People Speak

With a few clicks, you can use AI to bulk generate targeted microcopy for any audience.

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Inspiration

While we recognize the importance of persuasive text, we have personally struggled to write for consumer facing products in several different roles we’ve held, including:

  • Website copy while freelancing for a popular boba shop in San Diego
  • Social media posts promoting technical products to engineers while working as a digital marketing expert in a past life
  • In-product microcopy while designing for technical enterprise software used by business leaders and engineers

It requires us to switch gears and put our copywriting hat on — it’s almost always a slow grind! Why can’t we just focus on what we do best? And so we started thinking… AI should help us.

Regardless of what role we're in, writing is such an important part of business. Despite this, few people are actually trained to write for their audience. This causes bottlenecks in operations, wasted ad spend and is ultimately costly for enterprises.

What it does

With People Speak, users can create and select personas to generate taglines tailored to each persona based on selected text from a design. It uses the Qwen2 model to generate the tailored taglines, which are then saved to an Excel file. In short, it uses AI to translate text to appeal to different audiences.

Users can then use the Excel file in Canva’s data autofill feature create the designs with targeted microcopy in bulk. With only one person, workflows can be streamlined exponentially. Additionally, since People Speak is a Canva app, users can also seamlessly leverage feature from Canva, such as brand voice, and other apps.

1. Use custom user personas - Users can add custom persona profiles using real insight from their Market Research / Analytics teams.

2. Bulk generation of targeted microcopy - Microcopy is automatically generated in bulk to resonate with selected personas using a single writing sample. User can chose how many variations to generate for each selected persona.

3. Apply to existing brand templates to create assets - Generated microcopy is applied to existing brand template of choice. Maintaining brand identity and streamlining the workflow while producing new creative assets.

Benefits

  • Helps business users streamline their workflows
  • Empowers non writers to produce tailored microcopy in minutes
  • Offers validation and confidence in output, especially for complex topics
  • Is a ready to use solution without needing tech resources to build complicated integrations
  • Enables research teams to easily take action on their insights

Bigger impact

People Speak can help anyone who struggles with writing for a specific audience. It is especially beneficial when writing for super technical, niche or jargony use cases such as those found in finance, health, insurance, legal and more.

At its core, People Speak is about leveraging LLMs to tailor information for different audiences. Using People Speak as a marketing assistant to produce taglines for specific audiences is just one of many applications. For instance, a math teacher creating worksheets could tailor questions to student hobbies, interests, or background.

How we built it

  • Design thinking methods - ideation + user journey mapping
  • UI design - Figma + Canva App UI Kit
  • Frontend
    • Apps SDK Starter Kit
    • App UI Kit
    • useSelection hook
  • Backend
    • FastAPI
    • Uvicorn
    • mkcert
    • Ollama Python
  • AI
    • Ollama
    • Qwen2 LLM
    • Prompt engineering system instructions
      • get useful, varied taglines tailored to personas
      • …in a consistent data format

Challenges we ran into

  • Navigating the Canva Developer ecosystem
    • It took some time to understand the different use cases between the Apps SDK and Connect APIs
    • Initially struggled to run the app locally due to an adblocker
  • Finding the right model
  • Getting the model to provide useful responses
  • Technical constraints — unable to implement our original UX as a Canva app
    • We originally wanted the app to download the Excel file instantly

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built a COOL enterprise app that addresses real world challenges personally experienced
  • Built an AI-powered app

What we learned

  • How to build a Canva app
  • Canva design guidelines
  • How to run an LLM locally
  • The benefits of AI in graphic design

What's next for People Speak

image

  • Future integration with improved UX (make it more seamless without needing to separately export excel sheets and import)
  • Provide extensive list of out of the box customer personas
  • Users can easily import custom personas in bulk
  • Seamlessly integrate with brand voice feature

image Our example demonstrates use for promotional assets (social media ads) but the technology can support more use cases in the future, a few examples:

  • Teachers can generate worksheets in all subjects for students of different grades
  • Industry subject matter experts can get help writing emails
  • for example: a product designer can get help rewriting an important email to a business oriented colleague (like a sales manager, business analyst or product manager)

Built With

  • canva-apps-sdk-starter-kit
  • fastapi
  • mkcert
  • ollama
  • ollama-python
  • qwen2
  • uvicorn
  • xlsxwriter
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