Ask Ballad: ask questions about your workspace and get sourced answers

Ask Ballad ships in this release, alongside a rebuilt onboarding experience and a new People tab. Ask Ballad puts a question box over Signals and Loop, reachable via ⌘K on desktop or a button in the mobile title bar, that streams sourced answers from your items, events, attribution, contacts, conversations, plan, search rankings, and AI-answer visibility. Onboarding now carries you from pasting your site to your first drafts in one guided flow, and People turns identified signups into tracked contacts.

A handful of smaller things went out with it: image posts now turn on automatically with LinkedIn, public voice pages refresh right after you edit them, site visits show up on the Signals map, the beacon can be installed via an npm package, and a bug that stuck image-post review on blank slides is fixed. More on each below.

Ask Ballad

Ask Ballad is a question box now living on Signals and Loop, reachable with ⌘K on desktop or a button in the mobile title bar. Ask it something and it draws on your items, events, attribution, contacts, conversations, plan, search rankings, and AI-answer visibility — whatever's in the workspace. Answers stream in, and every one links back to the item, article, contact, or run it came from, so you can check the source instead of trusting the summary. You can even draft new content straight from an answer. Publishing and plan changes still route through your review in the Inbox.

Onboarding and People

Onboarding is rebuilt end to end: paste your site, confirm positioning, pick channels and publishing settings, add voice samples, and land on a first batch of real drafts. Progress bars show the site read and draft-writing happening live, and drafts show up one at a time in a swipeable carousel labelled by channel, including rendered image posts for Instagram. Confirming your positioning also seeds your competitor list and tracked questions, so Loop and the Signals GEO card have data from day one instead of starting empty.

Separately, there's a new People tab. When your site or a form passes an email — optionally with name and company — alongside a conversion, Ballad keeps that person as a contact, records the Ballad touch that first brought them, and tracks their conversions over time. People sits alongside Content and Signals. Two limits worth knowing: conversions under Global Privacy Control never carry an identity, and anonymous conversions stay anonymous — People only fills in for who chose to be known.

Also in this release

Also in this release, five smaller changes:

• LinkedIn images, on by default. Enabling LinkedIn for a voice — onboarding, Settings, a new teammate, a new brand voice — now also turns on the image-post format. Turn it off afterward and it stays off; only a fresh LinkedIn enable brings it back.
• Public voice pages update instantly. Edits to a voice's ballad.to page — links, handle, bio, CTA, publish status, name — and newly published articles now refresh the page right away instead of waiting out the old five-minute cache.
• Signals map now shows web traffic. The web layer displays recent site visits as dots that replay the last week and pulse in live, with country-level activity drawn from the last month of beacon traffic.
• npm install for the beacon. Settings › Site now offers the beacon as a script tag or as the new @balladlabs/beacon package for Next.js and other bundler-based sites, each with a copyable snippet.
• Fix: image post review no longer sticks on blank slides. Opening a review before slides finished rendering used to block Approve until you reloaded. Review now polls for the finished render and unblocks Approve on its own.