Natural language is familiar and flexible — it’s always been the interface between people and people. Now, with the recent developments in large language models (LLMs), we are finally entering a world where it can be the interface between people and machines.
When LLMs were first launched, their primary UI was a chatbot. Though many 3rd party apps continue to provide their own customized version of this, developer-friendly LLM APIs have resulted in new interaction patterns. You may have seen many of your go-to apps displaying a new “✨Generate with AI ” button (sparkle emoji prefix and all).
UIs aside, when a lot of companies say they’re using generative AI — what are they actually using it for? In this post, we highlight the five main ways we’ve seen LLMs integrated into products, including ten real-world examples.
Many products we’ve seen have integrated a variation/combination of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. After being trained on so much data, LLMs capture many of the patterns inherent in language — and consequently excel at these tasks.
When it comes to NLP, all tasks can be boiled down to some sort of “transformation”, where information is changed from one form to another. Each of these transformations lies somewhere on the spectrum of “reducing the input” to “enriching the input”:
Most approaches we’ve seen fall into the following five categories, which we’ll cover in this post:
If you’ve used Google (or any other search engine), you’re likely familiar with information retrieval and search. It can refer to:
LLMs change the picture like so:
Dropbox is a file storage product — it’s in a perfect strategic position to allow users to search/query their own private docs (PDFs, powerpoints, text files, etc).
The AI-enhanced version of their Dropbox Dash product provides a natural-language search functionality, and also specifically cites which files the answer is derived from. For instance, if your company is storing all of its artifacts in Dropbox, it becomes very easy to ask company-specific questions:
CommandBar’s HelpHub product allows companies with public-facing websites to easily create a chatbot interface to answer their customers’ questions.
To set up this workflow, you first specify which webpages should be used as input sources for your particular HelpHub bot:
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You can then either (1) issue a natural language query to get a list of relevant search results or (2) interact with a chatbot that automatically synthesizes the source into an answer.
Summarization is another widespread application of LLMs. You can think of “summarization” as a task where a larger chunk of text is condensed into shorter form, while preserving the most important information.
The following applications are all some variation of this:
Notion is a productivity/note-taking app that has integrated AI capabilities into its editor. Among other capabilities that it’s wrapped with shortcut buttons, it allows you to “summarize” a chunk of text
For example, here is some source text:
When summarizing, NotionAI provides the following:
When generating an outline, NotionAI provides the following:
Superpowered is an AI notetaker for meetings — in addition to using a speech-to-text model to transcribe what was said during a meeting, it also passes this text through an LLM to extract (1) a summary and (2) any potential action items
One particularly effective application of LLMs is being able to easily transform natural language into structured form. In the past, user-machine interactions were limited by the fact that machine interfaces expect structured input like JSON or SQL. LLMs give your app’s users the flexibility to ask for what they want in plain English (or any other natural language).
This significantly reduces the learning curve! Your users are much more likely to get up and running with your app’s core functionality, rather than getting stuck reading docs. You can now provide:
Booking.com is a travel search engine that allows people to find the best deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars. Normally, users have to enter their itinerary into a series of input fields:
With an LLM-integrated chatbot, users can ask about their itinerary, which is likely handled as follows:
Linear is a work-management app that allows users to create and track tasks. To find specific subsets of tasks, users often apply a series of filters. However, these filters are not always obvious to new users, and can become tedious to reapply.
One way around this is to have saved filters – but why not improve the querying experience from the get go? Linear has implemented AI filters that translate an English query like “open bugs with SLAs” into the filters that their original API expects
What the user types in:
Which the LLM will restructure into the following:
Translation is typically thought of as going from one language to another (e.g. English to Spanish) – and LLMs are indeed capable of doing this.
However, LLMs are also capable to “translating” in the following sense:
Mutiny is a no-code app that enables non-technical users to update their company marketing websites (and to observe the effects via A/B testing).
They’ve integrated AI into their website editor, so that users can select specific text, and request that it be rewritten “friendlier” or “more aimed towards clients in financial services”.
Replit is a collaborative browser-based IDE, with a recent AI feature that allows users to ask questions about their code, refactor it, debug it, and more. It’s based on OpenAI’s Codex model, which was specifically trained on code (as opposed to ChatGPT, which was trained on natural language).
Explaining code:
Refactoring code:
Pre-LLM algorithms could still achieve the previous NLP tasks (“reduction” and “translation”) to some extent, even if the results weren’t as high quality.
LLMs really unlocked the ability for text generation — adding large amounts of text where there was none before. You can give the LLM a high-level seed, and ask it to brainstorm on your behalf (e.g. “Give me five different titles for this blog post”).
The possibility space is quite wide, especially if you take into account that:
Jasper AI is a copywriting tool targeted towards marketers, which uses AI to easily generate blog posts, product descriptions, social media captions, etc.
Giving the user an entirely blank text box is overwhelming, and more likely to require several iterations of trial/error to get what the user desires. Instead, Jasper’s UI “binds” the space of what the LLM can generate by having the user specify things (e.g. intended use case, product name, tone, etc) — wrapping this all up in a separate prompt to the LLM behind the scenes. This allows Jasper a lot more control, quality, and consistency when it comes to the auto-generated text.
Tome is an app that allows you to use AI to generate and refine full presentation decks from a single input (e.g. “create a presentation about X”). Their straightforward prompt likely abstracts out a bunch of different calls from the user (“Make an outline about X”, “Write a paragraph for each section detailed in the outline”) as well as some potential DALL-E (text to image) integration.
For instance, you can input:
Which results in the following outline:
Each section of which gets a slide:
The user can tweak this initial scaffolding in subsequent iteration loops, using other AI features like “rewrite”.
Hopefully, these examples have given you some sense of how to use LLMs in your own product. We encourage you to experiment with integrating LLMs into your product if you haven’t already— we’re excited to see what you build!
