Jasper 101: An Introduction to the World's #1 AI Writing Assistant

The Future of Publishing is Here

It's been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. It also may be true that AI writing assistance can be worth a thousand pictures. Why? Because, in the world of publishing, with all the changes in technology and social media, it has never been more important to have good content for your business or blog - and there just isn't enough time for people to produce it all themselves. That's where Jasper (he/him) comes into play: an AI writing assistant who will help you smash through writer's block so you can get on with your day while he produces high-quality content lightning fast!

In this article, we'll take an in-depth look at what Jasper thinks and some of his different use cases so you can get up to speed on this game-changing technology and determine if using Jasper is right for you. Personally, I've been helping people use Jasper to write non-fiction books and marketing copy and have developed a process that's empowered thousands of users to do the same. No matter what sort of content you create, when writing with Jasper, anything is possible.

Jasper 101: What Is Jasper?

In the publishing world, content is key. It's what catches people's attention and draws them in - whether it be on a website, in a book, or on social media. And with so much noise out there, it's more important than ever to have high-quality content that stands out. That's where AI writing assistants come in: they can help you produce content quickly and efficiently, so you can focus on what's important - your message - not staring at a blank screen haunted by "The Curse of the Blinking Cursor".

Jasper is your AI-writing assistant! Jasper is designed to complement human ingenuity, spark creativity, and accelerate content generation. Jasper gives you the tools needed to organize, outline, and streamline the writing and editing process that comes with publishing.

Say, for instance, you’ve finished your first book's introduction but haven’t the faintest idea how to connect it to the first chapter of the book in a meaningful way. While Jasper might not do the research for you or even fill out the first couple of paragraphs, he offers structure and informed design choices to get those creative juices flowing again. The thing about writer’s block is that, more often than not, all you need to break through is a nudge in the right direction. You're still in control of the actual writing. Now, let's take a look inside Jasper.

The Dashboard

Feature Updates

Be among the first to get the inside scoop on the latest developments within the Jasper community. With feature updates upfront, you’ll be among the first to see what we’ve recently launched, plus what’s newly added to the app.

Favorite Templates

Your old reliables that you come back to time and time again will always be at your fingertips. All it takes to favorite a template and have it displayed on the Dashboard is a simple press of the star icon in the template’s top left corner.

Generated Words

Keep track of your progress! Jasper records the amount of writing that’s been done over the course of the last 7 days, helping you monitor your projects and reach milestones.

Facebook Quick Links

Jasper has a thriving Facebook community with thousands of others just like yourself on the cutting edge of publishing books, blogs, and all sorts of content with AI.

AI Templates

Creating content across any platform is made easier with Jaspers' 50+ AI templates at the ready. Blog posts, creative fiction, Google ads, product descriptions - you name it, Jasper provides writers with an enormous selection of intuitive, specific templates to work off of for creating quick, easy content.

Document Editor

Templates are explicitly constrained in what they’re designed to do, providing built-in structure to streamline the writing process. However, they aren’t the right solution for every project, especially when you need to exert a little more creative control. Jasper enables you to create documents according to your own design preference, making him perfect for long-form content like blog posts, emails, social media posts, or books. Jasper keeps track of all your irons in the fire, laying out every document you’re working on for better visibility.

Projects / Organization

No project succeeds without some good management and organization. Prolific authors, or those with numerous clients commissioning distinct projects, need to keep track of their catalog. Jaspers Projects section groups your content under a single roof, providing separate folders to segment distinct projects - blog posts, books, ads, articles, editorials, and so on.

Project creation is simple, and managing your various projects is intuitive. Jasper makes it so keeping tabs on your workload doesn’t have to be a stressful part of your career. Content is quickly created, easily moved between folders, and accessible for getting right to work at your own pace.

How Does Jasper Think?

Let’s take a peek behind the curtain at how the AI algorithms that make up Jasper's matrix operate. While you could just start pounding away at your keyboard, creating content at your leisure, you might find that Jasper might not function at his best potential. He’s an incredible piece of technology, but the AI field is still developing. For every piece of high-quality content, Jasper creates, his performance will be offset by churning out jargon, random lines of thought, repetitious writing, or subpar work. That doesn’t mean that Jasper has hit a dead-end. At the end of the day, Jasper is a tool, and knowing how to properly use him to produce the brand of writing that aligns with the quality of content you’re looking for means learning how to use him. We’ll give you a glimpse into how Jasper thinks, and from there you’ll have what you need to leverage the most out of him.

Training Data

The best way to train AI is by exposing it to publish content that already exists. Jasper started out by reading somewhere around 10% of the internet in 2019, which might seem like a small amount if you don’t account for just how humongous the internet actually is. What this did was develop Jasper's voice. As an AI-powered program, the most important part of making sure he could deliver consistent quality content started with making sure he understood how people actually write. Reddit, Facebook, newspapers, websites, recipes, and more gave Jasper the education he needed to adopt the human language, syntax, and flow.?

Getting Jasper started needs some content seeding. You’ve got your topic, you know the important points that need to be covered, and Jasper needs the guidance to generate the stuff you’re looking for. Starting his engine needs just a couple lines of descriptive text, using relevant information to give a jumping point to work off of. The longer your project is, the more often you’ll need to reseed that content, later on, to make sure Jasper doesn’t keep making up facts and figures or repeat himself. Add some variety, changing it up often enough, even so far as a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, to keep the writing fresh.

Now, basic training ended when 2019 concluded. At this point, his knowledge base is a little outdated. That’s all right though! Jaspers’ education was thorough, meaning that even events that have happened since 2019 can be written about comprehensively so long as you keep populating your content descriptions with useful information blurbs.

Word Prediction

Here’s the fun part of Jaspers’ programming. Based on his training data, Jasper has developed his own sense of word prediction for constructing sentences. Past context informs his procedural word generation, breaking down prediction to a matter of probability. Let’s use an example: “I needed a costume, so I went to buy one at the ______.”

Now, there are several avenues that Jasper could take to finish this sentence, each being assigned a percent chance. For this sentence, the probabilities might look like:

• Halloween - 34% chance
• Store - 27% chance
• Shop - 18% chance
• Mall - 9% chance

Remember, Jasper emphasizes creativity over factuality. He’ll generate a solid amount of content to work off of, but you’ll find that a lot of it is made up. Jasper is an assistant for keeping the writing process flowing, it’s your responsibility to comb back through and fact-check the work. The content might not always be accurate, but it’s on the page! That’s the most important part.

Patterns & Repeating Content

Every input given to Jasper influences its content generation process. For instance, if you wrote down a list of numbers 1-4, Jasper would continue the list by writing 5-9. The same would happen if you wrote down letters a-d or a list of colors. These are patterns that Jasper is trained to latch onto, identifying and expanding recurring themes.

Pattern recognition doesn’t stop at basic numbers, letters, or concepts. Any writing on a given topic intrinsically has patterns within its text, especially content that you’ve provided as training data. Writing a paragraph without further context and asking Jasper to continue writing will end with Jasper considering a few available options for how to continue:

• Repeat
• Continue
• Start New

Repeat will likely have Jasper rewriting the same paragraph over and over again. Continuing might look like Jasper expanding on the content with similar expansion, referencing similar content from the internet that he was trained on.?

Finally, Start New will imitate the content of the first paragraph, covering a similar subject. If the first paragraph was a biography of an individual, the second would be a similar biography written about a separate person.

If all you’ve provided is a single paragraph to work with, the chances of Jasper proceeding in the direction you’re hoping for are slim. Thankfully, all Jasper needs to continue generating high-value content is a little context. You’ve already written down the initial aspects of the biography, and to avoid the next segments repeating you can lead with a headline to provide some inspiration. Some examples include:

• [blank]’s childhood
• [blank]’s first football game
• [blank]’s music lessons
• [blank]’s moving to a new state

Jasper is sophisticated enough to pick up on the patterns you’re putting down in the first paragraph, and that model structures the rest of the content. With enough context, training, and guidance, Jasper's impact has immeasurable results on productivity and the final product. However, if you’re finding that you’re still not getting the right style of writing out of Jasper, ask yourself a few questions to see if you can’t course correct.

• What is the pattern Jasper is trying to follow right now?
• Can I give more instructions or set a better pattern to direct his outputs?
• Do I need to give Jasper more information as input in order for him to write what I'm looking for?

How to Use Templates

The results of Jasper’s ingenuity shine their brightest through the Templates feature. With over 50+ custom templates to choose from, covering virtually any style of self-publication across a variety of mediums, finding the right one for your use case has a critical impact on the distribution of finely tuned content. Each template has a series of forms to fill out and considering how important context is for Jasper’s AI content generation and word prediction, the inputs you use result in some amazing outputs. Keep in mind: the better the input, the better the output.?

Template Example(s)

Over 50 unique templates are a lot to go over, but thankfully they all work using the same fundamental principles. These templates are the core building blocks that define Jasper’s primary function, which is to write compelling content along with a number of different frameworks and use cases. Your available templates are easy to navigate through Jasper’s sidebar, or you could open a new document and enable “Power Mode” to access them from there.

Each template will have its own versions of input fields to fill out, resulting in different writing styles depending on the use case. For now, let’s use the AIDA template as an example.?

AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) opens with a lean number of fields to use: Company/ProductName, Product Description, and Tone of Voice. What you put in here dramatically impacts what type of content will be generated as your output.

Based on the training data preceding the end of 2019, Jasper can cook up some stunningly accurate posts. Let's say you're writing fiction, for example, you’re writing about Star Trek, he’s gonna know about Spock, Archer, Janeway, Burnham, and just about every other character, creature, and storyline in the archives. Jasper can write fiction if commanded. The same applies to just about any topic you’re interested in. You’ll still need to fact-check, of course, but you’re off to a strong start.?

Remember that your output is defined by your inputs. Leaving the minimal amount of effort will produce broad results, but if you’re looking for narrower content then you need to include extra details in the content. A few bullet points will concern the important aspects that Jasper needs to cover, and Jasper will then include them. The level of intricacy, accuracy, and detail is up to you. Plus, you’re always welcome to make your own edits to the output to tailor it as needed.

Tone of Voice

Happy, funny, witty, joyful, convincing, contemplative, professional - throw in just about any adjective and Jasper will adapt their writing style to accommodate its tone of voice. You’ll be able to play around with it until you find a particular writing voice you like, but the fun doesn’t stop there. Maybe you want something a little more unique, something with more… personality. Try typing in someone with a distinctive voice, like Barack Obama, Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenneger, or Borat. Jasper adopts and adapts, bringing a new flair to your content.

Additional Options

We’ve knocked the most fun and unique aspects of Jasper’s template features out, but there are still some more quality-of-life options to help out your content generation. These features include:

• Add to favorites
• Copy to clipboard
• Move to trash
• Flag bad content

The first three are mostly self-explanatory, but the last feature is important for growing Jasper as an app. If he produces anything that’s especially low quality, flagging it alerts our team to known issues that we can resolve for better future performance.

How to Use Documents

Templates are over and done, you’re ready to tackle short-form articles. Important as those are, chances are you’re looking for something with more substance. A book can’t be written on a template, it needs a definition that can only be utilized through a full-fledged document. We’ll go over how to use Jasper’s documents tool, getting you up to speed on developing long-form content with AI-powered support.

Create a New Document

Simple and easy enough, all you need to do to create a fresh document is to a) click the + icon near the Documents tab, followed by b) click on the Start from Scratch option. Voila, a blank canvas to work with.

Writing Content

It’s time to crack your knuckles, get down to work, and start writing. Jasper introduces a number of helpful functions to optimize his writing style.

Compose

One of your standby tools, Jasper will read your text and extrapolate on the context. As we introduced in the “How Does Jasper Think” section, he will identify patterns, instructions, and behaviors to follow, informing any writing going forward based on prior criteria, content, and guidelines provided.

Title

Every good piece of work needs a solid title. In Jaspers’ case, the title of your document provides extra content for him to follow. If your title is something like “How to maintain your hair,” then Jasper will use that as input data. You can toggle your title to hide it from Jasper if you don’t want it to influence the generated content.

Content Description/Brief

Including relevant details that you want Jasper to focus on helps guide the writing direction. Like with Templates, describing important aspects you want to be covered as well as the tone of voice establishes a baseline to follow during the book writing process.

Keywords

While keywords are often focused on in SEO strategies, the inclusion of keywords isn’t exclusively to promote search engine visibility for books. If there are important terms that need to be included, this is the section for them. Compiling a base of choice keywords increases the chances of Jasper using them. You are able to adjust the frequency of keywords to prevent the repetition of certain phrases.

Output Length

Jasper can’t and shouldn’t write forever. To handle how much text Jasper generates any time you click Compose, choose from the following options available through the sidebar:

• Shorter: 20-25 words
• Medium: 50-55 words
• Longer: 110-115 words

Saving a Document and Document History

Thankfully, you don’t have to fuss over saving frequently. Jasper tracks your changes as he goes, automatically saving to prevent loss of progress. If you want to return to a previous iteration of your content, you’re welcome to use the Document History function to restore a version up to 7 days old.

What Jasper Sees

Jasper has two separate plans, each differing on how much content Jasper is able to reference at any period of time. Input affects output, so knowing what parts of your document are informing Jasper’s writing is essential for quality control and high-value content generation. The two plans in question are:

• Starter Plan
• Boss Mode Plan

The Starter Plan option has a much more limited range than BossMode. This plan does not give you access to the long-form editor and limits your ability to give Jasper commands.? In the context of books and writing long-form content, the Starter Plan will limit your ability to tap into the full power of Jasper, since you will only be able to access individual templates.

The Boss Mode plan is a lot bigger in comparison. Unlike Starter Plan’s limit, Boss Mode can reference between 2,000-3,000 characters before your writing position inside the long-form editor. This larger frame of reference results in higher quality content that’s able to rely on more context for its word prediction features.

If you want to block Jaspers’ eyesight from referencing certain parts of your document, placing 3 asterisks (***) stops him from venturing any further up the document.

Floating Toolbar

A floating toolbar is at the ready for quick styling of your prose. This feature provides a few valuable tools to enhance your writing, including:

• Rephrase
• Fix Grammar (Grammarly integration, too)
• Explain It To A 5th Grader
• Formatting H1, H2, H3
• Insert Image, Hyperlink, Reset Styles
• Create Number & Bullet Lists

These resources help streamline, optimize, and overall improve your style.

Editor Modes

Greater control over your document is added through 3 available editor modes located at the top of your Boss Mode Long-Form Editor:

• Power Mode
• Focus Mode
• SEO Mode

We briefly mentioned Power Mode earlier. If you need to use one of your templates, this option provides accessibility right inside your document.

Focus Mode which clears out all other templates and distractions that can appear using Power or SEO Mode, allowing users to dial in on the long-form content they are creating and implement commands inside Jasper while still drawing on the power of all other templates because Boss Mode is activated.

What is arguably the more useful of the two editor modes is the SEO function that integrates with SurferSEO. SEO plays a powerful role in gaining online traction and attention, and SurferSEO is one of the most advanced SEO tools on the market, which is great for streamlining workflow for Jasper users! Designing and implementing the right strategies, as well as finding high-value keywords, can be challenging in their own right. This option helps you optimize your writing for SEO, enhancing your writing for optimal SEO compatibility.?

Jasper Commands

These tools are only available through Boss Mode, and they allow even greater control over how Jasper functions while writing. Using headlines to guide Jasper’s content creation process yields some stunning results, but you can go a bit further than that. Commands translate your exact intent into actionable directions, using plain language for cleanly executed programming. There’s an entire list of Command ideas in the Jasper Help Desk that can inspire writers to take full advantage of Jasper’s AI utility.

Voice Dictation

Slamming down long lines of text isn’t in everyone’s bag of tricks. Depending on your approach, you may feel more comfortable and confident using your voice to guide Jasper. That’s right: you can literally tell Jasper what to do, so long as you’ve enabled Voice Dictation on your computer. You can turn it on through the Edit menu while in your document.

Recipes

Inputting a series of Jasper commands through a base-by-base routine offers a fair amount of control, but it chews up your time. Luckily, Jasper offers lists of pre-built workflow commands to help implement a large number of commands all at once. Once you find a working recipe through the Jasper community or build your own, you can run it once you align it with your project.

Alignment means inputting the variables that are intrinsic to your document. These recipes come with missing pieces that can be altered to accommodate different writing projects. For instance, you’ll have to run through the recipe and fill in the blanks, such as “write a brief for [TOPIC]”. It’s plug-and-play.

Running the recipe is broken down into 5 steps:

1. Generate the content brief
2. Generate article title ideas
3. Write an intro
4. Create an outline
5. Write a conclusion

Depending on what you want to accomplish, creating your own recipes with carefully selected commands can be accomplished through the “new recipe” option in the top right corner of your document. You can, if you want to, share these recipes with other Jasper users, leveraging the support of the community at large and contributing to its growth. We have developed several custom recipes for Jasper users to apply to books, most notably:

• The Perfect Non-Fiction Book Introduction & Outline
• The Hero’s Journey Outline

Keyboard Shortcuts

Time and efficiency are key. Keyboard shortcuts keep your most popular and useful tools within immediate finger distance, allowing you to control Commands at will, undo mistakes, Compose on the spot, and more.

Account Management

We’ve gotten through the meat of what makes Jasper a remarkable tool to get that book idea out of your head. Even for already published authors, the work involved in creating an entire piece of fiction or nonfiction is a heavy investment of patience and sweat. Jasper makes the work breeze by with its AI-driven functionality, but there’s still more that hasn’t been covered yet.

Team Management

Your writing team shouldn’t be excluded from taking advantage of Jaspers’ features, tools, and resources. The team behind Jasper is no stranger to teamwork, which is why they ensured that collaboration channels are fully implemented. Adding in new members does incur a subscription cost, but the result in keeping teams on the same page is worth the investment. Admins are in full control over who has access to your documents, allowing you to add and remove team members as needed, as well as instituting permissions to safeguard sensitive aspects of your projects.

Translation

The world is a cultural petri dish. You might be reading this in English, but there are thousands upon thousands of languages that exist. While Jasper can’t provide translations for all of them, he’s at least capable of breaking down barriers for over 25 different languages. Jaspers’ integration with DeepL - one of the world's leading translation platforms -expands the borders for global accessibility, even going so far as to include language variants such as American English and British English.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism, accident or not, is a huge black mark on your record. It would make sense that Jasper, being primarily trained on vast amounts of internet literature, runs the risk of plagiarizing some content, wouldn’t it??

Thankfully, no. Jaspers’ AI algorithms may use what’s been learned through the internet as a knowledge base, but he never repeats anything that’s been said before. All content written is bonafide original work, keeping you safe from lawsuits flying your direction.??

That said,? it's always a good idea to check your work regardless before publishing,? and Jasper is integrated with Copyscape to save you time double-checking your work before clicking publish.

Sensitive Content Filter

It’s no surprise that there’s more than your fair share of unfavorable content lurking in the bowels of the internet. Even with 10% of its content being read, the fear that sensitive materials could worm their way into your text is palpable. Luckily, moderation measures have been implemented into Jasper to filter out any “sensitive” or “unsafe” text.

You’ve got your selection of curse words and slurs that are proactively filtered out, but Jasper takes an extra step forward to safeguard the validity and approachability of your generated content. More than what words are used, Jasper prioritizes intent, flagging combinations of words that might be considered “unsafe”. For instance, if the words “release” and “bullet” would appear within the same sentence, it would then be flagged as a potentially unsafe phrase.

The filter isn’t perfect, but at least it's imperfect in the best way: protecting the quality of your text. If you need more flexibility for your content, you can get in contact with the Jasper team at [email protected] to consult and review each case.

Additional Help & Training

The Jasper team and community are at the ready to answer questions, respond to errors, and provide specialized support. Applications that are built on the foundations of community and quality service are invaluable, allowing writers to take their work to the next level due to continual assistance from experts and neighbors alike. For an even more in-depth step-by-step guide for getting trained in using Jasper successfully, take the Jasper Bootcamp.?

Conclusion

If you want to take your business or content game to the next level, Jasper is an AI writing assistant for you. Sign up today and receive 10,000 free words from this revolutionary new technology!

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