Actually Useful AI Tools

Here are some new AI apps that you can play around with right now!

AI Avatars

One of the hottest areas of AI software production is the area of virtual avatars. The implications of text-to-video with a realistic avatar is profound. This would mean near instant video content. To this end there are nearly daily product releases improving upon this technology, from more realistic avatars, to deep fake clones of yourself and rapid developments in voice sims and improvements in speech, expressions and inflections.

There are quite a few products that are out of beta and available now. BHuman looks pretty amazing, check out this example video. Synthesia makes a beautiful product with quite a few avatars to work with. Render offers a realistic personal avatar, but it comes at a very high cost of entry and the production difficulty to get started is staggering (Several thousand dollars for the original build and you have to go to their production studio to film it). I believe that this product and pricing will be quickly eclipsed when you see what HeyGen has announced for their 2.0 product. Check out this video posted by the founder. I will be watching for this release with great interest.

Branding and Graphics

The most common releases in this category seem to be rehashes of text-to-image gens, of which there are a great many, including DallE, ClickDrop and Modyfi, which boast some professional tools, like the ability to collaborate and modify the artwork. What I think is actually the most useful is something like Canva’s integrated AI tool, which gives you the functionality within the application, where you need it. Check out my article on our AI Future, for a more in depth review of AI graphic apps. For this article I wanted to give you some tools that may be more useful than another fantasy image generator.

LOGO GENERATOR I played aroung with this Looka logo generator tool recently. Conceptually this is interesting for small businesses who do not have a budget for professional design. I was hopeful, but when I tried it out I was ho-hum on the results (see below). The options were ok, but not on-par with professional design. I believe that there are many other do-it-yourself tools that would give superior results. This also reminds me that I need to get writing my post about how a logo is not a brand.

BRANDING Also in the branding category is StoriAI, with their branding tool. I watched the sizzle reel and it looks like it could maybe be interesting. It does not look like a professional marketing department could upload their existing brand and have them build on an established look, which would be incredibly useful. But if you did not have a brand established, this might be able to help you to create one and build content from it. Worth watching this one to see how it develops.

SPECIAL REQUEST [tap, tap] If anyone is listening, on my wish list is a Brand Standards Manager app that will automatically proof materials and graphics for brand compliance. Many corporate brands have guides that are 50-100 pages long with very specific requirements. It takes hours sometimes to ensure compliance. If you hear of anything like this hitting the market, please let me know. I will be customer zero.

Along this same line, if any of you AI developers are looking for product ideas, a Food Packaging Compliance Manager would be a fabulous niche marketed tool. Federal packaging standards are incredibly specific, as are Canadian standards. Produce and Food businesses operate in fear of missing a technical detail and having to reprint their packaging, which could be to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many companies employ consultants to assist with this, but I believe that this would be the perfect area to apply the strengths of AI to help analyze these technical requirements.

Website Creators

I see a huge market for this and Wix had better step up and take notice. There are a few AI website generators that have recently launched. These tools can create a complete website in minutes. This is a game changer for small businesses. SiteKick creates landing pages and also has a cute name. Relume Library targets a professional market with full websites. Mixo also targets small businesses and start-ups and their own website looks pretty compelling. Sign me up!

Copywriting

MARKETING COPY I know you are probably tired of AI writing tools, but this one might be of interest. This one is designed specifically for marketing copy. Many, even larger in-house departments do not have a designated copywriter on staff. Copywriting duties, by default, often fall to the marketing team, who may not love writing. Check out Jasper and let me know what you think of it.

BLOG POST GENERATOR Easy Peasy AI Blog Posts. I am not going to name names, but I know that you are not staying up on your company blog. No, I don’t use this, but I might take a teeny-tiny peek at it when you are not looking.

Not Marketing Related, But Still Cool

HEADSHOT GENERATOR In this article I have tried to highlight products that are useful in a professional environment. Even though this is a personal tool, I thought it was still topical, since all of us working in offices have a need for professional headshots. Enter Aragon, transforming your casual selfies into professional work cover photos. This tool allows you to upload casual pics of yourself, it drops out the backgrounds, clones the image onto professional attire and professional poses, color corrects and lets you pick from multiple results. The sample images look pretty cool. Since most of us are not booking a professional photographer for headshots very often, I could see this being useful to many of us. When I get some time I will likely play around with this one a bit more. See below for a stock example.

LEGAL ASSISTANT DoNotPay AI Personal advocate, for lack of a better description. This looks very interesting and I will have to spend a bit of time checking the full (long) list of capabilities more thoroughly.

TEXT TO VIDEO I really want this to happen. Text to video would be so cool. There are a few tools on the market and I played around with Kaiber. The results were pretty interesting, but it will require some evolutions before this would be functional for a professional work flow. That said, the possibility of this is very exciting.

AI MUSIC CREATOR Mubert Want a cool track for your reels? Check this one out.

PHOTO RESTORATION and other image capabilities with Replicate 

This is just a small sampling of AI Tools that are available NOW and new tools are coming out everyday. If you know of one that I should check out, please feel free to post up in the comments.