Launch HN: Text Blaze (YC W21) Programmable snippets to automate tedious typing
Before Text Blaze, we designed and built internal tools for thousands of sales and support reps at Google. As much as we tried though, our tools could never automate all repeated work for all users. We saw that there were always tech savvy reps who would build additional scripts to fill gaps and help save even more time. With Text Blaze, we wanted to create something for those kinds of reps to speed up and automate their boring repetitive work (and make it super easy for them to share with teammates).
Text Blaze snippets help users to do this. You can start by taking all the repetitive messaging that they have and making it insertable with a few keystrokes. Many of our users easily save hours a month of typing just doing that.
Technical users can go much further though. Our snippets can include form fields like text boxes or drop down menus in them and have dynamic fields with formulas. Users can use this to:
- calculate a 15% service charge automatically when entering a price in a snippet text field.
- or automatically pulling in the name of contact when sending a message in LinkedIn,
- or saving data to a Google Spreadsheet every time they use a snippet,
- or create patient diagnostic templates where the snippet may include a drop down to capture whether the patient is a smoker. If (and only if) the answer is yes, a follow up question and text box (number of cigarettes a day) will appear.
Think of Text Blaze a little like Zapier meets Emmet. Some of the ways people use Text Blaze have amazed us. For example, the Customer Success department at a European delivery company, uses Text Blaze to standardize their comms with customers and drivers and automate much of the related processes. For example, their snippets read conversations with drivers in Intercom and automatically send a summary of the required information to a rep in the relevant Slack channel.
Our most common users of Text Blaze are in customer support and recruiting, but we’re also seeing a lot of adoption in other areas like education (especially with the increased levels of remote learning with Covid).
Text Blaze is free to use for many use cases and we have paid versions with additional features and improved collaboration for teams.
Want to try Text Blaze out? You can get started by installing our extension from the Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadac...).
We’re a Chrome Extension as we see more and more users are spending all their time in Chrome and we want to be able to closely integrate with the different web applications they use.
We would love your feedback on the Text Blaze here and your experiences with tools for end-user automation in general. What’s worked for you and where are there opportunities to improve existing approaches?
56 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadOne thing special Text Blaze offers is the ability to make dynamic forms with formulas. For instance say you had an invoice snippet. With Text Blaze you could do something like this
```
Cost: ${formtext: name=price}
With tax (15%): ${=price * 1.15}
```
This will create a snippet with a text box for the cost and then a dynamically calculated field that applies the 15% tax.
This is just a simple example but you can well beyond it to embed logic and dynamic behavior directly in your snippets.
Beyond dynamic behavior, we're very focused on ease of use and collaboration across teams of users (which is important for business use cases).
"Looks like you're trying to do an intro... and yours kinda sucks. We have a proven intro, click here to upgrade!"
We actually are interested in the possibility of selling premium snippet packs. Not something we have had time to explore at the moment, but the "give the razor away" model is an interesting one.
A Windows app because I dont use only Chrome. I use Slack, Outlook, VSCode, WSL2, Citrix VM, etc. Would be nice to have this for any and every window.
We haven't yet done so because we really want to nail the experience on a single platform first (Chrome).
Text insertion on the web is actually surprisingly complex [0] and we leverage some DOM API's that aren't fully standardized yet. Focusing just on Chrome for the moment allows us to really figure out the experience before we expand to other browsers like Firefox, along with Desktop and Mobile applications.
[0] There are so many different ways to support text input on the web. Take Google Docs for instance; when you type into it, you are actually typing into a hidden iframe element that captures your keystrokes and then updates the document model. Figuring out how to support all these edge cases is tricky.
But OP and Text Blaze should take your question as great feedback: by simplifying to "programmable snippets", it sounds like just a dumb automation tool to reduce typing. We saw that stuff yesterday on HN with people using AutoHotKey and similar.
Make it more clear what you offer!
As a Chrome extension, Text Blaze can use the contents of the webpage you are on in your snippet.
For example, if you replied to an email in Gmail, the following Text Blaze snippet would pull in the name of the person you were replying to automatically (the bit after the `selector=` is a CSS selector):
```
Hello {site: text; selector=.h7:last-child .gD},
...
```
CSS selectors are much too technical for most users and this one in particular is quite ugly, but we are planning on developing higher-level functionality to make this much more accessible in the future.
On a side note, a few images weren't loading when I opened your homepage in Safari just now.
For now though it's too technical for most users (outside HN of course) so it's not something we focus on.
Thanks for flagging the Safari issue, we'll look into it.
Second, we want to develop tighter integrations with various applications. In another thread we discussed how a Text Blaze snippet could automatically include the name of the person you are replying to in Gmail. This works, but it very technical currently. We want to build higher-level advanced integrations for all the common sites our users use to make this much easier (Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, Airtable, Monday.com, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Intercom, etc...).
I would be happy to learn how you will position your product compared to AHK.
[0]https://lintalist.github.io
We support a little bit of that (you can tab between different fields in a webpage with Blaze), but we're much more focused on communications (text).
Most of our features are really about making static or dynamic messages or documents. So for example, lots of forms support, formulas, data validation, etc... And making this all as accessible as possible.
So, there's definitely a market opportunity but I'd go more low-level in order to have OS-wide coverage and preferably beyond one OS but this would be impossible when doing three implementations. Maybe a macOS version is a good start. There you have few options which bring you far but yeah, not as far as AHK.
I use Lintalist[0] and wonder if your team is familiar with it and whether you might look to integrate.
It seems the planned feature of adding high level abstractions for working with Chrome page content would be the only point of differentiation I could see placing your app above Lintalist, for my needs. Perhaps integrating with the snippets and libraries I already have? Just a thought.
Good luck to your team!
[0]https://lintalist.github.io
The most interesting three users I heard from using Blaze were a priest, a tarot card reader and sushi chef.
Would love any feedback on how to reach users in general.
This also shows one of the dangers of building on Chrome (my company has two extensions, one of which we had to rush off of the Google payments platform), which is that you’re subject to their whims.