help a user write great content of any form. This is an excellent personification of the Jobs to be Done Framework.

If you still remember, we had said there is a totally game-changing feature we’ll talk about as well…

Drumrolls for Notion’s Q&A! 🥁🥁🥁

Notion's Q&A is like a supercharged search for your Notion workspace. Imagine a helpful AI assistant that reads everything in your notes, projects, and wikis. Ask it any question, and it will instantly find the answer, summarize relevant pages, or even explain complex concepts you've documented in Notion.

Whether it's brainstorming content, overcoming blank-page syndrome, or simply finding the perfect turn of phrase, Notion AI injects a spark of innovation into a workflow.

For Spark and Trouble, who constantly need to keep on top of each edition of “The Vision Debugged” and manage the complete workspace, Notion AI is almost like the third person on our team; it's our creative personal assistant that pushes us to think differently and provides a supercharge space to organize our work!

Whatcha Got There?!🫣

Buckle up, tech fam! Every week, our dynamic duo “Spark” ✨ & “Trouble”😉 share some seriously cool learning resources we stumbled upon.

You Asked 🙋‍♀️, We Answered ✔️

Question: AI models are often black boxes, for most users; this risk is especially magnified in sensitive domains like healthcare using models like Med-Gemini. How can this gap be bridged and improve transparency for all?

Answer: Great question and quite pressing given the unprecedented growth of AI applications in our lives. To bridge this gap, we can leverage Explainable AI (XAI) techniques.

For instance, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) can highlight the data points that most influenced Med-Gemini's decision. Additionally, visualizations like feature importance graphs can show how different patient characteristics contribute to the outcome. Interactive interfaces would allow users to explore how changes in data like age or medication history affect the model's prediction. Furthermore, educating patients and healthcare providers is essential. Patients should have the "right to explanation" for AI-driven decisions.