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Insight on digital media from the team at LexBlog, Inc.

Why we built Lou the way we did

The thought process behind our user-friendly AI-powered publishing assistant
White gear on pink flatlay
LUM3N, Unsplash
November 17, 2023

Artificial intelligence is not new. Not even a little bit. While large-language models have been the buzz for going on a year now, we’re been working with “AI” in our everyday lives for a long time.

I use this example every time I demo Lou, including on our recent webinar—if you use Spotify, go to the search bar and type in “mix for you.” You will see an absolutely wild list of playlists for genres (???) you didn’t know existed.

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There are some weird ones that will show up—Vampire Mix??—but there are also some pretty useful ones. If I’m thinking “I want some chill 70s music,” Spotify has a 70s Chill Rock Mix ready for me.

That’s AI.

And we’ve been using AI in music for a long time, at least since Pandora internet radio came on the scene almost 20 years ago.

AI is everywhere, even if you don’t think you’re using AI.

Use Google Maps or Waze to navigate through traffic? That’s AI. Ever notice the XY% Match text next to a movie on Netflix? That’s AI. The so finely-tuned For You page on TikTok that’s almost spooky. You bet that’s AI.

Just because a tool is using AI or other bleeding-edge technology doesn’t mean it has to feel like it. It can just be a tool that works well in accomplishing the task at hand.

That’s what we tried to do with Lou.

If you’ve never used ChatGPT, CoPilot or another large-language model operated through a chat interface, we wanted to make sure this tool made doing that easy. Or, even better, we wanted to make it feel like you weren’t even using new technology at all.

Well, it’d be new—and it’d do things you were never able to do with your blog, but it wouldn’t feel like something you had to learn.

If you need some help with blog post ideas, just go ahead and click blog post ideas and we’ll fire a few your way.

If you just can’t figure out a good title for a post you wrote (or one you’re posting as a marketer for one of your lawyers), hit that button and we’ll tee a few up. If you need some help writing an email to let a client know about your post—or never thought to do so—we’ve got a tool that’ll get that drafted with a simple click.

Often times, these AI-assisted writing tools try to do everything at once, or everything for everyone.

We wanted to go the other way.

Instead of a writing dashboard that feels like the cockpit of a plane, with more tone options than you knew existed and a never-ending range of output formats, we were able to focus on the people we work with and the type of content they produce.

We help you write and post blog posts. We built Lou to help you whether or not you’re a blogger yourself or a marketing/bizdev professional editing and posting lawyers’ content. Really—those were the two user groups we focused on from the jump, and we’re going to continue to listen to them as more and more folks give Lou a shot.

But at the same time, if you are already a prompting pro who uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, we got you.

Just hit Ask Lou and you’ll get a familiar chat interface to ask anything you want, and can even plug in “this post” to have it reference the content you’ve already written.

You could, say, do something like this:

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To wrap things up, AI is far from new—it’s been subtly enhancing our lives for years. With Lou, we’ve aimed to bring that same seamless integration to your blogging process. Whether you’re a blogger, a marketing professional, or a ChatGPT enthusiast, Lou is here to help. If you’re curious and ready to give it a go, feel free to reach out to me at colin@lexblog.com. Let’s make the most of what AI can offer to our writing.

Nailed it. Thanks, Lou.