The Wordsmith Gallery
One of the most frequent statements we hear from people newly introduced to natural language generation (NLG) is “I didn’t know you could automate that sort of thing,” usually followed by “how would I even start using NLG?”
To kill those two birds with one stone, we created the Wordsmith Gallery. The Gallery is where you can find starter NLG Projects, complete with mock data and a basic narrative Template, to help jumpstart your own content automation.
Right now, you’ll see that we placed Projects in the Gallery that showcase some of the most frequently encountered narrative types in which natural language generation is helpful and being used to automate content already.
Whether you’re looking to automate soccer match recaps across hundreds of teams or credit card statements for thousands of customers, the starter Projects in the Gallery can give you an idea of where to begin. You can also toggle between different data scenarios to see the various narrative situations and corresponding tone of voice you can cover in a single Template.
For example, the Credit Card Statement Project comes prepared for three different monthly scenarios: if the customer increased spending, saved more money than they’ve been averaging monthly, or they hit a rewards program milestone. When previewing the Project, you can also click the “Refresh Narrative” button to see how even the same narrative scenario has different variations. This means even if a group of customers have the exact same spending data for the month, each Credit Card Statement narrative can be unique to the individual.
While these Gallery Projects are great tools to help get you started, Wordsmith users can further enhance the output by clicking “Get Project.” This will drop the Project, including the pre-built Template, into the user’s account where it can be edited. By adding language specific to your company’s tone and increasing the possible variations for different situations within the data, you can automate narratives that are more engaging with your customers-without sounding robotic.
Stay tuned for more on the Wordsmith Gallery-we’ll be exploring the Templates that are currently available and adding more Projects in the near future!
Outline Mode
Since the launch of the Wordsmith platform, users have only seen one view of their Templates as they write in the text editor. For the more lean Templates out there, this is plenty-scrolling through the content and accessing a few Branches or Synonyms is easy to do. However, we’ve noticed many users getting pretty complex and building out some amazing Template monsters, complete with “nested”, or multi-layer, Branching and entire paragraphs used as Synonyms.
For the Wordsmith Wiz, we created Outline Mode!
Now, users can enable the Outline Mode feature (by selecting the option in the Editor’s “More” button) and view a sidebar that makes navigating complex Templates even easier. This sidebar displays a tree view of the Template, with nested levels of Branches and Synonyms clearly visible.
To expand or close any nested Branch or Synonym in your Template, all you have to do is click the +/- buttons to the left of each section. You can even navigate directly to the nested object in the Editor by clicking on it in Outline Mode. When you select the nested object (it will look like a clickable link) the Editor will automatically scroll it into view and enter the object on the right side of the Editor screen.
**Pro tip: Drag to resize the Outline Mode view to take up as little or as much of your screen as you want.
Outline Mode is intended to be a supplement to the traditional Editor layout, and is particularly useful for navigating lengthy or complex Templates. We’re constantly adding features and working to improve Wordsmith-Outline Mode is just the beginning!