What sets us humans apart from the rest of the animals on Earth?
In addition to the usefulness of opposable thumbs (perfect for scrolling Instagram) and being the best long-distance runners on the planet (not me, though–I get winded just picking up a burrito delivery from outside my front door), humanity’s ability to use tools helped us become Earth’s dominant species. Ever since our cave ancestors started carving stone hammers and axes millions of years ago, tools have been essential catalysts for progress and innovation.
While tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney helped spark an explosion of creativity and content generation (“Hey ChatGPT, write an epic poem in the form of limericks about a disco-dancing astronaut cat”), we’re in the middle of a veritable tsunami of new and transformative AI marketing tools.
Join us for this episode of Unprompted as hosts Pete Housley and Garrett Hughes are joined by Saba El-Hilo, Unbounce’s Senior Vice President of Data and Engineering. Together they explore the wild and wacky world of AI marketing tools and review 15 of them, rating each one on a scale from one to three bouncing elephants. (It totally makes sense if you’ve listened to episode one.)
In this episode, our hosts cover juicy topics like:
- What factors do marketers need to look at when weighing the benefits of an AI tool?
- How you can use AI to create a video from a text transcript and edit the video simply by modifying the transcript.
- An AI tool that generates complete podcasts, including copy, voices, and music, from a text prompt. (We didn’t use it to create this episode of Unprompted–pinky swear!)
- How AI can help us humans break through barriers and do things we could never do before.
The tidal wave of AI marketing tools is upon us, but we’re here to help you navigate these tumultuous waters and ride the waves by finding tools that will enhance your work and help your business.
Listen to the episode now and check out the transcript below for all the details, as well as links to all of the tools mentioned in the podcast so you can check them out for yourself.
Episode 5: Try AI
[00:00:00] Pete: Hey marketers, welcome to Unprompted, a podcast about AI marketing, and you. I’m Pete Housley, Chief Marketing Officer at Unbounce, and Unbounce is the AI powered landing page builder with smart features that drive superior conversion rates.
Today is our fifth episode, and we’ve got a great show for you. We’re gonna review somewhere around 10 cool and/or wacky AI marketing tools. And to be honest, I am overwhelmed by the plethora of tools and delighted by what we’re gonna share with you today. Today my co-host is Garrett Hughes. Garrett is our Content Manager here at Unbounce and a familiar name on the podcast. Garrett has been spearheading a ton of the research and the content development on this show, and he is definitely an AI smarty pants. Garrett, welcome back to the show.
[00:01:10] Garrett: Thanks for having me, Pete. As you know, my brain is jelly right now from all of the research that I’ve been doing into the AI tools that we’re gonna be talking about today. But yeah, we’ll talk more about that later.
[00:01:23] Pete: Garrett, we’ve been on a bit of an AI marketing journey over the past few months, and it’s been super fun keeping up with this tsunami of AI, but my point of view has really changed over the past few months, and hopefully that’s gonna start to be obvious in today’s episode. But the world really has changed and the more I’m learning about AI, the more I realize, not only what I don’t know, but how uncertain the future seems to be right now.
So, Garrett, what’s on your AI mind these days?
[00:02:06] Garrett: Yeah, I think it, it is a case where the more that you learn about these AI tools and there’s more all the time, the more excited, alarmed you become as you begin to realize, just like the full capability of artificial intelligence and the transformative nature of AI at this particular moment.
[00:02:29] Pete: Yeah. In terms of, you know, being excited or alarmed, one of the segments that we’ve done in a few episodes, Garrett, is just talk about in the news and stories that we’re following or seeing.
There’s a few storylines that I’ve been following lately that I think are super interesting, and the first one is the move by Congress to try to get their arms around how to regulate AI. And they know they need to do it. They don’t know how to do it. The genie is out of the bottle, you know, at this point. And of course, the fear is that everything is about to be upended, how business is conducted, how students learn, how art is made, how humans and machines interact together and where AI needs to be controlled or not. And what was so interesting about some of the stories that I read this week, the angle on it is rarely do you have businesses lobbying government to regulate the business, right? Normally the opposite of that would happen, but certainly, we’ve seen like Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI lobbying, Mark Zuckerberg, like it is really interesting, and obviously if they’re worried then we should probably be worried too.
[00:03:55] Garrett: It’s a little bit of a Pandora’s box, right? In that we’ve gone down this path with artificial intelligence and now it’s accelerating at just an insane pace, to the point where you talk about regulating it. How do you regulate something that’s transforming so quickly and use cases that we haven’t predicted and new capabilities emerging all the time? I think that’s why people like Sam Altman are the ones who are raising the flag, right? They’re close enough to these products that they’re developing, and they’ve seen what they’re capable of up close. They’re the ones who are most familiar with the risks involved in unregulated AI development.
[00:04:33] Pete: Hundred percent. It’s interesting. So when we started this show out, we sort of funnily coined it, are robots coming for your job? And we’re like, haha. That’s a bit of a laugh, like, nah, but we’ll just be aware of it. Well, certainly the latest thinking, and if I use The Economist for example, they’re predicting that in 2025, as many of 15% of American jobs could be lost to AI.
And it’s not just one industry. So in our world of media and advertising, there’s content creation and technical writing and journalism, of course, but it’s going to affect coders and programmers. It’s gonna affect the finance and accounting industry. Legal is at big risk because the artificial intelligence gets almost perfect information, research and so on.
So I think the world is about to change and hopefully if we lose a hundred million jobs, a hundred new ones will be created, but we don’t know. So certainly that’s just a scarier thought than when we first started the podcast out.
[00:05:44] Garrett: Yeah, I think that like, with where AI is right now, it’s still at a place where humans are essential, right? Like sort of extremely menial, like data entry jobs and just stuff that you don’t really have to think about. AI’s great at that, but even some of the more popular AI tools, their outputs still require somebody to come in to fact check, to improve.
Right now I think that, obviously AI job loss is starting to happen, but it’s probably, I don’t know, a few more years away before, like, we get to the point where AI can just straight up replace people.
[00:06:21] Pete: Well, hopefully. And you know, one of the purposes of today’s episode is we’re gonna give marketers tools to make them more effective using AI. And so hopefully that’ll be helpful to our audience. Let’s take a moment and bring in our special guest today, and I’m super excited that we’ve got a subject matter expert on machine learning and AI, and in fact oversees an entire data and tech team building marketing technology, AI tools. So super relevant.
So I’m delighted to introduce Saba El-Hilo. Saba is Unbounce’s Senior Vice President of Data and Engineering, and of course leads the engineering and the data teams. Saba’s career includes more than 10 years building technologies, publishing web applications and services. Most recently, Saba was the head of data platform at Mapbox, where she built and led a global organization responsible for producing data products for over a million userbase. Super impressive, Saba. We’re looking forward to having you on the show today. How are you doing?
[00:07:38] Saba: Yeah, I’m doing really well. Excited to chat with you both.
[00:07:41] Pete: So Saba, how the heck, you’re running an AI machine learning team, how the heck do you stay abreast of the world of AI?
[00:07:52] Saba: Yeah, not gonna lie. Hasn’t been super, super easy. You know, every time you think you’re up to date on something, a new tool or a new algorithm or a new model comes out, that’s just really exciting and really disruptive and you’re catching up all over again. But it’s, you know, it’s an exciting new space, exciting new time. And myself, you know, I’m constantly reading and following up on things. And then also just stay in touch with a lot of what my teams are excited about and what they’re bringing to the discussions and what they’re thinking about.
So yeah, doing our best.
[00:08:27] Pete: So interesting. And the learning is just beginning for all of us. And I stumbled upon this article called The Rise of the AI Engineer, and I know I asked you to read it so, is this real? Is this hype?
[00:08:41] Saba: I mean, that’s an, that’s an excellent question. There’s a ton of hype in the space right now, right? And this new role, the AI engineer is really coming on the heels of something we’ve already heard about, which is the prompt engineer.
You know, you’ve probably read articles about it being like, make $300,000 a year inputting prompts. So, what is interesting about these two roles is the similarity, it’s really about like, we will pay you to tinker with these AI tools and build products around them. So it’s, it’s a really interesting shift because, you know, historically you needed data science team. You needed ML engineers to start building these capabilities. But what these AI SaaS companies, or AI as a service companies, what they’ve done is they’ve really democratized all of these tools and all of these algorithms so that anyone can start building on top of them. So you don’t really need to know machine learning, you don’t really need to know all the intricacies of these LLM models or neural networks. You’re really just building products on APIs that are already built for you. So it’s, it’s an interesting space.
What scares me is like, now, you know, we have all of these products that are really skins on top of SaaS companies and AI and ML models as a service. So the innovation is shifting from these startups or small companies that you know are usually innovative and it’s, it’s really staying with these big players in the space. So is it hype? I don’t know. I think time will only tell, but there’s definitely a big element of hype because these companies are providing these services, like, you know, OpenAI or Google, they’re gonna continue to innovate and improve their models and the need for someone to, to tinker with prompts is, is gonna go away. So we’ll see. Some of these jobs definitely go away as well.
[00:10:26] Pete: Hey, Saba, let’s shift gears a little bit. So at Unbounce, we obviously have a number of AI products. Can you just tell us at the highest level how we’re leveraging AI in our landing page and optimization tools?
[00:10:38] Saba: Yeah, totally. It’s really interesting because Unbounce has been ahead of the game in the AI and ML space. You know, we’ve been on a journey of building optimization tools and a Smart Builder almost two and a half years now, right? So, you know, our goal at the end of the day is to make it faster and more efficient for marketers to build landing pages while also getting them the highest conversions, right? And how we do that is by building ML models from our ridiculously impressive 2 billion conversion data sets. So we know what converts.
So we’re really building these ML models that will make your job easier as a marketer. So some of the AI or ML tools that we have in our toolkit, so we have copy generation, we have Smart Traffic where it’s learning in real time from the visitors that are visiting your landing page and routing your visitor to the landing page that they’re most likely to convert on. We also have some really neat features like image recommendation, behavior sets, so some really, really cool, smart features that are built from top of our knowledge and as a leader in the landing page space.
[00:11:43] Pete: So impressive. So with all of that in mind then, how is AI impacting developers or your developers?
[00:11:52] Saba: It’s been actually really, really interesting to see. There’s all of these tools now that are cropping up that really want to make it easier for you as a developer to write code and get your code into production faster.
One of the biggest ones that internally we’ve been talking about is GitHub Copilot, so it’s actually built on top of OpenAI’s Codex, and so you can think about it as an AI per programmer. So you can really lean onto this AI feature to help you get started with a new programming language, help you write boilerplate code, even suggest entire functions. But you know, if you just put a description of what you’re trying to build, it is, it’s actually really, really neat to play around with.
What’s interesting though is, you know, we know AI is not always right. So now when it’s suggesting something completely wrong, but if you’re new to a language or new to a framework, you’re not gonna know what’s wrong. So now you have to debug AI code rather than your own. So yeah, it’s a really interesting time and space.
[00:12:52] Garrett: So obviously there’s been this explosion of AI tools and when I run into a new AI tool, I feel like I look at it somewhat uncritically. I have no idea how these things work for the most part. I’m curious, as somebody who builds AI tools and AI products, when you encounter a new AI tool, how do you go about evaluating whether it’s legitimate, whether it’s unique? ‘Cause to your point, a lot of AI tools today are just essentially user experiences on top of like an open AI GPT model.
[00:13:25] Saba: Yeah. Honestly, yeah. It comes from curiosity. So I, I do a little bit of sleuthing of, like, trying to figure out like, okay, what is happening in the backend? Also reputation of the company, right? Like taking GitHub for example, right? Like they are the biggest repository of code, so you know that they’re gonna be training their models on a really, really large data set and the output is gonna be pretty good, right?
So it’s like, really just looking into what the backend is and if they have a writeup of like, how does it actually work? So taking the time to read it and look at it, but then also at the end of the day, like looking at what value this tool or application that I’m using is providing, right, and who am I sharing my data with? That’s really, really important because at the end of the day, I mean even us here at Unbounce, like our huge value’s in our data set, and every company is trending that way. So like who am I giving my value to and am I getting that value in return?
[00:14:21] Garrett: It’s like a cold sweat middle of the night moment for me where I realized I’ve been sharing too much with an AI tool.
[00:14:29] Pete: That’s funny. All right, team, let’s shift gears a little bit. Garrett, why don’t you, introduce today’s topic?
[00:14:34] Garrett: Yeah, I’d love to.
So our theme for today is “Try AI.” There are obviously a handful of AI tools that just about everybody has heard about or used, right? We’ve got ChatGPT, Jasper, Midjourney, DALL-E, the big ones. But really these are just a narrow slice of ultimately what AI is capable of doing right now. So for this episode, we had folks from the marketing department submit their favorite, lesser known AI tools. The list came out to nearly 150. And we’re gonna take some time to review them. Would we use it? Do we see the value in it, or is it maybe a little bit of hype? From the list of 150 we’ve got around 10, a dozen tools that we’ve never seen before, and we’ve each taken a handful to review.
Obviously we’ve got Saba here as our expert, somebody who builds AI marketing tools and can maybe add that critical layer to our evaluation. We’ve developed a scoring system that we’re calling the Bounce-o-Meter. There are three core points of evaluation. The first is how essential is the problem that the tool solves. Second, how easy or difficult it is to adopt the tool. Third is how valuable it is based on the money that you’re paying, the time it takes to set up that sort of thing. The Bounce-o-Meter’s rating system uses bouncing elephants in a callback to a previous episode where we built a marketing campaign for an elephant trampoline.
Anyways, three Bouncing elephants means that you’ve gotta try this tool, like right now, two bouncing elephants means it’s interesting and probably worth a look. And one bouncing elephant means maybe the tool isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. So with that, I think we’re ready to start talking tools.
[00:16:26] Pete: Let’s bounce. Uh, Garrett, why don’t you kick us off in the area of copywriting and content AI marketing.
[00:16:33] Garrett: Yeah, thanks Pete. So the first tool that I want to talk about is called Market Muse. They label themselves an AI powered content intelligence and strategy platform. Essentially, the platform uses AI to automatically audit the content on your website and makes recommendations for how to build out a more robust content strategy.
Big focus here is around topic clusters, so based on the topics that you’re chasing in search, it’ll identify the content that you already have that ranks well for these topics, make recommendations for how to improve that content to better rank, and also let you know which content you’re missing in order to assert your authority over the topic. It’s also a great keyword research tool. Their big thing is personalized difficulty score. Market Muse considers the content that you’ve already got on your website in determining how easy or hard it’ll be to rank for those topics.
The Bounce-o-Meter, I give this tool two and a half bouncing elephants. I think there’s lots of value here, especially having just done a content audit of our own site earlier this year. Where they lose half a point is just that barrier to entry in terms of cost, in terms of setup. That sort of thing.
[00:17:36] Pete: I’m gonna review the next tool, and I’m pretty excited about this one. It’s called Anyword and Anyword is an AI copy generator, specifically built for marketing use cases, but they claim something called Copy Intelligence. And they claim that before you even create the ad, they know it’s going to be higher performing.
With that in mind, I did a little bit of study and I got so excited. I actually tracked down a guy named Danny Foyer who is their head of strategy. And he really explained to me what works. So what he basically said is, we’re all accessing the same language models, and generally this tool sits above that, and it can be a repository for all of your brand, you know, and content writing. Great, but it goes one step further in that it has hooks or links into Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and so on. So it’s actually pulling conversion data from your ad units and reverse engineering the copy that’s high converting.
Why that is so exciting to me is that’s essentially what our Smart Builder does for landing pages, leverages billions of conversions on landing pages that we already know that have converted and uses those insights. And this is a very, very similar way in that kind of pre-click ad universe. So I was really excited about that.
I tried the product, it’s got a great UX generally. It’s wizard driven. There was three categories. One called the Data-Drive Editor with literally a hundred use cases, one called the Blog Wizard, which allowed you to input your SEO keywords. And then the final one was this optimized and copy intelligence. I took a few minutes to just use the blog product. I used minimum prompts like literally, kinda one sentence and two keywords. I got a five section blog leveraging scientific evidence, and it was really, really impressive. And once again, people are like, these tools are so effective and time-saving.
So I would give this tool two and a half bouncing elephants. And the reason I didn’t give it the other half is I wanna see the proof of the pudding. I wanna actually see that it does leverage these conversion insights out of Google AdWords and Facebook. But on principle, I think these guys are in a, in a really great space.
So, Let’s move on now. So that was copywriting. Let’s talk a little bit about videos, because that obviously is a big world in marketing and Saba, I know you took a look at a tool. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about, uh, what you learned?
[00:20:32] Saba: I did, yeah. So I took a look at a tool called Synthesia. So what Synthesia does is it actually lets you create videos by inputting a transcript. So you know, you have a script of your video, you put it in, and then you can select an AI-generated avatar. And the AI-generated avatar will deliver the transcript and you can make some edits to the video, to the background, to the style of the video, but essentially we can, you know, in a matter of hours just whip up a training video or talking head video without needing to like go do a shoot or anything like that.
So, you know, I’m not a video maker, but if I were, I would be very, very intrigued by how much money and time and resources that would save me. So, you know, my curiosity, I was like, oh wow, you know, how are they generating these AI avatars? ‘Cause they’re pretty realistic and they looked pretty cool.
[00:21:26] Natalie (Recording): Hi Pete. I’m Natalie. I’m an AI avatar created entirely by artificial intelligence. You can use tools like Synthesia to create videos like this with just a few clicks. No human actors required.
[00:21:40] Saba: You can tell it’s an AI avatar for sure, but I’m not sure if there’s any way to get around that. So what they actually do is they use deep neural networks. So neural networks with deep learning. And what they have done is they get a real human, they do a big recording session with that person, and then they input all of that data into the neural network and they are able to generate these avatars that can read whatever transcript and deliver whatever transcript with a lot of human-like nuances. So very, very cool technology. So they have 140 AI avatars, a lot of, you know, gender and nationality diversity.
So yeah, I’d give it two and a half bouncing elephants. That’s a pretty neat video with a lot of, you know, user value. And as a video maker, you could definitely get a lot of advantage out of it.
[00:22:32] Garrett: Super interesting. Yeah. I’ve got another video tool that uses AI. It’s called Munch. And essentially what it does is automatically cuts longer videos into a bunch of smaller bite-sized snippets for sharing on social media. So basically you could upload like a 40 minute podcast episode, and Munch will identify key moments and pull out social optimized video snippets.
So I took an older episode of Unprompted and fed it into Munch. And what it did was slice it up into these smaller clips, and it’s super cool in that it analyzes the content. I guess it probably generates a transcript and then evaluates the transcript and will pull out the best content based on social media trends like trending keywords. What’s the ideal length of this content, that sort of thing, uses all that info to slice it up.
Okay, so I’m gonna play you guys an example.
[00:23:22] James (Recording): Hey Caoimhe, I had a question. Obviously we’ve managed to create a campaign within 24 hours, which is unheard of. How much different is this to the usual sort of process we would follow, on the creative team and on the campaigns team? Like how much money are we, would we be saving in theory? Or how much time would we be saving as well through using some of these AI based tools to create the campaign, and also generate the creative from it as well?
[00:23:44] Caoimhe (Recording): So our usual approach to campaigns, it would probably take about a week to generate the amount that we were able to generate within 24 hours.
[00:23:54] Garrett: So you can see Munch has automatically pulled out this single coherent thought and applied subtitles, cropped it, made adjustments, and basically it’s ready to go on social right now.
It also provides social captions for each platform complete with trending hashtags. So like the content for Twitter is: campaign done in 24 hours, we did it. Using AI-based tools, we created a campaign that would’ve taken a week the usual way. Amazing what can be achieved with the right tech. Hashtag AI power, hashtag campaign creatives, hashtag time-saving, hashtag 24 hours. No idea if those are trending, I’m not a social guy, but it’s trying, at the very least, super easy to use from account creation to my first video was maybe 20 minutes, but that was mostly just the platform processing the video, and the plans are pretty affordable, starting at $50 a month. So the pricing seems to be entirely based around like upload minutes, but very reasonably priced.
Anyways, so, Bounce-o-Meter, I’m giving it three bouncing elephants. I think it’s super easy to use and the time savings are pretty significant, so yeah. Very cool.
[00:25:01] Pete: Game changing. What’s up next, Garrett?
[00:25:03] Garrett: Why don’t we throw to you, Pete, to talk about podcasting?
[00:25:08] Pete: Alright, this is my pick of the day and I stumbled across Wondercraft. What does it do? It actually creates podcasts, so based on a few prompts, some of your existing content, it actually writes and records a full podcast, lays a music track down and everything. Pretty hard to believe. You can even clone your own voice, or you can use celebrity voices.
So I did something funny. I created a podcast called Pete’s Experiment. I oddly gave it the topic of AI marketing, exploring AI marketing tools. And then I cut two paragraphs from one of our previous podcasts. It generated and produced it in literally 30 seconds and it used Scarlett Johansson’s voice, which was like really amazing. So I’m gonna play you just like 30 seconds, but it is mind boggling, the quality.
[00:26:18] Scarlett: (Recording) Welcome to Pete’s experiment, a podcast dedicated to exploring the world of AI marketing. Join us as we delve into the latest and greatest AI marketing tools, unraveling their potential impact on our jobs. Get ready to discover the fascinating intersection between artificial intelligence and marketing strategies.
[00:26:37] Pete: Wow, that was…
[00:26:38] Garrett: That was pretty good.
[00:26:39] Pete: …so realistic and it took me no time at all. So I would definitely give this three bouncing elephants.
[00:26:49] Garrett: I thought you were gonna break the scale on this one actually, the way that you were talking about it. Three and a half.
[00:26:52] Pete: I might give, I might give it four bouncing elephants.
[00:26:55] Garrett: Okay. Four bouncing elephants for Wondercraft.
Yeah, it’s very cool. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of AI generated voices, and usually they’re pretty stilted and kind of weird. Like you can hear the breaths as Scarlett is talking. You know, like the level of detail is super impressive.
[00:27:12] Pete: All right, shall we move on to our next one? Saba, I think you’ve got something in the music genre.
[00:27:21] Saba: I do. So this tool is called Soundraw. So basically the pitch here is that you can instantly generate royalty free music. All you have to do is like put in the genre and like some mood prompts and like the feel of the music and it will generate a soundtrack for you that is royalty free. I actually lost a couple hours yesterday playing around with this ‘cause it was pretty cool. I have no musical background whatsoever, or even like a good ear for music. So it was really fun to be able to play around with it.
[00:27:53] Garrett: DJ Saba.
[00:27:54] Saba: Yeah, yeah, exactly. However, I was like, spent more time with it. I realized the track started sounding pretty familiar, especially if you were playing around within the same genre. So I started to dig around a little bit and just curious, like I just popped up like the developer tools to see like where is it bringing this music from? And I actually realized that they’re pre-canned, like audio files.
So, I actually don’t know if this is real AI. I think they’re just stitching together a bunch of audio files rather than generating music on the fly. It’s still really impressive. Still a really cool tool that probably a lot of people get value out of, but I’m not sure if I would call it AI. So for that, I give it one bouncing elephant.
[00:28:38] Pete: Fair enough.
[00:28:40] Garrett: It’s too bad. I also lost a couple hours to that tool and I thought it was super cool. So I’m bummed to learn that it’s not some magic technology.
[00:28:48] Pete: Well, at least you have the pride of “I created my own soundtrack” and it’s not just, you know, stock music and it does save you the money of getting a custom track. But fair enough. Saba we’ll bow to your one bouncer.
[00:28:59] Garrett: So I’ve got a design tool called Uizard, wee-zard, no idea how to pronounce this.
[00:29:08] Robotic Voice: It’s pronounced “wizard”, U-I-Z-A-R-D.
[00:29:14] Garrett: Anyhow, it’s an AI powered design tool for user interfaces. So what it lets you do is create wireframes, mockups for things like websites and apps. It’s been offering generative AI for design since like 2018, so they’re not bandwagoning at all. They were built essentially as a generative AI platform, and recently they launched what they’re calling their auto designer, which is extremely cool.
So using a ChatGPT-like interface, you can instantly create a mockup for anything. For example, you could say build me a fitness app for elephants and Uizard will create a multi-screen prototype outlining the layout and the core functionality. So that’s what I did.
So you can see it’s created a series of different screens, screenshots, mockups for different elements of this app. It’s also got loads of AI features like converting sketches and screenshots into editable mockups, generating the written content, simulating site maps, automatically extracting design elements, that sort of thing. In terms of how easy or difficult it is to use, pretty straightforward. There’s no setup or anything, but just like learning all of the different functionality within the tool took me a little while. I’m sure you’d get the hang of it pretty quickly. And in terms of value, it’s got a free plan and the pro version is still just like $19 a month.
[00:30:37] Pete: So, Garrett, lemme get this straight. So like, let’s say I’m an ecomm manager. But I don’t have UI skills and I want to do some type of feature set development. I can use an AI tool, which is going to generate mockups and wireframes for me.
[00:30:54] Garrett: Totally.
[00:30:55] Pete: Unbelievable.
[00:30:56] Garrett: It’s very cool.
[00:30:57] Pete: Like this is, again, this is like a robot’s coming for your jobs. Like I feel like as a marketer, I could be more of a one man band if I had to be. And for smaller marketing teams where you wear many hats, some of these tools to me are just blowing my mind.
[00:31:12] Garrett: You know, I don’t think that it would replace anybody, or at least this particular tool wouldn’t, but it gives you a great starting point, right? The mockup that I created, it had some errors. I mean, a lot of the images generated had that sort of uncanny valley feel to them. But I think that at the very least, like I could take what it gave me based on a super simple prompt and turn it into some (assuming I had the skills, I don’t have the skills) and turn it into something that’s like legitimately usable. So for that reason, I’m giving it two and a half bouncing elephants.
[00:31:44 Pete: I’m curious, so at Saba, you’re on the development side of the house and we often hand, you know your teams’ wireframes and mockups, is this also a tool that your teams could benefit from?
[00:31:56] Saba: Yeah, definitely. Especially in the prototyping stage. So as Garrett said, like it’s a great starting point. So, and I actually poked around a little bit on this tool ‘cause I was curious and I think the most impressive feature is the one where you just sketch on a piece of paper. An outline of what your app or UI looks like, and you can take a photo of it and it scans it in and generates an entire wireframe that you can edit and play around with. To me, that is really, really cool and the computer vision behind that and the massive dataset that they’ve mined to be able to create that is pretty, pretty spectacular.
So it’s a great way to like get you started. And just start prototyping and like really shortening that cycle of like creating multiple wireframes or multiple versions of an app. ‘Cause you literally just need to draw it on a piece of paper and you’re, you’re already getting started. The theme here is the democratization of these things, right? Like it’s just allowing anyone to get started with their programming or with generating wireframes or creating music or creating ad campaigns, right? That is where we’re seeing the benefit here. It’s like you can get started super quickly.
I think where us as humans and our knowledge and expertise is gonna be needed is like the next step, right? Like how do you take an idea that AI can help you get started to like actual fruition?
[00:33:18] Pete: Wow. All right. We’ve gone from copywriting, sound design, video editing, podcast production, Garrett. What’s next on our list of tools to review?
[00:33:32] Garrett: So this one is called Descript and what it does is it creates transcripts from videos, from audio files. Unless you cut and remix those files with a text editor. So imagine you upload the 30 minute video to Descript. It’ll spit back a transcript in a Word file, and you can go in and start to remove sections from that transcript. And at the same time, it will also cut your media file to remove those same sections. So, for example, if you regret saying something on this podcast, you would be able to use Descript to go back in time and remove that without needing to know how to edit audio at all.
Maybe the coolest thing about Descript though is that it lets you add content as well, so it’s not just removing stuff. You can also clone your voice and insert new audio that sounds like you also using the text editor. You go in, you say, Pete said this instead. (I haven’t done this to you. I promise.) I’d be able to essentially make you say things that you haven’t said before.
[00:34:29] Pete: Welcome to the world of misinformation and AI that we need to regulate.
[00:34:34] Garrett: 100%.
[00:34:34] Saba: Terrifying.
[00:34:36] Garrett: Descript also uses AI to clean up your audio, doing things like removing filler words, plus reducing background noise. You can also use the platform to recut videos for social media, add captions, that sort of thing. Super useful. It’s insanely easy to use, which is kind of their whole thing, right? Descript makes it easy for anybody to edit videos and audio files without any experience whatsoever.
So for that reason, three bouncing elephants. There’s something very cool about editing a video or audio clip through text. I think that some AI tools like, amplify a skill, right? They make it faster for you to do a thing or to do that thing more impactfully. Descript is a tool that lets you do something that you just couldn’t do before. And to your point, Saba about democratization and letting people, uh, do things that previously had these barriers, I think Descript falls into that category.
[00:35:29] Pete: So lemme get this straight. Anybody that knows how to edit a Word document, which is literally everybody, would be able to now edit a video. And so just imagine you’re a marketing guy. Someone hands you a 30 minute video and you have the file and you’ve gotta chop it up into 10, 15 second social media soundbites or a short five minute, and you can do that single-handedly because you know how to edit a paragraph, like that’s just so great.
So as we have reviewed all these tools, I think the point we’re trying to make to the audience is today, these tools are incredibly insightful. They really do help your workflow, your capabilities, and who knows whether robots are coming for our jobs, but as marketers, we need to embrace these tools and use them because we are going to be more effective if we do. And that is really my conclusion. And you know, Garrett and I, and now Saba, we’re spending a lot of hours studying AI and practicing it. But I guarantee you, if I was not hosting this podcast series, I would not have got on this journey, and I would not be as capable as I feel today.
I’m gonna suggest we do two more things before we end the episode. So, Garrett, being the research that he is, researched a ton of tools. I’m gonna give Garrett one minute, 60 seconds for a lightning round to tell us about how many more tools he can get to in about 60 seconds. And then each of us is gonna share our closing remarks with our audience today.
So, all right, so I am about to hit go on my stopwatch. 60 seconds starting now.
[00:37:36] Garrett: All right…
Otter, AI transcription software that includes an AI powered chatbot to help you search through the transcript, summarize the content, sort of similar to ChatGPT. Three elephants.
Forms.app, it’s an AI powered form generator. You can enter a prompt and it’ll spit back questions that you should ask, formats, length, plus generated content for the form. It’s very cool. Maybe a little niche. 2.5 elephants.
TLDR This summarizes long pieces of content into just a few sentences. Has a browser extension. Super nifty, although you could probably do it with ChatGPT now. Two elephants.
Tome, AI generated presentation decks. Recommend slides and sections. Auto-populates the content based on your prompt. 2.5 elephants.
Let’s Enhance, upscale low resolution photos with AI. Remove the backgrounds. It’s great for designers. Super easy to use. Credit based pricing model. Three elephants.
Formula Bot, generate custom Excel formulas through text prompts. Plus use an AI chatbot to ask questions about your data. Three elephants.
Lumen5, turn blog content into auto-generated video summaries to expand your distribution. 2.5 elephants.
[00:38:38] Pete: And time. That was really fun, Garrett, and I think you made your point of there’s a lot of tools out there.
All right. That was great fun today. Saba, tell us about what are you thinking after participating in this episode and thinking about today’s content? What do you wanna leave everyone with today?
[00:38:59] Saba: Yeah, so I think the race to deliver value with AI is definitely real. You know, we listed so many applications and products here that are calling themselves AI, leveraging AI.
The thing that I would like to leave everyone listening here with is like, continue to be curious, like don’t just take things for granted. Really question what you’re sharing, what data you’re sharing, who you’re giving that information to, and like what are you gaining like, okay, it’s like really cool to play with an AI tool, but is it delivering you value and like starting to question that side of the table as well. And I think the companies that are really gonna win this race are gonna be companies that are able to really deliver that value and help their customer with these AI tools rather than just delivering them as table stakes.
[00:39:50] Garrett: Totally.
[00:39:51] Pete: Garrett, how about you?
[00:39:52] Garrett: Yeah, we talked a little bit at the top about job loss versus job creation, and it’s hard to say like the full extent of who will be replaced and what will they be replaced with. I think for me, the important thing, like we’ve seen just this explosion of AI tools, and I think the people who are going to persevere to thrive in this new AI world are the ones who are working with AI, adopting it, learning about it.
So I think regardless of what happens, getting in there, getting your hands dirty, working with the robots. There’s only upside there and I’d recommend anybody listening to this start working with AI tools.
[00:40:35] Pete: Well, and you both said similar but different things and I would like to rename this episode. It was “Try AI,” but I think it should be “Try AI, Be Curious.” So Saba, thank you for those final words, that’s a wrap.
