Lex.Page Invite: Free Online Writing Tool with AI Assistant

Lex or Lex.page is a brand new platform on the block built to unlock your writing potential. It is an online text editor like Google Docs that also has an AI thought partner. It can assist you in generating ideas and content whenever you feel blank or stuck. And even though it is still in the early stages of product development, Lex has many of the essential features you would need in a modern writing tool. You have the opportunity to be an early user of this powerful, free writing tool with AI assistant. You can access it instantly for free with our invite link (or join the waiting list) at the url Lex.page. In this article, we will walk you through all the important aspects of Lex.Page such as its current features, how to use it, its shortcomings, and the future roadmap.

If you want Lex.page exclusive invite please DM us on twitter @blogsaays or comment on this article , we will send you exclusive Lex.page invite for FREE

What are the Top 7 Essential Features of a Modern Writing Tool?

7. Formatting

No one likes looking at a wall of text, let alone try reading and comprehend what's written in it! We organize our writing by dividing it into sections, making lists and subheadings where appropriate. Adding images and quote blocks to add interest and visual variety. We emphasize and differentiate key ideas using bold, italics, or underlines. And for personal notes or to-do lists, we might want to strikethrough bad ideas or done items. In short, a modern writing tool needs to have formatting options to give a visual structure and to logically organize the flow of ideas, especially for long-form writing.

6. Grammar and Spell Check

Let's face it: if there is no system to automatically check our grammatical and spelling errors, many mistakes will slip through in our writing. Proofreading and correcting our drafts can take up extra time unnecessary. Why waste time and effort in manually detecting and correcting grammar and spelling mistakes, when we are writing on the Internet which has almost all the knowledge about our world? While autocorrect can be an annoying feature while typing on mobile, grammar and spelling correction is a must-have feature in a modern writing tool. It is really helpful to have a reliable assistant doing the work in the background of marking our errors, and nudging us to fix them quickly.

5. Universal Access

You start writing the outline for an article or project report on the desktop in your home office. Then, you have to commute by bus to a co-working space. You get some new ideas for the article while stuck in the traffic. So you open the document on your mobile and type those ideas down. Then you decide to cover the last few blocks to your destination on foot, since it would be faster. You use your smartwatch to dictate a few important counterpoints to the ideas presented so far in your article. Once you have settled down at your table at the co-working space, you open up your laptop and expand on all the ideas you have added so far. Thus, thanks to universal access to the document across all devices and platforms, you were able to continue working even while moving around the city and shifting work spaces.

4. Collaboration

You know how great it is for teams to be able to collaboratively edit and write in Google Docs! They can comment and suggest changes in real-time, enabling synergy by combining the brainpower of many team members. You can take meeting notes in the same document with your colleagues and clients, while your Zoom meeting is live. Cloud documents are great even for asynchronous collaboration, letting all members of a distributed team to access and edit them during their respective peak productivity working hours. It helps to bring out the best quality of work in everyone. Thus, storing, sharing and editing documents in the cloud with other people in their team is an essential feature for the modern knowledge worker.

3. Search

When we physically write down notes in diaries, journals, files, or notebooks, it is really hard to search and find a particular keyword. Finding a particular piece can be like looking for a needle in the haystack. But modern digital tools can index all of your writing. And with that, they can help you to retrieve every single mention of any word or expression. So if you are going to be using a writing tool for most of your work, it is quickly going to hold a large and growing repository of your ideas and knowledge. It is imperative that you should be able to search, sort, and filter through this mountain of data. Hence, a modern writing tool needs to have the means of searching through the library of documents, so that you can find the right information again when it is needed.

2. Free and Unlimited

Running out of free storage space? Having to upgrade to paid plans and shell out a fortune every month to get the most useful features from a product? Don't get us wrong: we do understand the importance of keeping great product to be paid. It is a sustainable way to keep improving the product and giving support to users. But in a market with an ever-growing supply of tools with similar features, the alternatives that can provide high quality at low costs will win. And the lowest possible cost is free, with unlimited access to all the features. So realistically speaking, even if a writing tool is not totally free, it should offer great utility while being affordable. Most importantly, it should be affordable enough that users from all backgrounds can use it and benefit from it. Money shouldn't become a roadblock to creativity and productivity.

1. AI Assistant

Everyone encounters the writer's block from time-to-time. Quickly coming up with good article ideas, titles, and outlines can prove to be a challenge at times. Wouldn't it be great if you could automatically generate article outlines, titles, and even complete partially written paragraphs? Sometimes, you might already have the content with you, but you wish to quickly rewrite or rephrase it. It is also desirable to have a tool do the heavy lifting of analyzing competing content and giving you important keywords, so that your writings have high SEO scores. And it would be great if you got some help while researching about a topic to organize and understand key insights. For such benefits and more, it has become essential for modern writing tools to be powered by Artificial Intelligence.

Lex.Page: Current Features and Functionality

Lex.page works on all devices inside a modern browser like Chrome, Firefox etc. So you can use it on a desktop, laptop, tablet like iPad or smartphones like iPhone & Android mobiles. There is no iOS or Android mobile app for Lex yet. But you can add the site link to the homescreen, and you will get a Lex shortcut icon to access this writing quickly from your device homescreen.

1. Invite-only Access

Right now, you need to have an invite link to immediately start using Lex.Page. If you don't have an invite, you are added to the waiting list when you sign up. The Lex team will email you when your spot is ready. Or you can become a paid subscriber to Every, a bundled business newsletter service which is the parent company of Lex. When you get access to Lex, you also receive 5 invite links of your own to share with your friends and colleagues.

If you want Lex.page exclusive invite please DM us on twitter @blogsaays or comment on this article , we will send you exclusive Lex.page invite for FREE

2. User Onboarding

New users sign up for a new free account on Lex using their Google account. They are welcomed by 6 documents in their library, which explain different aspects of the product in greater detail. These documents are titled as follows:

1. Welcome to Lex! (Start here)
2. How to Use Lex: The Basics
3. Getting the Most Out of the AI
4. Using Lex on Mobile
5. The motivation behind Lex
6. The Roadmap (upcoming features)

3. The "AI Thought Partner" in Lex

Lex has an AI assistant powered by OpenAI's GPT-3. The AI assistant functionality is currently available in 3 distinct features.

a. The Typed Shortcut "+++"

You can use Lex totally as a regular text editor. But whenever you type +++, the AI thought partner will activate and write ideas or content depending on what you have written before. For example, if your previous sentence is a natural language command such as "write an introduction about Bitcoin", Lex will write a short paragraph related to Bitcoin. Or, if you write "write an outline for the topic 5 major advantages of Blockchain", it will produce an article outline on that topic. On the other hand, if you already have plenty of content, typing +++ will lead Lex to continue writing more things about the topic contained in the preceding text.

You can also use Command + Enter on Mac (Ctrl + Enter on Windows) to summon the Lex AI Assistant.

b. The "Generate title ideas" Button

In every Lex document, there is a + icon next to the Document Title element. Clicking on it gets Lex to suggest 5 title options for that document, based on what it contains. There is also a "Generate more" link at the end of this list, so you can generate many title ideas till you come across the right one.

c. The "Ask Lex" Chatbot Menu Icon

On the menu bar located at the top of every Lex document, there is a face icon with a question mark inside. This is the "Ask Lex" button which activates a chatbox window. You can freely chat in normal English with the AI assistant. It can be a quick way to get answers about real-world facts. Or just to have a companion to brainstorm with.

Caution: All GPT-2 and GPT-3 based AI writing tools have one major drawback. It is quite easy to detect that the written outputs of these tools is AI-generated, and not human-written. So it is possible that Google and other search engines can automatically spot and derank such AI content if it is deemed low-quality and spam by their ranking algorithms. For more details on this topic, please read How to Detect AI Generated Content?

4. The Menu Bar

a. Page Elements

• You can insert Heading elements H1 to H4, for titles and headings in your document.
• Paragraph element for the normal body text.
• There are three list elements: Numbered List, Bullet List, and Todo List. Todo lists come with checkboxes, to indicate the "done" items. You can indent and unindent list times.

b. Basic Formatting Options

• Lex has the basic text formatting options of Bold, Italics, Underline and Strikethrough.
• It also supports Markdown-style shortcuts, such as ## for a H2, > for a blockquote, [] for todo item, etc.
• Con: There is no way to align center, left, right, or justify text and other page elements.

c. Inserting Links and Images

• You can select some text, hit the "Insert Link" icon (or Ctrl + K), and then paste a link. Or you can select linked text, and remove the link with the same icon.
• Con: Right now, the UX for links in Lex is clunky. In the edit mode, you cannot see what URL a given linked text is pointing to. And to go to view mode in order to check the link, you need to open the view link (from the Share button) in another tab.
• You can insert images by clicking the "Insert Image" icon, and uploading an image, or pasting an Image URL.
• Con: There is currently no way to resize or align images.

d. Blockquotes, Horizontal Lines, Clear Formatting

• You can select a paragraph and turn it into blockquotes with the Blockquotes button. This is useful to make some text to stand out from the rest of the paragraph.
• To add a horizontal separator line, to make sections in a document, you can use the Horizontal Line button.
• You can select some formatted text, like headlines or bold/italic, and press the Clear Formatting button to turn it into plain text.

e. Undo / Redo

• You can undo / redo the edits in the document using these buttons, or with the usual keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + Z (undo) and Ctrl + Y (redo).

5. Share Button

On the top right side of every Lex document, there is a blue "Share" button. Sharing is as simple as copy-pasting one of the two links to a document with anyone.

a. View Link

By sharing the View Link, you can let anyone with the link to view the document in read-only mode. They will not be able to edit anything.

Con: There is no way to share a document only with particular user accounts. Anyone with the View Link can read your document.

b. Edit Link

You can share the Edit Link to a document so other people can access it in read-and-write mode. Anyone who already has a Lex account will be able to write and edit in that document using its Edit Link. It is not clear if there is any limit on how many users can simultaneously edit a document.

6. Settings

In the right-most corner at the top, there is a Gear icon for the Settings of Lex documents. These are global settings that are common for all documents.

a. Word count

You can see the word count for a given document.

b. Theme

You can change the theme of Lex to Light or Dark mode. There is also a System-default option, which will pick the theme from your OS. Switching between Light and Dark mode is useful for day and night usage.

c. Font size

The base font-size can be increased or decreased using this option. Changing the base font-size will make other larger elements like H1, H2 etc. to scale up or down relatively.

7. Archive / Unarchive

• You can organize your documents library by using the Archive/Unarchive option.
• There are two tabs for your documents: 1) In Progress 2) Archived.
• When you hover the cursor over any document name in the list, you will see an Archive icon on the right. Pressing this sends the "In progress" document to the "Archived" tab.
• Similarly, there is an "Unarchive" icon for documents in the "Archived" tab, to send them back to the "In Progress" tab.

The Future Roadmap for Lex.Page

If we consult our list of 7 essential features for modern writing tools, Lex has 5 out of those 7 features. Also, the two essential features that are absent are not on their roadmap yet.

Available Essential Features:

1. AI Writing Assistant
2. Free and Unlimited
3. Collaboration
4. Universal Access
5. Formatting

Unavailable Essential Features:

1. Search
2. Grammar and Spell Check

Other Features Mentioned in the Future Roadmap of Lex:

1. Document version history
2. Embedding Youtube videos, Tweets, etc.
3. Better hyperlink UX
4. Google docs style comments
5. Custom fonts and CSS
6. Image resizing
7. Tables
8. Folders
9. ... and many more!

There is a Lex feature requests board where existing Lex users can add feature ideas, product feedback, and comment & upvote on other feature requests. You can also see the Planned, In Progress and Completed features here.

Summary

Lex.Page is a minimalist web app for writing, with powerful features of cloud collaboration and AI writing assistant. It is still in Beta mode, so access to Lex is limited (via invite-links, waiting lists, or for "Every.to" members). But it is currently totally free without restrictions for the users who are able to get access to it. This "free and unlimited" aspect of Lex might change in the future when they make it available to all the public. It is possible that they will present a free plan with basic features, and a paid plan with more advanced features. If you are looking for a Google-docs style tool to write and edit documents with your friends or colleagues, which also has an AI assistant to give you ideas and complete your sentences, then Lex is the free AI writing tool for you!