If you’ve been in the Frase Facebook group for any time, you’ve likely seen mention of Peter Hatherley’s templates. Peter Hatherley is the founder of Authored Intelligence and, as of this writing, offers three premium templates for sale and has released a 4th template to the community for free.
Being huge fans of Frase (read our Frase.io review), it only seemed appropriate to buy these templates and give them a whirl. This article reviews the three premium templates, which also happen to be his long-form templates. These three templates are:
- Agency Writer
- AI Professional
- and Semantic Author
KrisAI: Original Data and Research
With a background in software certification for a Fortune 100 company, we created our own test and evaluation criteria. Here’s a short explanation of how we did our research, gathered data, and analyzed it.
To test real-world conditions, we created a set of 11 sample inputs ranging from very poor to overly specific contexts. We wanted to test each template against the same inputs to see how each handled the input. Additionally, we used each template’s first output for our analysis to avoid selection bias.
We did not modify the inputs at all during testing.
Since these are long-form templates, we wanted to measure a few qualities:
- Word Count
- Readability: Flesch-Kincaid Grade-level Score
- Readability: Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Score
While the Flesch-Kincaid scores have shortcomings, this is at least a fair, objective way to evaluate the readability of these templates.
The primary drawback to these tests is that they do not examine things like punctuation and the accuracy of statements.
Frase Templates Test Summary
Before we get into the individual template tests, here are some charts we made showing how each template performed on each test and their overall averages, minimum, and maximum scores. Commentary will be provided on each template’s review further below.
Summary Chart of Word Count Results
Summary Chart of Readability: Grade Level
A higher number means it is harder to read.
Summary Chart of Readability: Reading Ease
A higher number means it’s easier to read.
Authored Intelligence: Agency Writer Frase Template Review
Agency Writer seeks to distill the essential concepts and qualities of text and professionally present them. Writers can use this template to sift through large amounts of text to find the critical components and write about them.
We haven’t asked Peter, but we imagine this is why he branded this template as “Agency Writer.” As we see it, a person representing clients of diverse industries and backgrounds may only possess a broad but shallow understanding of their client’s businesses. A template like Agency Writer can allow an agency to input source data from a client and use the output for any number of purposes, including:
- Authoring copy for Facebook and Google ads for their client
- Creating copy for social media campaigns
- Writing summaries, excerpts, and meta descriptions for blog posts and other content.
In addition to isolating critical concepts from text passages, the template also manages to expand upon short ideas.
We spent some time asking it various questions about anything that came to mind, and it would often output excellent content between 40 – 90 words. However, when summarizing significant passages, we usually received outputs with word counts between 100 and 200 words.
While it is still considered a long-form template, Agency Writer consistently put out the least content of the three templates we tested, with an average of 70 words per test input. In addition, it had a minimum output of 4 words and a maximum output of 121 using our standardized set of test inputs. However, it produced the most consistent word count, while AI Professional and Semantic Author had more varying word counts.
Regarding readability (Flesch-Kincaid metrics), Agency Writer, on average, produced the most reader-friendly outputs, slightly edging out AI Professional and Semantic Author. It averaged just under a 6th-grade reading level. However, Agency Writer and AI Professional had much more variance in the consistency of their output readability.
Agency Writer Template Input Requirements
Agency Writer did best with most question-style inputs, and if you don’t mind giving the template free-reign, then it did pretty well with vague context. This template seemed to shine when inputting large amounts of data into the prompt and letting it sift through to try summarizing what you inputted. With a bit of practice, you can get it to output reasonably long content, such as the last example in our sample outputs below.
Agency Writer Sample Inputs and Outputs
Authored Intelligence: AI Professional Frase Template Review
AI Professional is a long-form content template for Frase. It intends to write engaging, SEO-enhanced copy in a professional tone.
This template tended to “meander” more on the tests than the other two but seems to do a good job of coming back on topic. AI Professional also appeared to do a decent job of re-mentioning the subject throughout the output. That last point is important because if the subject isn’t re-visited as the AI writes, then this can cause the AI to go off on tangents.
From our tests, AI Professional seemed more intent on outputting more content in article style than Agency Writer. This isn’t bad, but from our experience so far, we would select Agency Writer over AI Professional if we needed shorter-form content.
Based on our testing, AI Professional, on average, outputs almost 70% more than Agency Writer at 117 words. It did, however, come with more significant word count swings.
Regarding readability, AI Professional scored an average of just over 6th-grade level, but it also did have the highest maximum reading difficulty and the most significant variances. Remember, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The template is called AI Professional. Your readability scores will decrease when longer sentences and more advanced words are used. It comes down to your audience and your needs.
AI Professional Template Input Requirements
This template did a good job with a variety of input styles. Generally, it gave longer outputs with more detailed inputs, which makes sense. It also seemed to handle article outline style (list style) inputs better than Agency Writer, although we still think it’s best to feed each outline list item one at a time. If you’re writing articles, go with AI Professional or Semantic Author.
AI Professional Sample Inputs and Outputs
Authored Intelligence: Semantic Author Frase Template Review
Last but certainly not least comes Semantic Author. The description from the Authored Intelligence website bills it as a template capable of producing up to 600 words of content that the search engines will love.
It also states that it produces highly optimized semantic SEO content that may help increase user engagement and interactions.
While we can’t test most of those claims, we can at least measure the word counts and the readability. We can also see if it looks like the output includes relevant semantically-related terms.
A Quick Note on Semantic SEO
If you don’t know what semantic SEO is, that’s OK. It’s pretty simple to understand. Semantic SEO is about mentioning related terms and not just repeating the exact phrases. For example, if you’re writing about golfing techniques, then semantically associated terms might be “golf club,” “golf ball,” and related entities like the brand “Top Flite” or “Tiger Woods.”
Back to the Template Review
A natural byproduct of AI writers is that they tend to use semantic terms naturally. Looking at Semantic Author’s output, we see plenty of semantically related words, but we can’t validate if that’s the result of the Frase AI or the template itself. We didn’t notice much in the way of entities mentioned other than the term “professional.” We did run the outputs through Google Cloud Natural Language to ensure we weren’t overlooking things.
For example, in the sample output about renting vs. buying a home, we were hoping to see mention of “bank,” “credit union,” “landlord,” or some other entity that is semantically important to the subject at hand. Our guidance when using this template is to input any entities you want to be mentioned so you can ensure the output is semantically well-rounded. We did this and got a much more impressive result.
Regarding word count, Semantic Author acted like it had something to prove. It obliterated the two other templates in the word count. Semantic Author more than doubled the average word count of AI Professional and nearly quadrupled the average word count of Agency Writer. It averaged an astounding 270 words per output, with its maximum hitting 566 words. That validates the marketing claim of “up to 600 words.” If the word count is what you’re after, then Semantic Author is your new best friend.
In addition to word count, Semantic Author also did a fantastic job in the readability metrics averaging just a bit over 6th-Grade level with a nice, friendly reading ease average of 75. It was slightly more complex than Agency Writer on average, but it was more consistent in the reading ease and grade-level scores. While you’ll have some easier reading with Agency Writer, you’ll also get a few outputs that are significantly harder to read than any output that Semantic Author may generate.
Semantic Author Template Input Requirements
The template’s instructions state, “Type in keyword searches, relevant questions, or AI-based instructions.” The guidance we suggest if you’re using Semantic Author specifically for semantic SEO purposes is to ensure that you mention the entities you want to be included in the output. For example, for the “Should I Rent or By My Next Home?” topic, we suggest adding “Landlord vs. Bank” at the end of the query to help the AI understand that you want those entities mentioned and possibly compared. We did this and got a much more satisfactory output (semantically speaking).
Semantic Author Sample Inputs and Outputs
What Are The Similarities and Differences Between Agency Writer, AI Professional, and Semantic Author?
Here it is in a simple, handy chart:
Agency Writer outputs mainly sentences and paragraphs. So, for example, if we input a simple article outline filled with questions into Agency Writer, the output we get back tends to be a couple of paragraphs addressing most of the questions. Still, it isn’t a well-defined article with each outline point as a heading.
However, if we input that same outline into AI Professional, it does a much better job of outputting a short article in the form of each question being answered with its own paragraph of text.
Finally, Semantic Author was a word factory. Ironically, how we reviewed them is how they rank by output length, shortest to longest. However, they each produce readable content, and you’re likely to get quality output if you give them good input.
Next Steps
Now, the choice is up to you. If this review helped you, then we have plenty more value to deliver for you:
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Final Thoughts
We’ve seen a lot of commentary in the Frase Facebook group about templates and people attributing too much credit to the template creators for the outputs they feel Frase is responsible for. To that, we would encourage you to try making your own templates. It’s not as easy as it might seem. What we have in this review are three high-quality templates.
We have reviewed them as objectively as possible and have even tried to provide fair criticism. Having written templates ourselves, though, we respect the quality of the outputs we’ve seen and believe that Authored Intelligence templates are a great example of what is possible when a talented person like Peter Hatherley uses excellent technology like the Frase AI writer.
Until next time, have a great day!