Logos 2025 features feedback

Francis

Here is feedback on the new developments in Logos.

1. AI smart searches are definitely a huge and exciting improvement. To me this is the major and best development.
   1. Great to be able to use natural language for textual searches.*
   2. Great to be able to use synopsis to get a summary of the key findings with links to the resources the data comes from.
   3. Great to be able to summarize individual articles.
   4. Great to be able to know whether an unowned book has a section that would be very relevant to one's search and would therefore be a good purchase. To my knowledge, no other book platform offers this to that level.
   5. Great to benefit from key info from the entire Logos catalog even if one does not own all the books. Sure, to go further one needs (understandably) to purchase said books, but still, it is both useful and impressive to be able to do this.
   6. Great multilingual capability in summaries (I can get an English summary of an article from a book in a different language).
2. Insights bar is a good idea for those who want easy and quick glances to study notes or commentary and parallel references. I like it even if I don't really need to use it much.
3. Dynamic toolbar is a good idea but feels like the pendulum may have swung too far. It is good to want to bring closer the features that one may want to use when reading or studying but the sheer number of them has the adverse effect of making them difficult to find in the multiplicity of menus. In addition to that, the names of the menus overlap. Even as an experienced user, it took me a bit to remember that I could toggle notes icons only in the "Notes" menu and not in the "Formatting" or "View" menus where similar settings are found. The bar needs to mature in clarity and perhaps simplicity.
4. The new factbook is not to my liking. I love the new colors and look but I find the relationship between the lenses (biblical, books, etc.) and content not that clear and the streamlining reductionist. Factbook v. 2 was a go-to encyclopedia. Sure it was perhaps much, but I find the new factbook too "essential" to still be useful to me. I actually avoid it now.
5. AI content tools (sermon illustrations, applications, bible study questions) is in my view a more controversial application of AI. I don't have much to say about them because I simply don't want to see AI used that way for personal study and ministry and don't care for these features at all.
6. Help center is a good idea and its ease of accessibility is also a good development. However, it needs maturation as well. Right now, it feels like a messy Google like search. I'd love some kind of synopsis function and natural language search capabilities that would help user get to the point. Perhaps too many sources are included so that what may have been intended as wealth of content turns into more of a mess. Also, I think that going out of Logos when clicking on article links goes opposite in direction to the effort of making everything at hand (e.g., the dynamic toolbar). So I find the feature not that good right now but I can see how it could significantly improve over time.
7. Get started is not really new, just a more visible repackaging. Visible is good for new users though. It seems very good in English but has some bugs in some other languages (e.g., suggested entries that don't work).
   
   *It is not possible to use smart search to carry out a technical search such as "give me all occurrences of agape in the accusative right before preposition X in a clause that has Y as complement". You can, but the search is not able to really do this ably (perhaps one day, that'd be great). Instead, Logos reverts to "Precise" search which is the same kind of search syntax we used before (with connectors and special terms like "lemma:").
   
   Summary:
   AI searches is the most exciting development for advanced and new users alike. Although it might yet yield other useful applications, it is already quite good and useful. The usability features are generally good but need to mature. Some of the implementations are early and a bit messy. One hopes that they will get better soon.

Frank Sauer

@Francis your in depth personal review is greatly appreciated. It may be beneficial to some of us who have yet to subscribe.

Francis

Some worthies to mention on the new dynamic toolbar:

Search. Similar to but works better than inline search did. I used to avoid using inline search but am now happy to use this.
Notes. Very nice to be able to start a note and access the tool easily from a resource panel.
Tools. Nice to launch the text comparison tool right from a verse (it opens at the correct verse).