Bring flair to your writing with TextFX from Google – AI Diaries vol. 2

TextFX was brought to my attention by a writer I know and I immediately loved a few things about it.

The first one was its potential to give my writing some flair.

The second one was the simplicity and its niche usecase. It’s a benefit, since people often expect AI tools to take them from A to Z in one go. TextFX has no audacity for that, it’s just a couple of niche modes of operation.

What’s TextFX?

In a nutshell, it uses the same PaLM 2 LLM that Google uses for Bard, but tuned for a specific usecase.

And that usecase is… rap songwriting.

Bet you didn’t expect that?

Here’s a short video of the story behind it:

But wait a second, what does this have to do with marketing?

It turns out – quite a lot when you approach it with an open mind.

What’s inside?

The tool has 10 modes of operation designed to help you find words that work together. You don’t have to rap for this to be useful.

TextFX is a must try if you’re doing any of this:

• You’re a content writer

• You’re a social media manager

• You’re a copywriter

• You work with branding, esp. writing slogans

• You’re a professional pun writer

Coming back to the 10 modes, those are:

1. Simile – Create a simile about a thing or concept.

2. Explode – Break a word into similar-sounding phrases.

3. Unexpect – Make a scene more unexpected and imaginative.

4. Chain – Build a chain of semantically related items.

5. POV – Evaluate a topic through different points of view.

6. Alliteration – Curate topic-specific words that start with a chosen letter.

7. Acronym – Create an acronym using the letters of a word.

8. Fuse – Find intersections between two things.

9. Scene – Generate sensory details about a scene.

10. Unfold – Slot a word into other words or phrases.

Which one’s the most useful?

As someone who occasionally has to write something shorter, I found Simile, Explode, and Fuse the most useful.

Scene and Unexpect could be really useful for video scripts and finding related B-roll.

Chain, Alliteration, and Unfold has potential for an adventurous social media manager or event organizer who wants to set up some sort of game.

Acronym is definitely the one to check for someone in branding.

And POV? That’s for days when you need an angle for a LinkedIn post but are so out of ideas that AI beats you in it.

So as you see, there’s no need to rap for TextFX to be useful.

Try it out while it lasts at https://textfx.withgoogle.com/ 

As we all know, projects from Google are often somewhat ephemeral. :)