There has been an explosion of new services in the six months since ChatGPT blew the starting whistle on the generative AI race, and it’s becoming impossible to keep track of all the weird and wonderful new AI applications. To help keep you up to speed, we’ve identified seven of the best and most interesting new players on the scene!
Music LM
We’ll start with obscure but plucky upstarts Google, whose recent I/O conference was so densely packed with new product launches that some inevitably struggled for attention. One such is the remarkable Music LM, which in any other week would be a huge news story. It’s the first high profile app offering generative AI for music, and although it’s early days Music LM offers a fascinating preview of audio’s future.
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There has been an explosion of new services in the six months since ChatGPT blew the starting whistle on the generative AI race, and it’s becoming impossible to keep track of all the weird and wonderful new AI applications. To help keep you up to speed, we’ve identified seven of the best and most interesting new players on the scene!
Music LM
We’ll start with obscure but plucky upstarts Google, whose recent I/O conference was so densely packed with new product launches that some inevitably struggled for attention. One such is the remarkable Music LM, which in any other week would be a huge news story. It’s the first high profile app offering generative AI for music, and although it’s early days Music LM offers a fascinating preview of audio’s future.
Have you ever noticed how ugly chatbots are? Sure, they’re functionally incredible, but they look awful! Hey Pi seeks to change that by making the experience of chatting with LLMs more pleasant. Bland text boxes that look like administrative forms are out, and in their place is a stylish web interface that focuses attention on your cursor and the AI’s responses.
Pi is a new bot from Inflection AI, a startup founded by one of our True Superheroes of AI, DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman. Inflection’s goal is to create a more “personal” AI, one which interacts with a warmer, friendlier tone than the impersonal likes of Bing and Bard, and Pi manifests this through wholesome, supportive and cheerful replies that reinforce the feeling that this chatbot’s website is just a bit nicer to use than all the others.
Text-to-image generative AI is a hugely impressive technological feat, but what of image-to-text? While instinctively it feels that the process should be easier in reverse, it’s also a tricky challenge, but happily one that has seen huge improvements in recent months, with several new services popping up, but at the time of writing SceneXplain arguably offers the best results. An incredibly useful service for everyone from the visually impaired to web developers.
SceneXplain deftly handling the weirdest nonsense we can throw at it
Capsule
Video editing is traditionally fiddly and time-consuming, but Capsule’s new AI Studio looks set to revolutionize the field. It allows you to quickly subtitle, caption and edit video online, and has an inbuilt text-to-image generative AI that allows you to quickly insert appropriate titles and graphics. Capsule is also blessed with a lovely clean UI that’s intuitive and unfussy; the opposite of everything video editing is supposed to be!
This will either change your life or leave you cold, depending on how much of your working life involves fiddling with spreadsheets. Formulas HQ offers a set of AI tools that take natural language prompts and return everything from Excel formulas to VBA and Google Apps Scripts code. Lazy programmers will also adore the text-to-regex prompt, offering the power of Regular Expressions without the tedium of learning how to write them.
One of YouTube’s most used features is the playback speed button, beloved of viewers of spoken word content in a hurry. Eightify is a Google Chrome extension that seeks to replace 1.5x playback as the powerviewer’s tool of choice by offering AI-derived summaries of YouTube videos, and it does an incredible job. We tested it on a 27 minute news broadcast and it gave us an accurate summary, along with a bulleted list of insights on the video’s content, within seconds of loading the page!
Eightify at work, with the AI generated Insights on the sidebar to the right.
Dora
Finally, we have Dora, the first known example of text-to-website generative AI. Tell Dora what sort of website you want and it will design and code it for you. We haven’t been able to test this yet as we’re still on the waiting list, but Dora’s demo videos showcase some impressive web tech working harmoniously with the AI to quickly create complex websites from simple sentences.
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