Launch HN: Type (YC W23) – AI-powered document editor

[stewfortier]

Hi HN, we're Stew and Stefan from Type (https://type.ai/). We're building an AI-first document editor that helps you write. It's similar to Notion, but focused on building a solid authoring experience.

Here’s a general demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpK9PWo0lUw

And here’s a demo that includes math and code blocks: https://type.ai/code-math-demos

There are a lot of AI writing products out now, but we've found that most of them treat writing like a one-shot activity that should be delegated to AI. We don't think that's the optimal way to write. We think of great writing as the product of clear thinking, which requires a lot of time tinkering with and refining ideas. So we’re building a user-friendly document editor that puts the author front and center.

As you write in Type, you can press cmd+k to summon simple AI commands. Most of our commands are grounded in familiar writing primitives (ex. “Write paragraph”) and attempt to understand the context of your document.

Type supports multiple rich block types, including code and math and our commands are able to both interpret and output these block types. So if you're writing an introductory essay about machine learning, for example, you can use Type's chat feature to generate and refine equations and code blocks you'd like to include in your document. Once you’re satisfied with what Type has generated, you can drag and insert the block anywhere in your document (as seen in the demo video above).

We’ve also built a "what to write about next" feature in the document sidebar that offers suggestions on ideas you may consider adding to your document.

We’ve built some editor features that aren’t AI-specific but which we think make for an enjoyable authoring experience: (1) Type is built from the ground up to be offline-first. This means most interactions (search, loading documents, etc.) are instant; (2) Mobile support as installable PWA; (3) Keyboard shortcuts for the most useful commands; (4) Markdown copy/paste support.

We designed Type to be most useful for longer-form writing, so we encourage you to try it out in the context of something like an essay or a technical tutorial. If you try it out at https://type.ai, we’d love to hear what you think. We think Type feels pretty different from other AI writing tools that produce fairly shallow content, but would love to get your honest feedback on whether we're hitting the mark.

Each account comes with a free allocation of AI commands, after which you can activate a paid plan for unlimited AI usage (you can still create and access unlimited docs on the free plan). If you'd like some additional free credits, please just drop us a note at [email protected] and we'll refill your free credits.

We'd love your feedback on what feels helpful and what feels confusing or missing. Thanks!

[lyair1]

First of all, good luck and the implementation looks pretty slick.

I relate to the other comments that (1) Explosion of AI generated blogs / copy etc is not what we need and it's hard to see the value of it long term (2) this looks like a simple usage on top of GPT4, no real IP / innovation - this is risky from a business model perspective.

Good luck!

[comment_ran]

1. *Not that special* Honestly, this isn't too impressive. It's just a pump that sends a request to GPT-4 and gets a response. The buffer isn't anything extraordinary.

2. *Sectional content generation* What's interesting is how you can format a prompt to give GPT-4 the context of a section. It then generates content relevant to that section and the overall document.

3. *Deciding what to write next* It's cool that GPT-4 can analyze a document and suggest possible sections to expand upon. We can then choose which direction to take next.

4. *One-click content generation* I like the idea of a simple button that generates context-appropriate content based on your current location in the document.

5. *Standardized text manipulation* This approach offers a standardized way to select a region, generate a prompt, and manipulate text. You can shorten or lengthen it, change the timing, fix grammar issues, or even adapt it for posting on Twitter. It's a versatile method for content generation.

[resiros]

Congrats on the launch! Your product appears well-crafted and polished. I have a suggestion I'd love to share. As others have noted Type.ai doesn't seem to be highly differentiated from existing products like Notion AI, Lex, and many more. One intriguing direction to consider is focusing on knowledge organization and integration.

What if the AI can sort and use all the information in the system in their writing (bookmarked webpages, other notes and text in type..). For example, when you were demonstrating the launch blog post creation, you likely had plenty of related content saved in folders within the system. It would be great if the AI could organize and incorporate that material into the blog post.

Achieving this will require significant optimization and fine-tuning, but it could potentially create an interesting competitive advantage. Mem AI is moving in a similar direction, but not specifically for writing purposes.

[dbbk]

So basically, do something else.

[Closi]

Looks awesome! Congrats on the launch.

Just one small silly bit of feedback - in your demo video you show one of the use-cases as showing you coming up with fake user testimonials, maybe not the best use-case to show!

[f6v]

On the contrary, it’s where the money could be. ChatGPT didn’t show that AI is “smart” now. It showed that many more jobs can be automated with a machine that can’t reason, but is good pretending it can. LLM aren’t going to replace developers soon. It’s Filipino freelance content writers from Upwork who should be worried.

[stewfortier]

I really need to re-record that, I agree! I make a passing comment to replace them with real quotes, but at that point I guess the AI wouldn't have been all that helpful.

[manishsharan]

What I would pay for is the exact opposite of this.

I am not looking forward to being deluged by pages and pages of AI generated content that will surely be sent out by MBA types looking to make a name for themselves as visionaries and flooding my inbox.

What I want is a tool that reads documents or corporate memo or email and extracts the key message into a small paragraph or two.

[stewfortier]

My co-founder and I both resonate with this and we probably need to make our positioning clearer given that it didn't come through here.

The thing that excites me most about generative AI isn't "more," it's better. I often use Type to write satire and now whenever I hit a block, I don't tab over to Twitter – I have Type generate some ideas. Often, I don't use them as-is but they do inspire a new angle I hadn't thought of.

That said, I can see how we have a lot of work to do making that more clear. And I can certainly see how a product like ours or ChatGPT could be used to produce lots of mediocre writing – which is undesirable.

Appreciate the feedback!

[sebzim4500]

Can't bing chat do that already? You can tell it to summarise the page you are looking at.

[fzliu]

I think the core idea is strong, but it's missing several features that could differentiate it as a product:

1) adding an "advanced" tab which enables the user to input more information about the document, e.g. formatting, length, etc...

2) learning the user's writing patterns and style - I'm not sure if this can be done by prompting, but my guess is that there are methods that you can use to steer the prose towards the user's default style

3) plagiarism detection - this would require a large document store and could be implemented using fuzzy/semantic search via Milvus followed by string matching

Keep up the good work.

[cube2222]

This looks really cool! I think the UX around selecting a subpart of the text and asking it to rewrite that is very promising (also for stuff like code editing; it'd be awesome to have this built-in to your IDE, not sure if VS Code already has it).

My only worry with this is that I'm not sure what the long-term edge will be. This whole product looks a bit like just a feature that will soon be added to MS Office Word. I'd love to hear more from the authors about how they plan to differentiate themselves here.

[stewfortier]

We think about that a lot! I think this reply from my co-founder summarizes our answer well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35442714

[user3939382]

I'm getting burned out on the AI stuff. Every day it's half the posts on the front page. Startups, tools, it's neverending. It's somewhere on the spectrum between huge hype and real paradigm shift, so it's not unexpected, and very possibly not unwarranted, just tiring. If I could go a week without hearing about ChatGPT and AI tools that would be nice.

[dang]

It's a tough one because follow-ups [1] and repetition [2] aren't in the spirit of HN (it's hard to stay interested under a repetitive barrage), but significant new information is [3], and there has been a ton of that too. So we're in tradeoff land. If it helps at all, we've downweighted a ton of AI-related posts that don't really contain new information. I know that many are still making it through though.

The Launch HN posts are a special case because that's one of the things HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it; and as you can imagine, there are a ton of AI related startups wanting to launch right now. However, Demo Day starts tomorrow, so you have two more threads to endure today (the other one being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35445097) and Launch HN season should simmer down after that.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[dmje]

Maybe HN should make a category. I'm feeling your fatigue too.

[swyx]

congrats stew! (good to see you back with a new idea)

sooooo. this is a classic business strategy sort of thing. you, an AI startup, have to build Notion, faster than Notion can build AI features.

your work is cut out for you. i dont have any suggestions but would love to hear your thoughts on how to outcompete massive incumbents.

[chatmasta]

Are people happy with Notion? We didn't renew our (extremely expensive) subscription. The product is clunky and slow. As a team, we never needed the collaboration features. In the rare case where we do need some real-time shared writing space (mostly just for taking notes during Zoom meetings), we make an O365 document.

As individuals, a lot of us have moved to Obsidian, but we aren't using it collaboratively. Personally I just use it as a simple note taking space; I keep a note for everything I've googled multiple times, and I can pull it up quickly with a simple cmd+p or cmd+shift+f. Notion provides basicallly the opposite experience (open a website, wait for it to load, use their shoddy search, wait for that to load, then maybe find what you're looking for).

As a team, we don't feel like we're missing anything without Notion. We collaborate in markdown using GitLab pull requests and Mattermost chat messages. Some of us write that content in Obsidian and then paste it into the GitLab text input (have you ever tried pasting markdown into Notion? Good luck with that!)

I think some non-devs might prefer Notion, but as a dev, the idea of using some proprietary React frontend as a note taking tool is the opposite of what I want. Obsidian is great.

IMO Notion got distracted with this "database" idea, where everything is a "block," because the reality of it is that the experience of everyday text editing becomes infuriating. Nothing will make me resent a product like unintuitive shortcuts that hijack my return key and closing backticks (also see: ClickUp).

[autoconfig]

Hey swyx. Stefan, co-founder and CTO chiming in here. I think our strategy here is pretty simple (although not easy). We have our opinion and our vision on what this product ultimately should look like, we trust that that opinion coupled with our capability to execute and listen to our customers will at the end of the day deliver a product that has enough differentiated value that is carves out it’s own segment. This probably sounds a bit hand-wavy but I really think that is how you need to operate. If you’re too focused on what the competition does the product loses its soul.

At the end of the day though that thinking obviously needs to translate into a set of features that sets us apart. When comparing to Notion specifically we already have a few of those that make us stick out and that our customers appreciate such as offline first support, instant search, writing suggestions, and most recently our chat integration.

Btw huge fan of your new podcast! :)

[greyman]

It certainly has potential, I like it. There are also possibilities for additional features like prompt repository etc. What doesn't work for me is the pricing... normally, one already pays for ChatGPT+ and ChatGPT APIs, and now this wants additional more than $20... I would consider it, if it would somehow use the chat window or APIs with my API key, and the software will be $10 max.

[stewfortier]

Appreciate the feedback on pricing! Will keep this mind as I imagine we'll offer a wider range of options in the future.

[sotu]

I've been using Type for a month now and it has really helped me. Its nice to just have a fully feature rich editor that is modernized with AI /ChatGPT too. Nice work to the team!

[marban]

Also: https://lex.page/

[csmpltn]

Two comments:

1. This should've been an addon/plugin for the top-5 most used text editors (Word, Google Docs), potentially also a plugin for WordPress/Drupal/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, instead of a standalone text editor that nobody's going to download.

2. Looks like every YC startup now is going to be a thin wrapper around OpenAI's GPT endpoints. "Dump your ideas into this textbox and let the magical black box add some fluff". Things are going to get boring, old and non-original very quickly.

[awestroke]

Literally nobody installs addons for word or Google apps. Nobody cares about WordPress. You can't have plugins for social networks, and this is for long form text anyway. Bad ideas all around

[sakras]

> Things are going to get boring, old and non-original very quickly.

I’d say they already have. I have half a mind to write a HN front end that filters out any posts with the phrases “GPT”, “LLM”, and “AI”.

[corwinstephen]

Agree. The AI stuff is pure novelty, I’m skeptical it’s going to be truly adopted in its current form in any substantial way.

[chaxor]

This is HN... People enjoy not using Microsoft or Google products. Do it on neovim and people will be happy.

[alangibson]

Feature, not a product. Not hating on the founders, but has YC gotten so big it just accepts projects based on keyword matching now?

[punnerud]

YC accepts about 2% of the ones applying, and plan for only 2% to become home runs.

I like this idea. So simple, but a great product on top of ChatGPT

(Cited from one of the lates YouTube videos, don’t remember which one)

[nico]

Tons of products have been built on a single great feature.

Tons of amazing products have also completely failed to gain traction.

In this case, the goal is to build a business. If they can get enough people excited about their offering, it doesn’t matter if you consider it a feature or a product. You are not their target market, and that’s ok.

[schnebbau]

Also, so many are building their whole business around an API they do not control. They are one OpenAI decision away from being deleted.

[pl90087]

Complete with fake testimonials. I'll be downvoted for this, but that product is borderline unethical.

[addisonl]

Looks very similar to what Google will be adding to Google Docs—what makes Type worth almost $300 a year?

[stewfortier]

The honest answer is that it'll be hard for us to answer that until we try out what they've built!

[Obertr]

sorry but this seems so easy to copy and not really a something new, we havnt seen so far.

I am going to wait until smbd makes it on github for free

[spyder]

Yea, and I can easily imagine in the near future you don't even have to wait for somebody to copy these simpler "app-around-an-API" apps because AI models will generate the interface and the simpler logic for you on the fly. There will be still value in the human input: the ideas of the creator / prompter about what kind of features should the AI include, but if others too have access to the same app-generating AI then they can just generate it based on the same idea. So copying simpler apps will become a lot easier and you would need some complex feature as the core value of your app to compete with AI generated apps.

[csbartus]

Same feeling here: a simple ChatGPT prompt, masked as an Editor, having a Pricing page on it.

I might be wrong. And I had another feeling: soon every YC startup will do the same thing over an over again: pick any idea + chatgpt + pricing

[precompute]

You can do this in emacs, it's not really a big deal. It's a very simple editor that takes the text you've typed (or the text that's in context) and formats it as a query for "Open"AI's API. The only thing they're banking on is the "type.ai" name which I can assure you, no one is going to remember in the face of multi-syllable, heavily marketed, non-common-verb company names.

[moneywoes]

smbd?

[c-smile]

[A bit out of scope] I suspect that in pretty short time people will stop reading any texts from the Web.

And indeed, human got a good skill to skip ad blocks on pages.

Next will be any texts on web pages: why to bother reading stuff that AI throws on us?

[whatch]

I was afraid of that too.

But then I remembered that I had already stopped reading some common Google search results because they seemed too low effort for a very long time. And they often looked like they were generated, not written. Just three examples from different fields: Quora, CNN, and CNET. But the list is much longer. In non-English parts of the Internet, there is also poorly auto-translated content from websites like Stack Overflow, which is weirdly high in the Google results. Fortunately, I found extensions to block these websites in Google search. So for me, and I believe for many people, it has already happened.

On the other hand, I enjoy reading articles from Simon Willison and Adam Johnson. And even though now we have very powerful chatbot services that can explain anything to you or effectively teach you some skill, I will most likely continue to read the content that they put on their blogs or elsewhere.

Reputation did matter, and it will matter even more in the future. I believe people will continue to read other people's texts. At least I will.

[LoveMortuus]

Or, what I believe to be a more plausible future, you just read, watch and listen to content from sources that you consider worthy of your time.

Example: videos uploaded in the YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips have a high probability of being made by the Linus Tech Tips people and not just being completely AI generated, unless of course if that made the videos better, but I still think that the videos would be curated by the Linus Tech Tips team.

[senko]

Why bother reading stuff that some underpaid overworked copywriter throws at us at the behest of a growth hacker, with the sole purpose to get us engaged?

I, for one, would rather read an insightful piece by an author who has been helped by an AI than a soulless product of a content farm.

[spaceman_2020]

How soon do you think we'll have AI coming up with its own unique writing style?

When do we get AI Hunter Thompson?

[golergka]

Why? Texts generated by AI are pretty useful. I read ChatGPT answers to my questions literally all the time.

[sebzim4500]

What makes you think the texts that aren't from the web are any less likely to be written by AI?

[iKlsR]

I really really liked https://reflect.app but needing an internet connection to access my notes is a miss for me. I don't need an app but I need something offline and locked down. I managed to replicate the experience of Reflect with Obsidian and several plugins such as a calendar, meetings and their canvas feature. I also don't even pay for syncing, I encrypt the vault (also a plugin) and keep the files in GDrive that I use and sync across devices.

I like this but would not pay for another note, bookmark, todo or markdown/rich text editor app service. Also arguably true to hn fashion someone could roll this or get very close as an obsidian or other widely used tool plugin in short time.

I also just checked reflect's page and they added a gpt4 prompt feature a couple weeks ago and you get all this for $10/mo. https://reflect.app/changelog

[jahy-notes]

The pricing is too high. There should be some option to use existing chatgpt subscription. No way, $29/month but maybe at $3-4 / month I could see myself using something like this. That said, I am not sure how far away is microsoft loop away from this given they are starting copilot option.