Life with AI in your pocket: NotionAI

AI is ubiquitous in today's technological landscape. Major players like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Zoom all utilize it in their tools. It's literally everywhere. Even during a recent visit to the mall, I encountered it while popping in to get prescription medication prescribed by a doctor. I stopped at a cafe to take my first dose of medication, which consisted of simple flu and pain medication that must be taken after a meal. While there, I sat among retired patrons and late-morning runners who had popped in for their caffeine fix, scrolling through emails and checking my schedule for the day in Notion. I needed to plan my day, which included picking up my kids later for their week with me and doing groceries. Doing groceries before the kids arrived was always better than doing them with them. So, I decided to put NotionAI to the test.

NotionAI's claimed capabilities

Accessing AI in Notion

The Space key, or the shortcut ctrl-j, loads the AI assistant:

Initial impression

This is standard. It could work. But I'd like to interrogate to determine what it had in mind with these items. I asked to map each item to a use case.

With a few more iterations of my prompt, I got to:

Generate a healthy halaal meal plan for the next 7 days for one adult and 2 school-going children. 
Ensure we have breakfast at home before school and 1 main meal towards the end of the day

For each child, pack 1 healthy lunchbox with a drink.

Each daily main meal should have a protein main and vegetable side. Include 
fish somewhere during the week. I’m watching my dad belly, so go low on the carbs.

The kids (and I) like junk food, so include some sweets, chocolates or chips.

Generate the meal plan as a table with each day being one row.

Create the shopping list as a database of items, with each item having a description, 
a checkbox and last known price in South African Rands (as far as you know).

Keep the total cost of the shopping under R 1000. But aim for R 750 without the junk food.        

Here is the response

Meal Plan

Shopping List

Marking AI

Would I fail it? Let's ask AI to mark itself.

After some tweaking of the prompt, I got to this table

The initial results were surprisingly good. AI started unravelling as the queries became more complex and multiple formats were included. There was always something missing. What concerned me were the false positives. These are instances where AI believes it did something correctly but didn't.

There were cases where NotionAI just completely fell over.

I'm sorry, but I don't have access to the previous conversation or the list of queries you're referring to. Could you please provide me with the list of queries that you want me to group together?

The best practice, as I have experienced, is to:

1. Break down complex requirements into simpler queries
2. Apply each query one at a time
3. If NotionAI struggles, take a step back and break down the query further
4. Iterate until you get the desired output
5. Be patient; this process may take some time, but it will ensure accurate and useful results.

Last words

NotionAI is a powerful tool that can help us accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively. We can expect to see even more complementary functionality in many applications and platforms as AI advances. By keeping an eye out for these developments, we can leverage the power of AI to speed up our work and make us more efficient.

As AI becomes more prevalent daily, it's important to stay informed about its capabilities and limitations. By reading and sharing articles like this one, we can all become more knowledgeable about the ways in which AI is being used and how it can impact our lives. If you found this article helpful or informative, please consider sharing it with your friends and colleagues. And if you'd like to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in AI and other technology trends, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Thank you for reading, and we look forward to sharing more with you in the future.