Notis

Has this ever happened to you? You're walking outside or driving in your car. You have an awesome idea, but you don't know where to put it. You don't want to open your note-taking app because this would take too long and it's too tedious. Of course, you could leave a voice note in your phone, but you will probably forget about it later or you are just too lazy to open it again and work through it. Now, what if you had an AI assistant where you could just leave a brain dump of your ideas as a voice message and it would immediately start working on it? The AI could write a blog post based on ideas you give it. It could draft an email to someone or schedule a calendar event while you are going about your daily life. Today, we will take a look at such an AI assistant called Notis. It integrates with your Notion workspace and hundreds of external apps. And the cool thing is you don't even have to install another app. You can just use it directly via WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage. You can send it text or voice messages. And it can also handle file attachments. It can search through websites, find information in your workspace and all your data. It can set up different automations to do stuff automatically and you can even call it and talk to it like a real person. In this video, we will set up Notis together and we will try it out and see how useful it actually is. Is it better than regular ChatGPT or Notion's own AI? Let's find out together. My name is Florian Walther and this is the AI tool corner where I review the latest AI software to find out which ones can actually improve our lives and businesses. The tool is called Notis. I will put a link to it into the video description below. And they offer a 7-day free trial so you can try it out yourself and see if this is useful to you. Let's click on start for free to start our free trial. Here you select what messaging app you want to use. You can actually switch later between these different apps as long as they are connected to the same phone number. In my case, that's WhatsApp. And then enter your phone number here. Click on sign up. Just follow the instructions it gives you. And then you do the onboarding directly in your messaging app. So it asks you what language you want to use, what your name is, and email address. Just give it all the answers it needs from you. Now, Notis needs Notion to work. Notion is a personal management app. It's really useful. I've been using it for years. If you don't use Notion yet, the AI assistant will actually give you a free template that you can use. It's basically a whole personal productivity system that you can just install in your Notion app, but you don't have to use this template. I don't use it because I already have a Notion workspace set up. And Notis works with any Notion workspace. Now eventually Notis will give you a link to your customer portal where you can manage your connected Notion databases and pages. So here under sync databases when we click this little plus icon we get redirected to the Notion authentication page. Here we select the pages that we want to give Notis access to. You can limit this to a few pages or connect all pages like I did. Allow access. And then here it shows all the databases in your workspace and you can enable the ones that you want to give Notis edit access to. So it can add new entries to this database, remove entries, update them and so on. And if you ever lose your portal link, just ask Notis for another one. Okay, let's see what cool things we can do with Notis. So here in my Notion workspace, I have this blog post database. Let's say I have some ideas in my head for a new blog post, but I'm out somewhere walking and I really don't want to pull out my phone and start typing notes there. We can just send Notis a voice message. Hey, Notis, draft a blog post on why people should use AI tools to organize their lives. Include the following points. AI understands you and can organize your messy thoughts. Um, AI can learn from your habits and become more useful over time. And AI can do whole tasks for you like online research or scheduling calendar events. Yeah. and add a few more good points yourself, please. Let's send this. And a few minutes later, we have our draft post. And we can immediately see it here in our Notion database. This was created by the AI. Now, this actually took 15 minutes, but this is because I have deep research activated. More on that in a moment. Let's take a look at this blog post draft. It includes all the points I dictated to the AI. for example, that it can organize our thoughts that it learns from our habits and a lot of other points that I told the AI to research by itself. It also added some images in the post and even internal links to other blog post of ours. Here you can see a link to the OpenAI assistance blog post which is this one here, one I created earlier. And the tone of the blog post is also similar to earlier blog posts of ours. So it has the same writing style. How did I achieve this? So here's the trick. You can give Notis instructions by adding descriptions to your Notion database. Let's take a closer look at this blog post database. Here I added a description. This is a feature of Notion and Notis will take this description into account before it generates a new blog post. For example, here I told it to do a deep research before it generates a new blog post and also to analyze our previous blog post to adhere to the same writing style and to analyze the titles of my last 10 blog post and include internal links where it makes sense. And this is exactly what it did inside this post by linking to other relevant blog posts of ours, which is great for SEO. I also told it to add images to our blog post either stock images or AI generated ones and Notis executed all these steps before generating this new blog post. You can also add descriptions to a single properties of your Notion database by clicking on them. Then you click on this little eye and here you can add more instructions like every new entry should be marked as draft for the published date. I told it to automatically pick a date 7 days after our last post. Our last published post was on November 10th and indeed it picked November 17th as the next post. I also told it to add two to four fitting tags. The only thing it didn't do is autogenerate a thumbnail. But I can tell it please also generate a thumbnail and put it in the thumbnail column. And here in the thumbnail column I have more instructions for generated thumbnails. Use a bluish color theme and include the post title in the picture. Let's see what it generates. So, it generated a thumbnail for the blog post, but it didn't add the title. So, let's tell it to do that. Add the blog post title and put the image into the thumbnail column. There we go. I had to nudge it a little bit. Tell it to generate a new image. This one has the title on it. And then I had to tell it to put it into the thumbnail column, which it had some trouble with. So, there are still some kinks that have to be ironed out. But the result is we have this AI generated thumbnail in here which has a blue theme as we described and the title on it. It's probably also a good idea to put another note about the aspect ratio in here because a blog post thumbnail should usually not be rectangular depending on what blogging platform you use. Notis can also browse web links. For example, I can give it a link to a news article and say draft a newsletter issue explaining what these news mean for regular AI users. Anthropic invests 50 billion in American AI infrastructure. And a moment later, we have this new newsletter issue here in this database that summarizes this news article. And again, I added custom instructions to this database like keep each issue concise and favor bullet lists over dense paragraphs. And this is exactly what it did. It added a bunch of bullet points here. And it added sources like I also told it to somewhere here. Super cool. This can make your work so much easier. We can also tell Notis to find information anywhere in our workspace. Let's say we get an email with a video request. Here in my workspace somewhere I have guidelines for what we do with video requests. I can ask Notis what do our community guidelines say about video requests via email. How do we handle them? Yeah, I didn't find the information I was looking for, but I think I said community guidelines and not communication guidelines, which is the actual name of the page. Let's try this again. Okay, again it struggled a bit with this task. Notis is really good at finding information in databases, but normal pages sometimes cause a bit trouble. So I had to give it the direct link to the page and eventually it found the information I care about. I also told it to remember this page for later because Notis has long-term memory. So it should be able to improve over time the more tasks you give it. And if you're ever too lazy to read, you can also tell Notis to turn this text into a voice note. It can send you voice messages, not only receive them. And there we go. Now we have a voice note that we can listen to. Hey there. Here's a quick guide to submitting YouTube video ideas for AI tool corner based on our official communication guidelines. When you have an idea, just share your topic. Pretty cool, huh? Now all the content we created so far was put into our Notion databases. But with the help of integrations, we can also post to other apps directly. For example, we can let Notis draft or even send in email directly in Gmail or even post to Instagram or X directly. Let's try this out. Next, you find all the available integrations in your customer portal. Again, if you lose the link to your portal, just ask Notis for a new one. And here you can connect hundreds of different apps. Let's do one together. Gmail for example. We click on connect. Here we select the account that we want to connect and give it permissions to read our data. And then Notis can use Gmail on our behalf. Connect as many apps as you want to use with Notis. Let's give it a more complex task. Schedule a dinner on Monday 6 p.m. in my calendar and send an email to Leon Fischer from my contacts with an invitation. also add a task to my Todoist account to brainstorm new video ideas before this dinner. And I find that it helps to be explicit and tell Notis exactly what apps you want it to use to avoid ambiguity and confusion. And the task I just gave it should include three integrations, Gmail, Google calendar, and Todoist. We get a confirmation message. And let's see, indeed, we have an event dinner with Leon Fischer in Google Calendar with the correct time and correct time zone. We have a task in our to-do list inbox also with a due date. And Notis was actually smart enough to schedule this 1 hour before the event to allow us to prepare. You can read it here. Set for 1 hour earlier. And it asks for confirmation to draft the email. So let's say yes, go ahead. There's the email draft. Looks good. Send it from my Gmail account. Again, I am explicit and tell it to send it from Gmail because I find that it works better. But just saying email should also be enough usually. Okay, it still didn't send the email. It put it into our drafts instead. Let's take a look at it. So the email sounds very natural and human, which is great. And again, Notis learns from our own writing style over time. Let's tell it to actually send the email. And I spelled "send" wrong, but maybe it can still figure it out. And by the way, if you want to customize the writing style of your email or anything else, you can go into your account settings and add a custom prompt here that Notis will read before it does anything. I told it that my name is Florian. And to never use em dashes in any generated texts or posts because em dashes always look AI generated. Okay, this is getting ridiculous. It asked me for another confirmation to send this email. Yes, please send it. Okay, I now understand why Notis is struggling with sending this email. It's because the email address of my account is different from the address I connected for my Gmail account. So I tell it to send it from my Gmail account. But frankly, this should work automatically because it also put the draft into the correct account, right? So it should also send the email from there. Okay. And it's asking for the 1,000 confirmation to send the email. Yes, please send it. Yeah, it's not sending the email at all. It just generates more and more drafts. And also this email address here is wrong. I told it to get the email address from my contacts which is another database in Notion that I synced with Notis. Here is Leon Fischer and I hoped that it uses his email address leonfisher.studio for our email but it used an example address which doesn't make any sense. So, if the Notis team is watching this, you have a great product, but you have to iron out these little kinks because if I have to find this information myself, it destroys the purpose of an AI assistant. But I'm sure they will fix this in the future. Okay, let's try another integration and see if we have more luck. Take my recent blog post about how I teach myself coding, generate an Instagram carousel and a Twitter post with a few images, and then post them to my connected accounts. So, I generated the post and the images, and they look pretty good. But again, it's not posting it to my social accounts. But I know that this works because I've done it before. This Instagram post was generated and posted by Notis automatically. It generated a nice caption, hashtags, and these AI generated images. They look good, but it's not posting this one here. Right now, there must be something stuck with my permissions. Let's try something else. I told Notis to scan this business card and put this information into my contacts and CRM database. And this time it found the correct database and it put this contact in here with the email address, phone number. It changed the job title from CEO, which is what it says on the business card to content creator. It did this because in the instructions of the database, I told it when you create a new contact and a property is missing, do an internet research to find it yourself. So even though the job title was not missing, it did an internet research and found out that I am a content creator and not actually a CEO. It actually even found my real phone number. So this on here is obviously a fake phone number. It put my real phone number here into this column, but I replaced it for the fake phone number because I don't want to dox myself. But this is very impressive and you can send all kinds of files to Notis not only images but also for example PDFs, text files or voice transcriptions and you can use that for example to find information in larger text files or transcribe meeting recordings automatically or scan receipts and put them into your expenses tracker. There are really tons of possibilities what you can do with this feature. Reminders and automations are another cool feature. Let's try this out. For example, every Friday at 5:00 p.m., remind me to buy a nice gift for my girlfriend and give me three ideas for creative gifts I could buy for her. So, we get a confirmation message and then in our customer portal under reminders, we should find a new entry and there it is. So, it picked the correct day and time of the week. It will send a reminder via WhatsApp where we set it up and it will do this automatically every week. Now, it kind of hard-coded the gift ideas into the prompt. So, I think it will always send the same three gift ideas instead of searching for new ones. So, I guess a reminder cannot execute another AI query. So, this will not work. Let's remove this. So, instead, I turn this into just a reminder to buy a gift without the gift ideas. Save these changes. And automations are similar to reminders, but they are more powerful. Again, we can set them up here in our customer portal or we do it via a message. Let's try every Monday at 7:00 a.m. search for the top AI news of the last week and then prepare a newsletter draft and save it in my newsletter database. So, this worked. We get our confirmation message and we can find a new entry here in our automations with a very elaborate prompt that gives the AI instructions when this is executed. And it runs every Monday on 7:00 a.m. as we told it. And we can even test this right now. This will take a few minutes because this actually has to do an internet search, find the information, and then draft the newsletter. While this is running, we can take a look at the different trigger types we have available. So this is running by a schedule every week at a certain time. We can also run from an integration. For example, when we get a new email in Gmail, we can do something or when we create a new calendar event or we can run it from a web hook. A web hook is a URL that you can call which will then trigger this automation. Usually this is used by developers, but you can also use it from regular Notion via Notion automations. For example, whenever we create a new blog post in our blog post database here, we could activate a Notion trigger, which then calls this web hook to automatically create social media post, for example, for Instagram and X, and put them into a separate database. This could happen automatically every time you create a blog post in Notion. And how to do this is explained step by step in this Notis guide. I will put a link to this guide into the video description below, so check it out. So, our test run has finished. And indeed in our newsletter table, we now find a new entry with the latest AI news of last week and Notis will automatically go ahead every week now on Monday 7:00 a.m. and prepare a newsletter for us. And this saves us so much time. What cool automations did you come up with? Let me know in the comments below. The last feature I want to show you is that we can actually call Notis directly. And I don't mean sending a voice message. I mean doing a WhatsApp call and talking to it one-on-one. Let's try this out and let's ask it the same questions about the community guidelines that I also asked earlier. >> Hello, how can I help you today? >> Hey, Notis, I got an email with a video request and I'm wondering if there's anything in our internal community guidelines that says how we should handle video requests. >> I'll search your Notion for those community guidelines so we can see exactly what the process is. I'm searching your Notion for the guidelines now. While that runs, can you tell me a bit about the video request? Who's it from and what are they asking for? >> Um, I forgot who who it was, but they are asking for a video review about Notis about you basically. >> Perfect. I found your guidelines. So, based on your communication guidelines, here's the standard process for video requests. You'd want to start with preparation, picking a strong title and hook, then structuring the video with a proper outline, including chapters, demos. >> Yeah. Can you send a summary to the chat of this? I don't want to have to listen to all of this. >> Got it. Let me hand this over to the team on WhatsApp so you can review it there at your own pace. >> Yeah, thank you very much. I told it to send me a summary in the chat, but unfortunately it didn't follow through. So, Notis is one of the most useful AI tools I've tried out so far, but there are some kinks that still have to be ironed out. Most of the stuff works. It can generate really good blog posts. It can take your instructions into account, generate images, all of this stuff. But sometimes it has trouble finding the correct information and this can be a problem because then I have to waste time telling it what to do exactly. But I'm already in contact with the Notis team and I told them about some of the bugs I encountered and I'm sure they will fix them quickly. If you want to try out Notis yourself, remember they have a 7-day free trial, so you can give it a try and see if it works for you. And let me know what would you automate using Notis. Tell me in the comments below. I always love to read your comments. Then subscribe to the channel for more AI tool reviews in the future. And I hope I see you in the next video. Take care.