Meet the writerbots of Indent Labs
A smart lineup of assistants to help your writing process
It’s no secret I love using AI as a tool to help me work faster — or better — wherever I can. I’ve been working on Notebook.ai and other AI-adjacent tools for authors for almost a decade now and have collected quite an assortment of helpful bots in our Discord server for writers.
So I thought I’d introduce you to the crew. These bots are all public, free, and ready for you to use, too!
Author-Maton the Wordsmith
Meet Author-Maton, a bot to help with your wordsmith woes.
What can he help you with?
Looking up definitions
Finding synonyms and antonyms
Finding rhyming words
Finding derived terms and phrases of a word
Looking up the etymology of a word
Basil the Artist
Basil is here to help you visualize the ideas in your head. Just describe whatever you’re envisioning and he’ll do his best to come up with something. The more specific you are, the better!
When you have a few designs, you can “re-roll” for four more random ones from your prompt or generate four variations of any specific one you like (with the V1, V2, V3, or V4 buttons).
And finally, when you find one you like, you can upscale it to full resolution with the U1, U2, U3, or U4 buttons.
Of course, the server also has a Midjourney bot (with very similar controls!), but Midjourney requires a paid subscription to use, while Basil is completely free.
BookBot the Librarian
For those of us who love reading (so… everyone?), Bookbot is here to help with your book-related tasks — such as looking up any book’s details with /search and a title.
BookBot will also provide a list of matching books if you search with /list, or provide book recommendations for you with /recommend.
Brainstormer the Theorycrafter
Whether you need to research a topic or just want to bounce what-if ideas around, Brainstormer is always there to help. Just ask him a question by mentioning him in any channel and he’ll create a thread to brainstorm with you in.
Just click into your personal thread to see your in-depth answer:
You can even ask follow-up questions and fall completely down the theorycrafting rabbit hole in your thread; he’ll respond to everything you say in the conversation.
Challenger the Nitpick
Challenger is a lot like Brainstormer, but can be a little more argumentative. His purpose is to get you talking about your world or story and then point out inconsistencies or flaws in your worldbuilding or plot. You can start talking to him immediately by just mentioning @Challenger on Discord.
If Challenger can’t think of any flaws to point out in what you’ve told him, he’ll ask you more questions about your world — specifically, he’ll ask questions that he thinks many authors would get tripped up over and create inconsistencies from. The more you tell him in a thread, the more he’ll have to go off of when making sure everything fits logically together!
See if you can keep him asking questions instead of pointing out how illogical your world or plot is! :)
Sprinto the Encourager
When you’re ready to start writing, check out Sprinto’s sprint feature! Sprints are like timed writing challenges you can do by yourself or with friends; you’re given a set amount of time and it’s up to you to write as much as you can until the timer goes off.
You can start a writing sprint with one of these handy commands (or choose your own parameters if you prefer):
/sprint (will start a default 15-minute sprint starting in 60 seconds)/sprint 10 (will start a 10-minute sprint starting in 60 seconds)/sprint 30 5 (will start a 30-minute sprint starting in 5 minutes)
Whether you’re starting your own sprint or joining someone else’s, you can also set your initial word count with /join word-count 1234.
After the sprint, you’ll have 3 minutes to update your word count with /words. When everyone has updated their word count, you’ll get a nice little scoreboard for how many words everyone in that sprint wrote!
Tristan the Worldbuilder
Tristan’s a simple guy, here to help you add more characters to your world. To get started with him, just type /generate character. This will give you a customizable template that you can choose fields to generate with.
When you’ve selected a few fields for your template, Tristan will automatically fill out a character for you!
With that, you can generate more and more characters using the same template with a single click or go back and change your template any time.
Other bots on the server
We also have several other bots on the server that are more fun than productive. Everyone deserves to take a break and relax every once in a while, right?
Here’s a very quick rundown of the stragglers:
GarticBOT
This bot allows you to play Gartic in Discord. To start a game, just type g.gartic or g.restart in the #gartic channel. During a game of Gartic, you’ll be shown a hand-drawn image and must guess what it’s supposed to be an image of. You have until the timer ends, so guess as much as you want!
You can also start a brand new game of Gartic in a specific category with g.gartic CATEGORY. You can choose between: animals, foods, flags, cartoons, movies, objects, pokemon, or verbs.
Heartboard
This bot tracks blue-heart emoji reacts across the server. If any message receives 3 or more blue hearts as reacts, the bot will automatically reshare that comment to the #heartboard channel. It’s a little best-of celebration of the community.
Midjourney
Does Midjourney need an introduction? You can generate images with it in #midjourney-bot, but you’ll need your own paid Midjourney subscription. If you want a free alternative, I’d recommend @Basil in #notebook-basil instead.
There’s always more to explore
These are just the main features of each of these bots; many of them support other features as well. You can always see what commands are available from a bot by typing a slash in Discord and clicking the icon of the bot on the left you want to see commands for:
With that handy little skill under your belt, I recommend you play around and see what else your favorite bots can do!
And, of course, if you have recommendations for other Discord bots that would be helpful to a writing community, I’d love to hear them!
Happy worldbuilding!
