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It began like most new ventures. Somebody had an annoying downside to resolve, however nothing existed that might fairly match the wants of the put-out occasion. When this occurs to most of us — our canines will not sit, our budgets will not stability themselves, we lack the diabolical genius to make a small robotic to butter our toast for us — we both give in and take care of the established order, or cobble collectively an answer by way of a irritating set of countermoves.
Jeremy Toeman, the founding father of Augie, is just not most individuals.
Toeman is a product developer and serial startup founder with many years of expertise launching media instruments like Sling. He additionally labored for CNET for 3 years within the 2010s. When he wished to place collectively a fast, social-focused piece of video content material to advertise his pandemic challenge podcast on films, he realized he had a kind of annoying issues: He is not a video producer.
“I estimate about 40 hours of tutorials later, I had made no progress,” Toeman stated by way of a Zoom interview.
However what Toeman does have is a specific set of abilities that make him a nightmare for annoying issues. He referred to as up considered one of his co-founders, Scott Havird, who has 10 years of expertise working in synthetic intelligence for corporations like WarnerMedia, and began troubleshooting.
“I sort of referred to as him up and stated, ‘I wanna do one thing that listens to my phrases, understands the context of them after which matches visuals to them routinely. Are you able to try this?’,” Toeman stated.
Two years and $4.1 million in seed funding later, Augie, the AI-assisted, automated video producing and enhancing platform, has emerged. The platform combines a number of AI instruments into one in-browser expertise. Augie is designed to generate and supply scripts, voiceover and transferring photos right into a cohesive video utilizing solely a single textual content immediate as the place to begin.
It comes throughout the explosion of generative AI instruments, and their means to create textual content, video and audio in a flash on the immediate of the consumer. Different corporations are additionally experimenting with video-generation instruments akin to OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Lumiere and Microsoft’s VASA-1. You could find extra ideas, information and opinions of AI instruments on CNET’s AI Atlas hub.
Augie creates a script by way of ChatGPT, generates an AI voice to create narration and voiceover, and it creates, defines and animates imagery. Then it places all of it collectively to create a completed product in a matter of minutes.
It is designed for individuals who have to create video content material who’ve zero expertise with enhancing software program, and do not have time to sort out constructing a deep understanding of storytelling.
“We inform tales, however what we do not naturally do is make movies,” Toeman stated. “We will report ourselves tremendous simply. We will minimize up a recording tremendous simply, however the second you get barely extra sophisticated than that, all the pieces form of involves a little bit of a psychological nightmare on methods to put all of those items collectively.”
I used Augie to create a promotional video for a fictitious product referred to as TechNeck. My immediate was this: “a cream designed to alleviate neck and shoulder ache from the awkward posture many a pc consumer adopts throughout lengthy display screen time periods.”
In about half-hour, Augie helped me produce this video, with photos courtesy of a Getty license and voiceover patched in from ElevenLabs, an AI text-to-speech software program Augie has partnered with.
Ease, expediency and customization are high of thoughts for Toeman and the group at Augie. He hopes Augie can assist launch an period of accessible, on-demand video creation for each people and company entities.
Augie, at present in beta, affords a free model and month-to-month and yearly subscriptions from $10 a month to $34 a month with a bespoke possibility for bigger corporations that may have particular wants. You can too purchase tokens that act as credit for producing animated AI in your video.
That is considered one of a sequence of brief profiles of AI startups, that will help you get a deal with on the panorama of synthetic intelligence exercise occurring. For extra on AI, see our new AI Atlas hub, which incorporates product opinions, information, ideas and explainers.
Editors’ be aware: CNET used an AI engine to assist create a number of dozen tales, that are labeled accordingly. The be aware you are studying is connected to articles that deal substantively with the subject of AI however are created totally by our professional editors and writers. For extra, see our AI policy.
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