Brainstorms - A Powerful New Feature for new.space
Collaborative documents supported by AI
It’s a hot trend these days to shove a magic wand button in your app, plug it up to an AI, slap the hood closed as you dust off your hands and then call it a day. There is a label for this type of junk: ai slop. Our team has been thinking deeply about LLMs, AI, and where all this is heading and we’ve really considered what we could build that would actually help people in their projects in a meaningful way. In today’s post (a continuation of a series covering a big update we shipped), I want to share with you what we came up with, why we think it’s special, and how you can use it today. Let’s get into Brainstorms.
A powerful new card type
So what is a Brainstorm? A Brainstorm is a new type of card in new.space where you can add items from a Space as context to ask questions, gain insights and generate new documents. These Brainstorms are collaborative by design, meaning everyone in the Space can contribute to and see the results. Additionally, due to how sharing anything with new.space works, this is one of the best ways to share insights from an LLM with others. We call it collaborative thinking, supported by AI.
Another special thing to note, you can use either ChatGPT or Claude or both! Just tap the provider and toggle between which ever provider is better for the task at hand.
Things Brainstorms can do
This sounds nice, but what are some real-world use-cases for Brainstorms? Well we’ve added some ideas to our use-case page, and I’d like to talk about a few here as well. I’ll use a workplace example, something that might be great for personal use and a way to use it with your team.
Share the feedback
One way we’ve been using new.space as a team is to find patterns in feedback from bug reports and feedback on social media we’ve received. We add them to a Support Space and generate summaries to find patterns, translate feedback and responses from non-English messages, and finally create an anonymized version of that Brainstorm to share back with the team. This has been a great way for us to deliver fast and effective responses, and also helps the whole team feel like there is clarity on any potential bugs or UX issues.
Level Up Learning
One way a few of us have been using Brainstorms is to enhance our language learning capabilities. You can just add your homework or resources to a Space, fill out the answers and then create a brainstorm to check your results. Before taking my German B1 TELC exam, I asked it to create some practice material to study with. Similarly, it is great for checking writing for grammar mistakes and ensuring things are written in a correct tone.
Automate boring stuff
Planning things is always hard, especially bigger projects. While a Brainstorm probably can’t help you deduce an accurate deadline or estimate, it can help you automate some of the more difficult or boring tasks involved with planning. For instance, you can add spreadsheets and reports to a Space and then add them to a Brainstorm to create summaries, find standout moments in the data, or reveal patterns. Additionally, once you have a plan in place, you can ask the Brainstorm to create a calendar file, and it will generate one—just long-press on it to save it to your calendar or add it to a Space!
Cheaper than the competition
So how much does this cost, and what are the privacy implications with all this? Great questions. You do not need a Space+ subscription to use Brainstorms, however you do need to add your own API key. We’ve created a whole page to guide you through how to do this here. It might sound daunting if you’ve never added an API key to something, but I assure you it is very easy and very fast. Probably faster than buying something on Amazon. Additionally, you don’t need to have an expensive subscription with OpenAI or Anthropic. Just add $5 to your account and begin using the service. Using the models over the API is much more cost efficient, and we’ve found that on average ~50 Brainstorms costs less than $0.50. Pretty nice.
As for privacy, we take this topic extremely seriously. We wrote an FAQ to cover the details, but up front this is how it works. Your queries to the models only travel from your device and the provider, they never cross over our servers. Also, both Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s privacy policies declare that data sent over the API is never used to train models. If you have other questions here, or would like further clarity, let us know in the comments.
Using it today
As I mentioned before, you do not need a special subscription or plan to use Brainstorms. They are free for all new.space users with an account on iOS today, and will be coming very soon to Web (currently read-only). To create your first one, just use the + button! We are very excited about Brainstorms, as they have changed the way that our team uses new.space. If you find that you are using Brainstorms in a unique or special way, we would love to hear your story. Let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading, and as always: happy sharing.