Key Features and Comparative Analysis of AI Tools for Personalized Content Generation
Evaluating the Efficacy of AI Tools: Contextual Integration and Response Generation
Recently, many AI tools have emerged promising to enhance your personal knowledge. They claim to respond just like you would or provide a context that mimics your style.
So how does one judge their efficacy? To evaluate these tools, we can consider two main aspects — their ability to handle and integrate context, and their capacity to generate relevant and coherent responses. For the first aspect, we can look at how these tools incorporate the user’s context into their operations. For example, do they take into account the user’s past interactions, preferences, and style? Are they able to effectively build upon the context provided to them, or do they merely function in isolation, ignoring the rich tapestry of information that the user’s context provides?
Moving on to the second aspect, the quality of the responses generated by these tools is paramount. We need to assess whether the responses are relevant to the query and the context, and whether they are clear and logically structured. A tool that produces creative and engaging responses could be seen as more effective than one that generates straightforward, predictable replies. However, this doesn’t mean that creativity should come at the expense of relevance or coherence. The best tools find a balance, delivering responses that are both interesting and useful.
This article aims to examine three tools: Mem.ai, the Smart Connections plugin for Obsidian, and ChatGPT4. We’ll be focusing on their ability to generate medium length and short form content, for example an article or a blog post etc.
Leveraging AI Tools for Article Writing with a Personal Touch:
What should such AI tools provide?
- Contextual Understanding: The AI tool should be able to understand and integrate the user’s context into its operations. It should consider the user’s past interactions, preferences, and writing style to deliver personalized assistance.
- Intelligent Note Organization: The AI tool should have the capability to organize the user’s notes efficiently and automatically. It should save the user’s work as they write and categorize it appropriately for easy retrieval later.
- Assistance in Idea Generation: The tool should offer AI writing assistance to help generate fresh ideas and structure the content effectively. This can be particularly useful when the user is facing writer’s block or needs inspiration.
- Access to Relevant Past Work: The tool should have a feature that automatically surfaces relevant past documents or notes or emails etc (from other sources) while the user is working on a related topic. This can help in connecting ideas and adding depth to the current work.
- Robust Search Feature: The AI tool should have a powerful search feature that can help the user find specific past documents or ideas. This can be invaluable when the user needs to track down certain information for their current work.
- Interactive Chat Feature: The tool should offer a chat feature that allows the user to discuss topics, seek answers to their queries, and generate content based on their past documents. This feature should be powered by advanced AI models, providing the user with a personalized assistant capable of referencing all their past work.
- Content Curation: The tool should provide the user with the ability to curate their content as per their preferences. This can involve creating collections of related notes or documents and adding to them over time.
- Continual Learning and Adaptation: The AI tool should be capable of learning from the user’s interactions and adapting its operations accordingly. It should continually improve its understanding of the user’s context and preferences to deliver increasingly personalized assistance.
The above features can be grouped according to their complexity as follows:
Basic Features:
- Contextual Understanding: The AI tool should be able to understand and integrate the user’s context into its operations.
- Intelligent Note Organization: The tool should automatically organize and save the user’s work.
- Robust Search Feature: The tool should have a powerful search feature for the user to find specific past documents or ideas.
Intermediate Features:
- Assistance in Idea Generation: The tool should offer AI writing assistance to help generate fresh ideas and structure the content effectively.
- Access to Relevant Past Work: The tool should automatically surface relevant past documents or notes while the user is working on a related topic.
- Content Curation: The tool should allow the user to curate their content as per their preferences, which can involve creating collections of related notes or documents.
Advanced Features:
- Interactive Chat Feature: The tool should offer a chat feature that allows the user to discuss topics, seek answers to their queries, and generate content based on their past documents.
- Continual Learning and Adaptation: The AI tool should adapt and learn from the user’s interactions to deliver increasingly personalized assistance.
I explored a variety of tools that offer the above features and finally chose these three — Mem.ai, Smart Connections+Obsidian and ChatGPT4.
Mem.ai:
Overview of Mem.ai
Mem.ai uses AI to create a self-organizing workspace for efficient note management and knowledge discovery. As you write, the AI saves and organizes your notes, while its powerful search feature helps retrieve past notes. The platform also offers a personalized chat assistant, powered by GPT-4, which can generate content based on your notes. Additionally, Mem harnesses large language models like GPT-3, fine-tuned for specific use cases, and technologies like OpenAI embeddings models and Pinecone vector search to aid knowledge discovery and connection.
How Mem.ai works:
- Embeddings Storage: Mem transforms documents into a format suitable for embeddings and stores them in Pinecone’s vector database, which allows for quick similarity queries1.
- Dynamic Updates: As documents are edited, Mem continuously updates the embeddings in the Pinecone index to keep the information current.
- Smart Results: For search queries, Mem creates embeddings using OpenAI’s models and queries Pinecone to find the most relevant documents based on cosine similarity scores2.
- Similar Mem: When viewing a document, Mem fetches its embedding from Pinecone, then finds and surfaces the most similar documents, aiding in knowledge discovery and connection3.
- These functionalities enable Mem to organize information effectively and surface relevant knowledge when needed.
What is it good for?
Mem.ai is great for writing blog posts, especially when you need to pull information from different sources. For example, I wrote a recent article on popular Indian festival called Sankranthi using three different notes from three separate collections. One note was from a research collection about Sankranthi, another was a personal reflection on kite flying from a collection called ‘Personal Me’, and the third was a note on the movie ‘Million Dollar Baby’ from a collection named ‘Random Notes’.
You can use mem.chat for many purposes, especially for asking and answering questions across your knowledge base.
It also works well when you want to create a spontaneous LinkedIn post or tweet that draws from your existing knowledge base.
Smart connections plug-in + Obsidian
Overview of Smart connections plug-in +Obsidian:
The Smart Connections plugin for Obsidian is equipped with several features. The Smart Chat feature transforms your notes into interactive conversations, enabling you to retrieve information and explore ideas through an AI-powered chat interface. The Smart View feature offers real-time relevant note suggestions, aiding in organization and uncovering hidden connections between your notes. Within Smart View, there’s a Dynamic Code Block feature that enables dynamic content display within your notes. Lastly, the External Connections feature allows you to link external sources and content to your notes, enhancing information retrieval.
Here’s how Smart Chat finds information from Obsidian notes.
The Smart Connections plug-in works using a process called HyDE. Basically, when you ask a question, Smart Connections identifies the top 20–30 notes in your vault that might hold the answer. These notes are then fed into the OpenAI GPT model which generates an answer based on this information. If your question covers a topic that is spread across more than these 20 or 30 notes, the answer might not include everything. So, to get the best results, it’s advisable to ask more specific questions. This way, the HyDE process can supply the most relevant notes to the GPT AI.
Note: To make it function, you need a key from the OpenAI API and you can choose various models.
What is it good for?
The Smart Connections plugin is particularly effective when you need to generate summaries from extensive notes within Obsidian, especially if you’re dealing with companion course content. The tool also offers retrieval across multiple notes, however, I’ve found it to be most efficient when working with a single note rather than a combination.
For instance, I once wrote a note about “Using Text Embeddings”. Later on, I needed to revisit the same topic. Using the tool, I was able to quickly recall what I had written earlier and expand on it, with the help of an additional note.
You can also do a folder-based work report with a variety of notes on it, as a good start.
If you’re satisfied with the response quality similar to ChatGPT, you can tweak the output using the next prompt.
‘’’Can you convert the above into a table?’’’
You have the ability to store chat conversations and access them later. You can also view the specific context that is sent to the AI model for analysis.
From what we’ve discussed above, both Mem.ai and Smart Connections use RAG techniques to give a personal touch to your content.
ChatGPT-4
If you’re unsure about the connection between your notes but still want a clear output, ChatGPT4 is the perfect tool.
Let’s say you want to create a profile of a person using their Wikipedia page, recent news about them, and some brief notes you’ve made. In such a case, ChatGPT4 is your best bet.
ChatGPT4 is also useful when you want to polish the output from Mem.ai or Smart Connections, making it more understandable and clear.
Summary:
When you need brute force, not sure which context you need for your content, ChatGPT4 is the way to do. Long notes, with a variety of elements like code etc, Smart Connections does the job. If you are looking at building a knowledge base and like to dig into past context, then Mem.ai is good.
The ideal solution would be a single tool that can perfectly mimic your personal writing style and effectively utilize your knowledge base. However, currently, we may have to work with a combination of different tools to achieve this.
Mem.ai shows promise with many upcoming features like email integration
Also, as the above article pointed out, as the context window starts becoming bigger and bigger there could be a way to sidestep RAG completely and build on content dump and custom instructions.
Whichever might be the end result, a single tool or multitude of them, one thing is clear, data is the oil. So, keep thinking…keep writing…keep collating.
In conclusion, there are many AI writing tools out there, each with its own strengths. Mem.ai is great for organizing your workspace, Smart Connections can turn notes into interactive chats, and ChatGPT4 is excellent at making clear content from different notes. But the ideal tool would combine these features, creating a personalized writing experience that respects your unique style. Until we find that perfect tool, the best approach is to try different ones and see what works best for you. And remember, no matter what tool you use, the most important thing is to keep learning, keep refining your writing, and make your words matter.
Related links:
- Building the Self-Organizing Workspace at Mem: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/series/wild/mem-semantic-search/
- Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labels: http://boston.lti.cs.cmu.edu/luyug/HyDE/HyDE.pdf
- Unveiling the Crystal Ball: 2024 Data and AI Trends: https://sanjmo.medium.com/unveiling-the-crystal-ball-2024-data-and-ai-trends-74164da31cf8
- Fall Roadmap Update | The Memo: https://get.mem.ai/blog/fall-roadmap-update-2023
