AI at work: Automating product content generation at Headout

At Headout, we’re all about helping people discover the wonders of the world—and making that happen through our website is key. But let’s face it: keeping up with content needs can feel like a sprint, especially when you want every word to sparkle. Enter AI, the game-changer that has made our content dreams come true.

Why We Needed a Boost

Writing engaging, structured content isn’t a walk in the park. Sure, we’ve always delivered, but when we started hearing the buzz around LLMs like ChatGPT-4, we couldn’t resist the idea of speeding things up. We imagined a world where content creation was not just fast, but perfectly aligned with our voice and our guests' expectations. Sounds dreamy, right?

The Challenges We Faced

Even with fancy AI tools like GPT-3, 3.5, and 4, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. We had a few bumps along the way:

• Keeping a consistent tone and voice
• Sticking to word limits
• Dealing with API rate limits
• Not enough content variety
• Still needing too much manual effort

Writers' block was a struggle too. But with the right tools, even that roadblock became a thing of the past.

Our Bright Idea: Content GPT

So, we built Content GPT, a tool tailored to our needs. It slides right into our workflow, and here’s how it works:

• Starting Strong: Our content writers kick things off by filling out Google Forms designed for different content types. These responses flow into Google Sheets and turn into a JSON that sends a request straight to Content GPT.

• AI Magic: AWS Lambda Functions, orchestrated through Pulumi, process the data with Python. The system gathers key facts, shapes them into AI-friendly prompts, and—presto!—compelling content comes to life.

• Behind the Curtain: Think of it as our secret recipe. We use prompt templates, carefully crafted for maximum engagement, to guide the AI in creating the perfect piece. Our Scraper Summarizer keeps us well-stocked with facts from partner websites or internal knowledge, handling any tricky bot detection like a pro.

• Mastering the Art of the Prompt: Our Prompt Generator is like the secret ingredient in our content recipe. It’s all about crafting custom prompts that steer the content creation process. How does it work? It smartly picks from a collection of special prompt templates—each one carefully crafted by our team to deliver top-notch engagement. These templates are the result of tons of research, ensuring every prompt hits the mark.

• Gathering and Distilling Information: The Scraper Summarizer is a powerhouse in our system, pulling in data from all corners—be it product listings from our partners or our internal resources. It distills this information into concise summaries, serving up the essential facts and insights directly to the Prompt Generator. Plus, it’s built to navigate any obstacles like bot detection and anti-scraping tools, ensuring smooth and continuous data collection.

• Bringing Content to Life with ChatGPT-4: The ChatGPT-4 API is the heart of our content machine. 💜 Each request gets broken down into bite-sized pieces, with responses stitched together to create a cohesive final output. Whether it’s a casual chat or a precise, single API call, it handles all kinds of content creation styles, offering our writers multiple variations to choose from. The Prompt Executor takes care of all the heavy lifting here.

• The Final Touch: Once our system has crafted the content, it’s sent to Google Docs for the last round of edits and approvals. We use Google Docs templates to keep everything neat and organized, ensuring a smooth handoff. When a draft is ready, our content team gets an instant Slack notification with a link, making it easy to review and polish before going live.

Creating Content that Clicks

Our star player is the ChatGPT-4 API, which breaks down content requests into bite-sized chunks and stitches them together seamlessly. It’s flexible too, offering different content generation methods and multiple response options. Our writers choose their favourite, polish it up, and send it on its way to Google Docs for final review.

Solving Our Problems

Integrating Content GPT with Google Forms, APIs, and Slack notifications has been a game-changer. Here’s how we tackled those earlier challenges:

• Consistent Voice: Custom prompts keep our tone on point.
• Word Count Control: Thoughtfully crafted prompts help us hit the mark every time.
• No More Rate Limits: By breaking requests into smaller pieces, we dodge those pesky API restrictions.
• More Variety: With slight prompt tweaks, we generate multiple content versions, giving our writers plenty of options.
• Full Automation: The heavy lifting is now automated, freeing up our writers to do what they do best—make great content even better.

The Result? Pure Magic

Now, about 70-80% of our new listings gets a head start with AI-generated drafts. Our team refines these drafts, ensuring they meet the high standards we set for our guests. The result? A smoother, faster, and more exciting content creation process. The feedback from our team has been fantastic—they love how user-friendly the whole system is, especially since it fits right in with tools like Google Docs and Slack.

One of our writers put it best:

"ContentGPT has been a lifesaver for revamps! The 'Your Experience' section content comes out great—just needs a little tweaking to fit our style, and it’s good to go."

What’s Next?

We’re just getting started. Next up, we’re integrating a fact-checking engine and a content checker to make sure our content stays top-notch. It’s all about raising the bar and keeping the quality high for our guests.

Our content writers Neha and Tanya played a pivotal role in perfecting our AI-powered content generation process. As key members of the content team, they rigorously tested outputs, providing invaluable feedback that significantly improved quality and consistency. Their expertise ensured our automated content aligns seamlessly with our brand voice and high standards. This project's success also owes much to Nishanth from the engineering team, who laid the crucial groundwork for the entire system.