Inside Writer

– 7 min read

Writer delivers content trained by your best content

May Habib

May Habib   |  August 2, 2022

Writer delivers content trained by your best content

As part of Writer’s mission to bring the power of great writing to everyone, we’re excited to introduce our new generative AI capabilities, which empower writers to accelerate their content production process and dedicate more time to valuable strategic work — without sacrificing brand consistency.

What it takes to make great AI-generated content

We saw it again and again: overworked content teams, content backlogs months or years long, no one to even write the content for a content design system. The people on the content teams — whether on the marketing, product, UX, support, learning, or engineering teams — were barely able to keep their heads above water. 

When we started talking to long-time Writer customers about the early prototypes of our generative AI feature, we faced a lot of skepticism. Most people had already gained access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 and had asked their teams to play around with the technology — or they had used a GPT-3 tool. But none had integrated AI-generated writing into their workflows: the output tended to be repetitive, generic, and not calibrated to their voice.

Thankfully, the next generation of AI-generated content is here: one that’ll accelerate content production, increase conversion rates, and empower good writers to do even more. Writer is AI writing designed by people and with people who understand what makes for good content.

“When we compared Writer to other GPT/NLG apps, we found that these ‘one-size-fits-all’ companies don’t deliver on the promises that they try to,” said customer Ranjan Roy, SVP of Strategy at Adore Me, the disruptive online lingerie startup. “I think the first thing that attracted us to Writer was seeing first-hand how it actually solved real business problems and made content processes better and more efficient.”

Ranjan Roy, SVP of Strategy at Adore Me

When thinking about how to design generative AI capabilities in order to ensure high-quality AI writing, we kept several criteria in mind:

  • Put good writers in the driver’s seat: people who care about writing need to be guiding the AI.
  • Train the model on the customer’s own voice: models need to be fine-tuned with customers’ best content to make sure that the generated content sounds on-brand.
  • Incorporate the customer’s style guide: AI-generated content should automatically abide by the style rules that give a brand its unique voice.

Writer learns from your best content

With these principles in mind, what we did at Writer was simple: customers already had their style guides built into Writer — their writing style, terminology, and must-have language. We used that plus samples of customers’ best blog posts, help articles, headlines, email subject lines, ads, and more. Writer can create first drafts that are significantly better than other tools because the content is modeled off your best content and trained on your voice.

“The first time I saw Writer in action, my jaw hit the floor,” said customer Deedi Brown, Senior Editor and Content Strategist at Ellevest. “I couldn’t believe what I had just seen it do — it took a little bit of direction, and produced a great, inspirational starting point for a copywriter to run with.”

Deedi Brown, Senior Editor and Content Strategist at Ellevest

To train Writer, you can provide thousands of examples, or even as few as one or two. With fine-tuning, the Writer model will be producing high-quality first drafts that sound like you wrote them: it’ll learn more about your team’s context, and identify language and tone patterns. You can also rest easy knowing that your data isn’t the product: any custom training data you give to Writer will never be shared with anyone else.

Customize Writer apps to meet your unique needs

Writer also offers the ability to create AI apps designed to meet your team’s unique content requirements. Specify anything from the number and type of inputs, to the length of the outputs, to relevant character counts and more.

Customers like Intuit, Twitter, Ellevest, Fundbox, Bill.com, and Adore Me have to date built hyper-specific apps for use cases as varied as newsletters, error messages, design systems, thought leadership, blog posts, performance marketing, and product websites.

Writer also comes with dozens of prebuilt apps made by people who understand what makes for good content. Get started right away with apps for:

  • Blog headlines, outlines, posts, and meta descriptions
  • Press releases
  • Email subject lines
  • Executive summary
  • Product descriptions
  • Release notes

Scale production so you can focus on strategy

So why did we launch our generative AI capabilites now?

Marketers and content strategists are increasingly being asked to do more work with less time and fewer resources, and the truth is that a lot of that work isn’t especially satisfying or creative: iterating on hundreds of ad copy variants; rephrasing the same points in different ways for social media; summarizing longer pieces of content; creating basic SEO blog posts. With Writer accelerating these previously time-consuming tasks, customers can unlock improvements in the writing process: they can produce content in less time, and use those time savings to be more deliberate and strategic with the content they produce.

“Nobody gets into content writing for the copy, paste, tweak busywork,” said Brown. “So I’m really excited about the way Writer can help Ellevest take those pieces and streamline them, so that we have more time and energy for the heart of every piece.”

The team at Adore Me is also taking back valuable time for themselves with Writer. The team at Adore Me has used AI-generated output to accelerate the writing of everything from press releases to website copy and advertising, saving 30-40 hours a month per writer. “As a startup, time and resources are everything,” said Roy. “The ability to take those hours and move people into bigger, higher impact and creative things makes a big difference, and I believe gives us a competitive advantage.”

And while Writer supports customers through the ideation, outlining, and drafting stages of the writing process, our other features like suggestions, terms, and style guides enforce brand consistency, clarity, and inclusion throughout the writing and editing phases. Writer’s full suite of writing tools supports customers throughout the entire writing continuum: by baking your voice into the software you use every day, you can scale brand consistency in a way that would be impossible with a purely manual human process.

Ideate > Write > Edit (then back to Ideate in a flywheel)
Writer supports customers across the entire writing continuum, through the ideation, writing, and editing stages.

See how Writer works for yourself

Our generative AI capabilities are available on Enterprise plans. If you don’t have an Enterprise plan, you can try Writer with a free Team trial that also gives you access to a content style guide, taxonomy tools, and collaboration features.

To get started, go to the Writer app and create a new doc. You’ll see a new icon that will bring up the app gallery. Depending on the app you select, you’ll see different input options. For example, to generate blog headlines, you can provide 1-2 sentences describing the blog post, and a target persona; to make a press release, you can provide context like the people or companies the press release is about and any facts or quotes you’d like to include.

Once you’ve filled out the inputs, Writer can generate content for you. If you want to get different results, you can keep generating new content, and Writer will store the different drafts for you.

“I think content designers have all experienced that anxiety that occurs on a blank page,” said customer Sarah Mohs, Senior Content Architect at Intuit. “So many content designers are being asked to create content faster and are given remarkably little time to brainstorm and let things marinate and edit and go away and come back.”

High-level creative work requires time, but with increasing expectations and decreasing resources, time is exactly what writers don’t have enough of. That’s why a new crop of content strategists, content designers, content marketers, and editorial leaders are giving themselves the power of machine learning and giving themselves greater leverage to create greater content. With Writer, writers can automate away the busywork that prevents them from focusing on what really matters.