Ever since Notion appeared on the scene back in 2016, people have been using it for all sorts: from organizing their day to building internal documentation, creating and selling templates, and even creating entire sites.

That last one has become a popular niche among the Notion community since the company allowed pages to be made public. A handful of products have been built around the concept, and now Notion is joining the party by launching Notion Sites. 

As the name suggests, Notion Sites is the company’s solution for those who want to build and host a site using their Notion documents. It is essentially an expansion of the existing publishing feature but with a number of bells and whistles tacked on. 

When you publish your Notion document as a site, you’ll now be able to do several things to make it truly yours, like adding a custom favicon, configuring it with your domain, and adding a navigation bar with links and breadcrumbs. Alongside those features, your new site also has analytics and basic SEO features like meta titles and descriptions. 

One thing the team stayed away from for now is adding too many customization options. It’s not a site-builder like Webflow or Framer, and at the moment, it’s not meant to be. You can theme your site to light or dark mode or respond to system settings, but that’s about as far as it goes. There’s no animation engine, custom CSS, hamburger icons, etc. Over time, the team plans to add more functionality, according to product lead Matt Piccolella.

If you want to take Notion Sites for a test drive, it's available now across the platform. Log in to your profile, swipe through the onboarding, and create a document to turn into a site.

AI is rapidly transforming our personal lives with automated tools and innovations, such as AI girlfriends, therapists, travel guides, and even AI social networks.

Dot fits somewhere into this genre. It’s a new AI app built by the team at New Computer. It’s not a therapist or a girlfriend — it’s more of a friend, a companion, and a confidant who strives to learn as much as possible about you. This allows it to give advice and complete tasks beyond the typical responses of other chatbots.

When you first boot up Dot, you’ll go through an onboarding process. Your new companion will ask “getting to know you” questions, like “What do you do for work?” “What’s your favorite hobby?” or “How do you like to wind down in the evening?”

Once you answer, the AI will ask deeper questions. I mentioned that I love cooking, leading Dot to ask, “What’s your earliest memory of home-cooked food?” You can tell Dot to move on, but initially, it will ask deeper questions to get to know you.

The more questions you answer, the more you, Dot, becomes. It’s not meant to replace human connection but to help you learn more about yourself. “It’s meant to be a tool for self-introspection, accountability, personal growth — but not to replace human relationships,” co-founder Samantha Whitmore told TechCrunch.

So what’s it good for? My immediate use case was as a journal. It’s good for externalizing thoughts and feelings, and since the AI gets to know you, it can sympathize better than other chatbots. Its follow-up questions genuinely lead to introspection.

If you want to try out an AI version of yourself, Dot is available on the iOS app store.

Remember when The Beatles got together for one last song? It got mixed reviews, but the fact that one of the biggest bands of all time embraced AI set a precedent. AI was going to change the music industry. From writing songs to generating entire tracks, many predicted an AI-powered musical revolution.

TwoShot is one of those AI apps looking to make its mark on the music scene. Launched last week, It is focused on making music accessible to all by letting you craft tracks with your voice, text prompt, or just by humming into a mic. 

Say you’re working on a lo-fi track to stimulate productivity. You can instruct TwoShot to generate a “melody of flutes inspired by nature” and then pair it with a chill drum line by beatboxing into your mic. The AI will turn it into a full-fledged, professional-sounding track. 

It also comes with a library of over 200,000 samples, ranging from rock to country music and everything in between, that you can grab for inspiration or even use the AI to remix into something new to create your next banger. 

One of the most powerful features is TwoShot's plethora of different models. While building your track, you can swap your chosen AI model at any stage for a different one, including ones built by big names. Say you want your lyrics to have a female voice. You can load up the “Grimes” model with your prompt or existing sounds, and it will work it into a more Grimes-esque sound.

Alongside that, these models are “ethically trained,” according to the team, meaning they usually have attained artist permission to use their likeness or have worked with them to create the model itself, like in the case of the Grimes one above. 

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