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Show HN: Pointer – AI agent for Google Docs (like an intern working for you)
Hi HN,

I'm Rade, the developer behind Pointer — the first AI agent for Google Docs.

Have you ever tried copying text from ChatGPT into Google Docs and ended up with a formatting mess? I certainly have, and it was frustrating. The constant fixing of styles and formatting broke my workflow and wasted time.

That's why I built Pointer. Instead of juggling between ChatGPT and Google Docs, you can now give instructions right within your document. Pointer acts on your requests by typing out changes in real-time and adds comments explaining the reasoning behind each suggestion. You can approve or reject these changes as you see fit.

One of the technical challenges was creating a seamless experience that feels native to Google Docs. Under the hood, Pointer communicates with the OpenAI API to process your instructions and generate context-aware edits without disrupting your writing flow.

By eliminating the need to copy-paste and fix formatting issues, Pointer aims to make writing and editing more efficient and enjoyable. It's like having an intern who understands exactly what you need and implements it directly in your document.

I'd love for you to try it out and let me know if it improves your workflow. You can find Pointer on the Chrome Web Store.

Looking forward to your feedback and any questions you might have!

Cool stuff! What I like about the idea is to have an agent working with you on your document without doing any window switching. The beginning is there, specially with the UI actually being used to apply changes. However, you can't really see it since it has a loader every time you prompt it. Kinda breaks the co-working experience.

Ideas for iterations: allow to start from scratch (e.g. "generate a blog post about x"). Or allowing to focus on selected text, rather than having to prompt the area to change (also a bit costly). Bonus; if the user is not me, but the agent.

Thanks for the awesome feedback! I added the loader mainly to prevent user interactions while it write suggestions (and I thought it looked cool), but your feedback is invaluable, I'll work on it.

Good catch! The ability to start from scratch is the most requested feature, and I'm actively working on it. Working with Google Docs can be tricky due to API restrictions, but I'm determined to make it happen!

P.S. You can already select a portion of the text to focus on—give it a try, it should work just as you described! :)

I forgot to mention that it's most valuable for when you're editing a long document, like a complex contract, in which you need to make a bunch of changes that would take a lot of time to locate and edit manually.

P.S. It feels a bit like magic watching it click around and write suggestions for you to approve, check out the video :)