New Notion AI Update: Reviewed

Notion AI has just made a major update, rebranding their assistant into a friendly ‘all-in-one’ helper that has new access to knowledge, docs and integrations.

I’ve taken some time to review the new update, and here are the 5 key changes that I’ve walked away with:

1. Selective Knowledge/Context: The most exciting update with this AI assistant is Notion now lets you select which pages you’d like to give access to for each Assistant response. This may sound like a small improvement, but it actually fundamentally changes how you can reference information from anywhere in your Notion workspace and feed it into the AI Assistant’s context window.
   
   Having built my own AI tool (Bizway.io), I have some appreciation for how much you can improve performance of these AI models by giving appropriate context. For example:
   
   - Reference a specific content piece or brief when getting it to write something for you;
   - Reference your Project plan and tasks before giving advice on next steps and tasks;
   - Reference your financials database to give context about current expenses, then ask it to categorize or cut costs with the appropriate context available.
   

2. Save as page: You can now also quickly save the responses from Notion AI’s chat assistant as its own page. When you save the page into a database, this even lets you access and edit the properties directly from your chat (after saving).
   

3. Insert onto page: You can also quickly insert an assistant response onto the current page. In my review video, I show an example of how you can use the assistant to brainstorm tasks, insert them onto the page, then drag them into a tasks database, all in under a minute.
   

4. Reading page contents: This assistant seems to be much smarter in how it interprets and accesses information on a given page. However, this is where we first bump into some limitations of what the assistant can do. The major limitation being that when you have multiple database views on the page, and you ask the assistant to summarize the contents, it either doesn’t seem to have access to all the database items, or it gets confused and skips out on key information.
   

5. Attachments & PDFs: This assistant is also more capable in reading and working with attachments directly. Now you can upload a PDF, and ask Notion’s AI Assistant to process and work with its contents, all from the assistant chat in your Notion workspace.

There’s still a lot I’d like to see from Notion’s AI functionality in future, but this update marks a very promising move in the right direction.

Take a look through the video to get the main highlights of this update, and if you have any questions or comments, just let me know and I’ll be happy to answer :)

Sign up for Notion AI

If you don’t already have Notion AI as an add-on, now would be a good time to explore it. You can do so by heading into your workspace settings, then heading to ‘Billing’ and clicking on the Notion AI Add-on option. Or you can learn more about the update and features below:

Best,

Gerrard
Founder @landmarklabs.co