Adding the “AI” to Notebook.ai

Supercharging Notebook.ai’s document editor with opt-in artificial intelligence and document analysis

When I first started Notebook.ai, I had a grand vision for a ridiculously intelligent worldbuilding notebook that would assist human creators in designing and fleshing out the fictional worlds in their heads.

Until now, however, Notebook.ai has been pretty basic; I’ve focused solely on creating the best worldbuilding tool out there for everyone, with little focus on the “AI” in the name. Our favorite smart worldbuilding notebook focused primarily on fleshing out the pieces of our worlds — characters, locations, towns, countries, governments, creatures, religions, and more — while neglecting the possibilities of how modern technology could actually understand those concepts and assist both in the worldbuilding and the writing processes.

I’m super excited to introduce a ton of new features in Notebook.ai now available that focus on using artificial intelligence to understand your Notebook.ai pages and augment your writing process.

Analyze your writing with IBM Watson’s AI

Speaking of grand visions, I cannot express how excited I am to finally see this dream become a reality. Notebook.ai’s editor has evolved over the years from a simple text field to unlimited rich text documents — and now includes rich analysis of your writing style and world.

Know how long it takes all kinds of readers to finish your story.

IBM Watson is known for beating the top human contestants in Jeopardy — and that same machine learning technology is now available to analyze your writing in Notebook.ai. There’s so much to talk about here but I’ll keep it short with screenshots. You should definitely go check it out for yourself, though.

See easy your story is to read: computed with five different readability metrics

Measure the readability of your story with industry-standard metrics.

Measure your lexical richness to make conscious decisions about word choice.

See your characters’ emotional ranges and how they feel to readers

The analysis will automatically detect the characters and locations in your story, but you can also manually add any page you’ve already created in Notebook.ai to link it to the analysis. If a detected character matches the name of a page you’ve already created, it’ll automatically link the two for you. Simply click on any character to look into their emotional range.

See what each character’s emotional range is just by clicking on them.

Determine which emotion each character is likely — or not likely — to express.

Compare your writing style to typical writing or published authors

See how your readability stacks up to other famous pieces.

Peek beneath the hood at the nitty-gritty parts of speech and how you compare to average writing or Hemingway.

There’s a ton more available in the document analysis and there’s a ton more I want to share in this blog post, so I’ll leave things there. Of course, if you have any feedback on your analysis or suggestions on what else you’d like to see, there’s a form at the end for you to leave suggestions — I can’t wait to see where this feature goes from here!

Since this feature runs on IBM’s Watson supercomputers, it’s currently restricted to users with a Premium subscription. However, any analysis you generate will be available to you forever, regardless of an active subscription.

Seamlessly reference your world while writing

In addition to analyses, the document editor also received a fresh facelift and several new features to help while you write.

Add your documents to a universe

You can now add documents to a universe just like any other page in your notebook. This lets you inherit privacy settings from your universe when sharing documents, as well as filter your documents by universe to just see ones relevant to the world you’re working on right now.

Quickly reference your world while writing

This might be the feature I’m most excited about. Whenever an analysis detects that an already-existing page in your notebook is being referenced in your document, it’ll create a quick reference for that page directly in the document editor.

Quickly reference every aspect of any piece of your world without losing your writing momentum.

These quick references show up as transparent tabs on the right side of the screen and, when clicked, open an unobtrusive view of that entire page without you having to leave your document. The entirety of your worldbuilding notebook is now immediately available to you while writing.

These quick reference tabs are also automatically created whenever you @mention a page while writing, and you can also just add them manually.

This feature is currently in private beta available to Premium users only, but I plan to make it available to all users after a short beta period. As far as I know, no other editor does anything like this and I want to make sure everyone who wants this functionality has access to it.

Link documents directly from worldbuilding pages

Whenever you add a page to a document, we automatically create the reverse association as well. You’ll see a new “Documents” tab on your characters, locations, and other pages that links to the documents those characters appear in.

Of course, lots of other improvements everywhere

I’m always improving Notebook.ai and listening to suggestions. Also included in this update is a ton of quality of life improvements and small bugfixes around the rest of the site. If you’ve got any other suggestions for how to improve the world’s best smart worldbuilding notebook, please tell me! :)

Happy worldbuilding!

— Andrew