Tony Piazza

Vibrant Frog Collab – AI writing assistant for pen-and-paper writers (looking for feedback)

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I built an iOS app to solve my own problem: I write by hand every morning at 7am, but the workflow to transform those pages into something shareable was painful—photograph, transcribe, edit, pair with images, format. Each step a context switch.

Vibrant Frog Collab brings AI into the creative workflow with a specific philosophy: AI enhances, doesn't replace. The app has guardrails that can't be overridden—it won't generate content from scratch, only help develop what you've already written.


What it does now:

  • Scan handwritten pages → instant transcription

  • AI collaborative editing with memory across conversations

  • Quote image creation (text overlaid on photos)

  • BYOK: Claude, GPT-4 (API keys) or Gemini (Google OAuth)

  • $9.99 one-time / free tier available

What I'm considering adding:

I'm thinking about a "create book" feature—letting writers compile projects into a formatted manuscript. Options could include:

- Export to Google Docs (formatted manuscript)

- Export to Google Slides (pitch deck or visual presentation of your work)

- An AI-assisted flow that helps with sequencing, themes, and structure


I'd love feedback on:

- Does the "AI as collaborator, not author" philosophy resonate?

- Would a book compilation feature matter to you?

- Which export format would be most useful—doc, slides, both?

- What's missing that would make this useful for your writing practice?

🐸 App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vibrant-frog-collab/id6756248063
📖 How it works: https://frogteam.ai/VibrantFrog/how-it-works.html


Thanks for any thoughts—genuinely trying to make this better before a proper launch.

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Tony Piazza

My work here continues. I have this other project https://github.com/SpiderInk/VibrantFrogMCP. The work I am doing to integrate these solutions is in a pull request for any techie that is interested. Apple doesn't yet enable an API that allows you to do photo search so you can't make a tool that an LLM can use to search photos with native functionality. This is not a simple problem to solve on an iPhone unless you want to use a commercial model to generate vectors on all your images, I am not sure the average iPhone user would appreciate the process and close to none would want to deal with the cost or run time so I have been working on integrating these two solutions. If one cares to setup the VibrantFrogMCP system they can index their photos and ship the index to iCloud where their phone can use it. This is a nice value add to the app because now the user can ask things like, "Take your favorite line from the poem, search for a photo in my photo library and make me a quote image where that line sits over the photo." The AI can then generate this for you. It also enables a UI based search that is in some cases better than the IOS Photo Search. Here is a comparison for the search phrase "Frog in Hand" searching in my photo library.

Vibrant Frog Collab Search

Native IOS Photo Chooser Search


The next version is also planned to have:

  • version tracking with comparisons

  • export to book by

    • prompt

    • tag

  • Export poem to pamphlet

    • Each page is a line from the document with a photo behind it.

Thanks for reading.