Dibbly would like to introduce you to your new personal assistant. The tiny spaceman with a bright pink face is vying for a place in your heart next to Microsoft’s big-eyed paperclip. KIP is the avatar for Dibbly Create’s AI chatbot, just one feature on the content creation platform that seeks to simplify and personalize authors’ experience on the site.
Dibbly started out as a ghostwriting company, founded by Marco Moutinho and Natasha Moutinho in 2018 under the name The Urban Writers. Although Dibbly still provides a place for authors to connect with vetted freelancers for creative collaborations, such as ghostwriters, editors, illustrators, translators, and narrators, they’ve recently shifted their focus to software for content creation. The company’s revised vision statement reflects this change: “We aim to be the world’s top AI-powered content creation platform, making high-quality content accessible at a fair cost and effortlessly achievable through our all-in-one workspace.” Marketed as an all-in-one solution, Dibbly allows users to create a project, track their progress, find collaborators, and use AI to solve problems from SEO optimization to translations and book descriptions.
Features
The new content creation platform, Dibbly Create, was designed as a project management system, but its primary function is as an AI-integrated cloud-based word processor. After creating a project, authors can immediately start writing or choose from several templates. Authors can ask KIP, the in-house AI, for help or submit the project to freelancers for collaboration at any point in the writing process.
Inside the document, you can invite editors, beta readers, and co-writers to leave comments and suggestions, similar to Google Docs and Word. The project saves automatically and keeps a running word count as you go. If you lose internet access while working on a project, it will save locally and sync with the cloud when you regain your connection. The platform is mobile-friendly but does not yet have a dedicated app.
Writers can also use KIP to research, structure, or generate content. The Acceptable Use disclaimer requires that freelancers modify any AI-generated content they use on your project to “ensure veracity, appropriateness, accessibility, and originality.”
Once you’ve finished writing your book, you can export it as a Word document or PDF file, choosing from fourteen paperback page sizes, as well as ebook, legal size, and more. Some formatting is available, though currently the only option showing in the style gallery is for ebooks.
Authors seeking advice have access to several video tutorials. The Help Center provides options for bug reports, contacting support, or live chats between 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST Monday through Friday.
A research tool will search Amazon for similar books and provide details like reviews, sales, and rank to help you understand comparable titles and what readers wanted from them. YouTube and Google research is also available.
Other features include:
- a prompt library;
- an interior book designer for both EPUBs and paperbacks;
- Content Manipulation with KIP;
- the /KIP command, which allows users to access AI tools without leaving the document;
- ChatKIP, an AI personal assistant;
- an outline generator;
- a title generator; and
- a summarizer.
Pro Tip: Like ChatGPT, KIP can take on assigned roles and respond from that point of view. Sci-Fi/Horror and Nonfiction author Dale L. Roberts says, “I will get KIP to take on a fictional character, and I can have full conversations with KIP in that character’s mode. And it kind of helps grease the creative wheels for fiction.”
Pricing
On the free plan, users get twenty thousand tokens per month, unlimited projects, 1 GB of storage, and limited access to ChatKIP. Tokens are spent when you use KIP and max out at 7,500 words per month on the free plan.
For $19.14 per month, authors can upgrade to the Professional plan, where they get one million tokens per month (up to 750,000 words per month), 10 GB of storage, and use of the Intelligent Research Tool, Smart Outline Generator, AI Book Description Generator, and Intelligent Summarizer. The Professional plan provides unlimited access to ChatKIP, including Inline KIP, Highlight KIP, and KIP Generate. Inline KIP allows you to use KIP to make changes and check grammar directly in your document. It sounds similar to ProWritingAid but is also capable of bigger changes, like shifting point of view. Using KIP Generate consumes tokens at a faster rate than ChatKIP, but it includes a suite of AI tools, like an outliner, summarizer, and Amazon researcher.
The platform is currently offering a seven-day free trial, and two months free if you choose the yearly payment option over the monthly one. Both plans include a prompt library to assist with common uses of the AI tools, as well as real-time collaboration and sharing tools, offline and dark modes, historic versions of sections of the project, and a Word export option. Templates are available for some projects on both plans, though the free plan’s options are limited.
For authors interested in going all-in on creating a project with AI, Dibbly offers an AI Non-Fiction Book Bundle. The package is advertised as delivering your next book at half the cost and four times the speed. To accomplish this, Dibbly provides two freelancers, a writer and an editor; plagiarism checks; ebook formatting; and book descriptions for your marketing plan. The result is a detailed outline and full manuscript that starts at ten thousand words. You can monitor progress and provide real-time feedback throughout the process. This package costs $1.70 per one hundred words. Additional services include project management, cover design, illustrations, proofreading, and narration.
Although the human writer on your project will handle assigning prompts and fleshing out the manuscript, and the human editor will handle revisions, some book categories may not be suitable for the AI system. According to the website, “Recipe books, exercise books, crafts, coding, workbooks or any book that has unique formatting or illustrative requirements may not be ideal.”
To further entice authors to test this process, Dibbly offers a free ebook, The AI Book Method, which claims to teach you “how to build a book in less than 24 hours for less than $38.” The book walks writers through finding profitable topics, then using AI for research, generating an outline, and generating the book. It follows up with how to enhance the AI-generated content, format the book, and get it ready to publish. The process is focused on speed and developing passive income.
Integration
The most meaningful integration of Dibbly Create is with Dibbly itself. Now fully rebranded from The Urban Writers, Dibbly functions as an online marketplace for freelance professionals like writers, editors, proofreaders, designers, and SEO experts. Should you need the skills a freelancer can provide, you can ask KIP to recommend someone to you. The AI assistant will give you names with star ratings, reviews, and profiles. And if you’ve used a freelancer before on the platform, KIP can remind you of their name, qualifications, and contact information.
If you choose to make use of project managers and freelancers on Dibbly, every member of your team can be connected through a Slack-integrated channel.
Pro Tip: Conversations with KIP are stored in the history in case you need to revisit them.
Updates
Dibbly Create’s developers recently added improvements like split view and a token use tracker in response to user requests. Split view allows users to open the document in side-by-side windows, where they can see two sections of the project at once. A counter on the homepage shows both tokens used and tokens available to help monitor your balance as you use ChatKIP and other AI tools.
The developers have more updates and additions planned for the site as well. Upcoming features include an image generator, currently in beta; custom prompt saving; sprints; and a mobile app. The image generator and custom prompt saving feature will only be available on the Professional plan.
Strengths and Limitations
If you’re interested in using AI tools for content creation, Dibbly stands out as a platform that provides both AI and human resources. Being able to pull in freelance writers and editors who have been trained and vetted in their use of AI may be preferable to hiring someone off Fiverr or Upwork, who may not be transparent in how they use it. That said, freelancers on Reddit have accused Dibbly of exploitative practices, and users have reported inconsistent quality in the work completed by ghostwriters hired through Dibbly.
As with any AI tool, fact-checking is still the author’s responsibility. When I asked KIP to tell me about Dibbly’s features, the AI included a section on community engagement that told me about forums and discussion boards users could join. I found no evidence of either resource on the platform. After I asked it a follow-up question, KIP admitted, “I don’t have specific information about Dibbly’s platform layout or features” and suggested I check directly with the platform.
Dibbly is designed to be a one-stop shop for creating a book, and the platform provides almost anything you could need to accomplish that. However, the number of features may be overwhelming, leading some users to treat it more like a word processor with some fun, if potentially distracting, extras.
For more information about ways to use Dibbly in your writing, check out Roberts’s review on his YouTube channel, Self Publishing with Dale.
