GM Assistant is a Year Old!
The company is still just me (Alex) with occasional help from some contractors. Running the business has been an immense learning experience for me and, to be honest, a bit of a rollercoaster. We've gone from 0 users to consistently hundreds of users analyzing sessions every month 😅
Most of this first year has been improving the core feature, user experience/quality of life and coding up many, semi-secret experiments for possible future features.
You all have helped shape the tool via the Feedback button, Discord, and Email, which I really, really appreciate. Please keep it up.
For this next year, I hope to continue to improve the tool and grow the user base. I've switched to planning in 3-4 month dev cycles. This allows me to adapt to user feedback and new technology relatively quickly, but also be productive by focusing for months at a time without those shiny distractions.
So what's new?
Increased Analysis Detail
We found a few ways to squeeze out way more details without adding more costs. Analyses will now come with way more detail. This means longer recaps, more scenes, and longer descriptions for NPCs, Locations, Items, etc. If you are like me, though, you can still use the "short" recap that remains at 2 paragraphs to read aloud to your group.
Expanded Capacity
Some of you may have noticed this month that analyses were taking longer than the usual 15 minutes. This is due to more users and some users doing large backlogs of sessions. It was also exacerbated by the increased analysis detail which adds some processing time.
Thanks to FB marketplace, we got some more GPUs (running off our local solar) so we can do more analyses concurrently without sending more up to the cloud.
We also secured increased rate-limits with other providers which will allow us to have larger bursts of concurrent analyses.
Bugs
✅ Fixed: Increased limits on session fields as new analysis details were sometimes beyond the limits! This resulted in a "400 Request body validation error" alert when clicking "Copy to Session" or "Save".
- Number of scenes from 40 → 100, Recaps from 15,000 characters to 50,000. Appropriate field limits are important to prevent abuse and to keep the system performant.
- We will also add a more explicit error message in this case.
✅ Fixed: Browser would run out of memory if a user rapidly selected multiple audio files. This was due to us loading the first 5 minutes of each file in an attempt to detect silent audio. This has been throttled to 4 checks at a time.
✅ Fixed: Issue where it would appear an analysis was stuck at 100%. This was due to an issue where we stopped checking the analysis status if it was at 100% but was also not yet set to "completed", thus it required a page refresh.
✅ Fixed: Analysis details would sometimes be missing large swaths of details. This was due to parts of our analysis pipeline losing information. We've added sanity checks and tweaks to those parts of the pipeline to ensure this doesn't happen.
✅ Fixed: Occasionally, unicode characters would not be rendered properly in session notes. This mostly caused issues for non-English languages.
✅ Fixed: Tutorial popup not showing for new users
❌ Confirmed: Copy and paste from fields other than "Recap" into another app may fail due to lack of the "Barlow" font. We will work to fix this by changing the font used for displaying notes to a standard font. Workaround is to export the notes.
What's Next?
The following items are the current focus before we move onto the next set of features. Check out our Roadmap
Improved Transcripts
- ✅ Timestamps
- ✅ Spelling corrections
Improved Spelling Hints
- ✅ Supplying phonetics
- ✅ Better detection of spoken out out spelling hints
More Analysis Options
- ✅ Field selection
- ✅ Give text hints per analysis
Past-Session Context
-
✅ Use information from previous session notes to improve the
analysis
- NOTE: Currently, only details in the Campaign Details page are used during analysis and not past sessions.
🥂 Here's to another year of not taking notes.
-Alex
Founder, GM Assistant