TLDR:
An exciting month for Bardeen! We teamed up with “You Probably Need a Robot” for a cool AI productivity event and, heads up, our CEO will be taking the stage at the INBOUND conference next week.
On the features front, we’ve rolled out the GPT-4 Plus model, improved meta description extraction, introduced advanced scraper settings, and added an action to add contacts to HubSpot lists seamleslly. We’ve also fine-tuned Bardeen by merging some Google Sheet actions, improving Magicbox’s suggestions, and making background scraping faster.
Among our fixes, we had to deprecate some Twitter actions because of API changes. On the bright side, our error messages are now clearer, especially when you’re reconnecting. Check it all out in this release!
Announcements
A Deep Dive into AI Productivity: Event Recap
This month we co-hosted a fantastic event titled “5 Essential AI Tools for Your Productivity Belt” with You Probably Need a Robot. Led by the brilliant minds of Jordan Mykleby, founder of ‘You Probably Need a Robot’, and our very own Ivan Escobar, Head of Community at Bardeen.ai, the session was full of insights on how to leverage AI to supercharge daily productivity.
Apps To Expand Your AI Toolbelt
- Bardeen.AI: Unlocking the power of AI to automate and streamline everyday tasks.
- Gamma App: Transforming the art of presentation-making to tell compelling stories.
- Bearly.AI: Revolutionizing reading and writing with deep, insightful summaries.
- Chat GPT: Mastering the art of prompting to produce exact writing outputs.
- Canva: Leveraging AI algorithms to turn plain text into stunning designs.
Key Takeaways
- How to enhance your writing powers with ChatGPT
- Designing like a pro using CanvaAI’s capabilities
- Researching at double the speed with Bearly.ai
- Crafting captivating slide decks effortlessly with Gamma App
- Automating tedious data entries with Bardeen
- Showcasing the power of Bardeen AI automations
- Streamlining meeting workflows like never before
If you missed the live session or want to revisit the goldmine of insights, we’ve got you covered.
Catch the event recording to witness firsthand the transformative power of AI. For those keen on diving deeper, the event slides are available as well.
A Deep Dive into AI Productivity: Event Recap
Exciting news! Our very own CEO, Pascal Weinberger, will be speaking at the renowned INBOUND conference, powered by HubSpot, next week. His session, titled “AImpact: Using Artificial Intelligence to Scale Your Startup,” is a must-attend for anyone keen on harnessing the power of AI automation for business growth.
Features
Introducing the GPT-4 Plus model! Perfect for longer outputs 
Experience a deeper level of AI interactions by leveraging the power of Open AI’s 32k model, which you can now find inside the OpenAI actions, and select “GPT-4 Plus**”.**
When to use it?
This model is powerful enough to run big operations with Bardeen, which needs to process many characters. For instance, if you prompt OpenAI to read an HTML with the standard model, you might run into a limit, because ChatGPT 3.5 has a context length of 4.096 tokens.Instead, this model has 32k tokens, being able to process longer prompts.
Meta Description Extraction
The scraper can now extract meta descriptions seamlessly, a data point useful for data collection and analysis. Find the “Meta Description” option from the Special Fields drop-down menu, in this way, they will extract the page’s meta description.This can be useful if you’re extracting page information from a bulk of URLs. Now, besides the scraped fields, you can get their meta descriptions seamlessly.
Advanced Configuration for “Ask me every time” Arguments
As an advanced feature, it is now possible to customize certain parameters of automation inputs (“Ask me every time”) for the scraper.
This will add a greater level of customization when designing and sharing automations.
It allows 2 main possibilities
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Automations can be created without a scraper model, and the user will create it when it runs.
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Magic Box will get better automation drafts and work even if we don’t have an existing scraper model for a page.
Video demo
How to use it
If you’re creating a scraper automation and set the model as “ask me every time”:
You can now input the URL for the model. Now, when you (or whoever has the automation) runs it, they’ll see this, and be guided to create a scraper model for that page.
“Ask me every time” to fill in tables
VIDEO DEMO:
Table inputs - required in actions like Add Row to Google Sheet - can now use “ask me every time” and be filled when running a playbook.For instance, here I decided to fill in the spreadsheet values when I ran the automation:
Once I run it I’ll see this:
This is useful for apps that require a lot of manual input, like creating leads on Salesforce or tasks at Clickup.
Add Contacts to HubSpot Lists
Enhance your CRM workflows by adding contacts directly to specific HubSpot lists without switching between platforms. Find the new action to “Create Hubspot contact” in the builder, on the Hubspot integration.
Improvements
Consolidated Google Sheet actions!
We heard you! The “Add rows to Google Sheets” and “Add rows to Google Sheet Tab” were confusing in their differences. We have consolidated them into one action, “Add rows to Google Sheets”, making the Tab optional.
We’ve done the same for “Update rows in Google Sheets” and “Update rows in Google Sheets Tab”.
Magicbox Enhancements🪄
We’ve updated our suggestion algorithms in Magicbox, ensuring you get even more accurate and helpful automation suggestions to streamline your tasks.
Improved page load detection for background scraping and reliability.
We have improved the page load for pages that are scraped in the background, sometimes scraping used to start before the page has been loaded successfully, especially on slower networks. This means it’s no longer needed to specify the custom delay in many scraping automations. We have also made few improvements into general execution logic. We have also made few improvements into general execution logic, so can also expect your deep scraping automations to run more reliable.
Bug Fixes
Deprecating broken Twitter actions:
Unfortunately, recent changes in Twitter API broke most of the actions that Bardeen supported. We have no choice but to remove those actions from Bardeen. Going forward Twitter integration will only support creating a new Tweet.
Clearer Error Messages when reconnecting integrations:
Error messages for integrations that need to be connected again were improved. We’ve added clearer descriptions, helping you understand and resolve issues faster.