😸 OpenAI connects the Dots

OpenAI has apparently given people what they want: a small plushie in digital form. We’re talking, of course, about its new AI agent, Dots. If you have the $100 a month Pro plan, you can get your own—with the agent and its data living in a virtual machine. 

The company says your dot is always on and can “readily connect to over 4,000 apps,” meaning you can chat with or call it via ChatGPT, Slack, Teams, etc. And since it’s your dot, it learns your preferences and working style over time. 

The release comes on the heels of Meta’s Muse, another personal AI agent that acts similarly but without the price tag.

Customers! They always want something, am I right? It’s almost like they expect value for their money. So, to help you give them good value and good service without you breaking bad, we compiled some recently launched customer support tools that caught our eye:

• Ferndesk is knowledge-base software for small teams. It checks your docs against your products, updating any changes. It hit #2 on our leaderboard on September 30. 

• SaleSmartly is a tool for managing customer conversations. It brings all your feedback and follow-ups on to one platform so you have a better view of what’s going on. It reached #2 on September 28.

• Typewise, which began in 2019 as a smartphone keyboard for reducing typos, has evolved into a fullscale “AI customer experience platform.” Nova, which hit #1 on Sept. 10, helps set up and manage agents that deal with customers.

by Ridvan Uyan, software engineer at ShipHQ (which recently launched)

In Turkey, when someone you love leaves on a journey, you pour a cup of water behind them. "Su gibi git, su gibi gel": go smoothly like water, come back just as easily.

When a subscriber churns in ShipHQ, nobody gets angry and the office doesn't go dark. Someone just steps out and pours water after them. Churn hurts, but I wanted it to feel like "see you again" instead of a loss.

How do you handle the days when someone cancels? Do you look at churn, or avoid it?

Taking a screenshot is easy. It’s the part after that’s hard. They don’t always look good, they can take too many steps to share, and it can be hard to find the right one. So thankfully there are a few tools out there to make more of your screenshots.

Here they are and their reason for being, in their founders’ words. 

Shotcandy: Makes screenshots look better

“I made Shotcandy because I kept losing ten minutes to the same chore: screenshot something I built, then fiddle with padding, a gradient and a shadow before it was good enough to post. The good tools were paid, watermarked, or wanted an account. So Shotcandy is free, MIT-licensed, and runs entirely in your browser. Your screenshots never leave your machine.” - Bilal Tahir

BiBimba: Makes screenshots searchable

“BiBimba started from a small annoyance: I take a lot of screenshots (receipts, error dialogs, slides), and when I need one number from one of them a week later, I can't search for it. So BiBimba treats screenshots like clipboard entries. It runs OCR on them right away, and everything you copied or captured ends up in one search box. Type ‘invoice’ and you get the text you copied, the screenshot with that word in it, and the snippet you saved.” - Rihito

Xnapper: Makes screenshots easy

“As a content creator, I post a lot of images and screenshots on my Twitter and LinkedIn. BUT, I was frustrated with the existing solutions to make beautiful screenshots. There are too many steps involved! After Xnapper: 1. Take a screenshot. 2. Upload to social media/document. That's it!” - Tony Dinh