Bold is the new “Medium for businesses,” complete with digital assistants. This blog examines the publishing platform’s impact on the future of writing.
A New Publishing Platform for Long-Form Content
Founded by David Byttow, founder of Secret, Bold’s goal is to “provide the best experience for reading and writing long form content at work,” and it makes this possible through its sleek, collaborative platform. Bold integrates with Slack so that users can discuss a long form post with others. It also enables posts to be turned from private to public. This allows a piece of writing to become a brandable piece of enterprise content.
In the near future, some enterprises might even choose to use Bold to exclusively host their company blog. Companies such as Slack have already done this on Medium.
Digitally-Assisted Writing
Just like Google wants all of its employees to know and understand machine learning, Bold wants all of your employees to become adept copywriters.
Bold’s digital writing assistants make this possible. The Hemingway assistant acts to trim the fat from your writing. While many SEO plugins point out if your sentences are too complex or hard to read, the Hemingway assistant takes this one step further and becomes your personal editor. As you write, it will suggest edits in real-time, such as when to cut adverbs or point out when the passive voice has been used:
The Ambience assistant can also be employed to play ambient noise while you write.
The Beginning of a New Way of Writing?
Aragon predicts that by 2019, digital assistants will talk with and complete electronic tasks for their human counterparts. Bold’s Hemingway assistant is the first iteration of this prediction, and it points to a potentially new way of writing in the digital age. While copywriters have always used editors to help them refine their sentences and catch grammatical and syntax errors, the Hemingway assistant has the beginnings of a stylistic editor that has the potential of evolving beyond its current capabilities.
Bold says it will eventually allow third-party developers to create new AI assistants for the Bold platform; perhaps these will be more sophisticated evolutions of the Hemingway assistant and will include voice capabilities.
New digital writing assistants beg questions such as how much of the writing was done by the human? How many of the stylistic choices were made by the human? Digital writing assistants allow for faster, better writing. Will they help mediocre writers produce better content than sophisticated writers?
Humans and Machines Are Working Closer Together Than Ever Before
The purpose of digital assistants is to do just that: assist. But as they become more advanced, the lines between human productivity and productivity that emanates almost exclusively from the assistant will blur, thus democratizing the ability to write well.
Perhaps one day, writing from a human versus writing from a human-aided-by-an-assistant will need to be distinguished to maintain creative integrity, depending on the capabilities offered by the assistant.