Creating the Ultimate AI-Enhanced Bookmarking Buddy with Notion
If you are anything like us, you are constantly finding and bookmarking content on the internet.
Many well-known apps, such as Pocket, Raindrop.io, and Evernote, help with this, but none of them are perfect or as customisable as we'd like.
We often add bookmarks only for them to be lost under the ever-increasing pile of new links. Sometimes, we remember something we added weeks later and can no longer find it, and things are not categorised as well as they could be.
All of these little issues got us thinking. Could we build an AI-powered bookmark bot using Chat Thing and Notion? Well, we've done just that, and it's pretty awesome!
Read on to find out how to create something similar in about 5 minutes!
So, how will our AI bookmark manager bot work, and what will it do?
It's pretty simple: open up the bot and paste it into the link whenever you find something interesting online. The bot will gather info on the link and save it into your Notion database. On top of that, the bot will do some beneficial things:
- Automatically assign the type of bookmark, e.g. "Website", "Image", "Video", "Tweet", etc
- Automatically categorise it. E.g. "Personal", "Health", "Finance", "Food", "Home", etc
- Visit the link and generate a summary description with AI
- We can ask questions about the bookmarks we've added. Eg. "What have I added this week?", "What podcasts have I added".
If you are more of a visual learner you can watch this tutorial below:
Creating a Notion database for your AI bookmarking tool
Before we create the bookmarking bot in Chat Thing, you will need to create a database in Notion. If you want to copy ours, you can duplicate a template here.
Here's what our Notion database looks like:
The database is relatively simple and we added the following properties:
- Name - A name for the bookmark.
- Created time - When was it added.
- URL - The URL we are bookmarking.
- Type - The type of bookmark (Article, Image, File, Tweet, Video, Website, Podcast).
- Category - The category (Food, Health, Personal, Other, Home, Finance, Business, Development, Design).
- Description - The summary description of the bookmark content.
You could add more properties here, but this should provide a nice start.
Creating the AI bookmark bot with Chat Thing
Now that your Notion database is ready, it's time to create your bot on Chat Thing. Creating the bot shouldn't take more than 5 minutes, and there are a few steps we will need to complete to get it to work.
Writing your prompt
First, we need to create a custom system message that will give our bot instructions on how to act. After making the new bot, we need to go to its general settings so we can add a custom prompt.
You will need to uncheck "Use our default prompt" and then update the system message field with the following:
You are a helpful and friendly bookmarking who receives links, investigates them and then based on what you find out, categorises them and saves them into a Notion database. Whenever you receive a link, use your browse web function to attempt to get more info on it so you can categorise it better. You can also use the Google search tool to do the same. Don't worry if you can't get any more data, do your best with the info you have, or ask questions about what the link is if that helps.
Here, we give the bot a role and instructions on what it should do when receiving a link.
Choosing the model
Our bot will need to use power-ups to browse the web and interact with Notion, so you must choose a model that supports tool calling and power-ups. You can do this in the advanced model section. We went with GPT-4o for the best balance of power and cost for this demo.
Adding the required power-ups
Next we need to add a few power-ups to our bot. This will allow the bot to visit any link we give it so it can gather info on it and automatically categorise it, etc.
After that, we will add a few power-ups to enable the bot to save and read items from our Notion bookmarks database.
Let's add the Browse web page power-up first. Go to your bot settings, then the Power-ups tab, then a new power-up, select "Browse webpage", and click Create.
You should then see the Browse webpage settings screen, as shown below. We don't need to change anything here, so just save it and get ready to add the next power-up.
Next, let's add the Google search power-up. This can be used as an additional way for the bot to get information on a link. Again, add the power-up and leave the default settings.
Now, we can move on to adding the Notion power-ups. First, let's add a "Save to Notion database" power-up. Once you have added the power-up, the first thing you need to do is select your Notion bookmarks database.
After that, I updated the power-up name to "Update bookmarks" and the description to "Save and update bookmark items in a Notion database, categorising them by type and category.". Remember the description is the most important part and should describe what the power-up does to the bot so it knows how and when to use it.
Next, you should scroll down and set all the database fields to the required using the toggle. It's also worth checking that the AI-generated description of each field is correct. Again, this is important because it tells the AI how it should use each field.
Great, we can add our final power-up, a "Query Notion database" power-up. This one will allow our bot to find and retrieve items we already have saved to our Notion bookmark database.
Once you have added the power-up, select the same database you used previously and then update the power-up name and description.
We used the name "Find bookmarks" and the description "Search Bookmarks database".
That should be all the bot building done, we can now test the bot!
Using the bookmark bot
Using the bookmarking bot is as simple as going to your bot URL and pasting in an interesting link. Here's an example:
And the item added to Notion:
Pretty cool right!
Adding it to your home screen
I am constantly bookmarking things on my phone. To make it as easy as possible, using your new bookmarking bot, you can add it to your home screen, which is super convenient. On iOS, you can visit your bot's URL, then click the share icon and find the add to home screen option.
You can now open your bookmark bot with a few clicks like any other app on your phone!
What next?
This demonstrates the powerful tools you can build using Chat Thing and Notion without any code! This is just one of the 1000s of potential use cases.
If you want to learn more, check out our Notion Power-up docs, and if you have any questions, please get in contact!