👯‍♀️ We build a virtual AI video twin in 5 minutes ...

AI-HOI AInauts,

Welcome to the new issue of your favorite newsletter. Today with some exciting tips and practical tool tests. Here's what we have in store for you:

• 👯‍♀️ How to build a virtual AI video twin in 5 minutes ...

• 🚀 Magic Studio 2.0: Unleash your creativity with Canva's AI

• 📰 AI-News-Quickie: The HAI-lights

👯‍♀️ How to build a virtual AI video twin in 5 minutes

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, ex-Open AI board member and investor, recently had himself cloned. Virtually of course. And he gets up close and personal with his digital self - a video worth watching.

Behind it is a video avatar of Hour One, his voice was cloned via ElevenLabs and a custom GPT-4 chatbot acts as a persona, trained on Reid’s content. And such tools are available to all of us (sometimes even in an open source version, such as OpenVoice).

Since we’ve already covered this topic several times, we wanted to build a virtual "twin" today - in just 5 minutes, with a free tool!

We use D-ID, and this is how it works:

1. Go to studio.d-id.com/agents and click on "Create Agent".

2. Create an account, answer a few questions about how to use it and then upload a high-resolution photo of yourself (or use one of the canned avatars).

3. Use your own image or create a suitable avatar. We generated an image with Midjourney for testing, that was the prompt:

Photorealistic closeup portrait photo of a man in a futuristic astronaut suit, centered, neutral friendly expression, very well light, futuristic cityscape background, visible badge with the text AI --no helmet

4. Then give further context to the avatar and select the desired voice. You can choose any given voice or clone your own voice (premium feature). Here are our instructions:

You are a friendly, helpful and concise AI assistant to the AInauts. Answer the question as well as possible and ask follow-up questions if necessary to get more context.

4. In the next step, you have the option of defining the "Grounding", i.e. which resources the avatar should access. This can be ONLY your data, a hybrid solution with general knowledge and your files, or ONLY general knowledge.

5. You can upload up to 5 PDF, TXT or PPTX documents with a total size of 100MB. Pro tip: Use https://www.freeconvert.com/txt-converter to convert any URL to a PDF file (for example a website, your LinkedIn profile, ...).

6. Finally, you can enter optional sample questions and your virtual avatar is ready!

7. If you want to integrate the avatar on your website, you will find the embed code on the overview page.

None of this was rocket science, and with the right knowledge base you have a cool way to spice up interaction and communication with your stakeholders.

Here you can see our live example and play with it, as long as the free credits last 😎 (to be on the safe side, we’ve also recoded a quick demo video). Our Avatar is set up to speak German, but you can simply ask him to answer in English - he will do so!

Such "streaming avatars" are rapidly gaining popularity, and our absolute favorite AI-generated video tool is HeyGen.

You can use it to create high-quality avatars and control them via API - you can test it here, and we've also recorded a short demo video (in German, but you’ll get the point). Pretty cool, isn't it?

🚀 Magic Studio 2.0: Unleash your creativity with Canva's AI

Welcome to a new era of creativity and productivity! Canva released a flurry of new features at this year's Canva Create 2024 in Los Angeles that will take our your design game to the next level. We’ve tested all of them, let’s dive in!

Btw, the keynote was super well organized and "on brand" - some other companies can learn from them! From AI-supported tools to improved collaboration options - Canva has it all. Let's take a look at the highlights.

Designing just got easier!

• It's Magic! Everywhere it says Magic, the AI comes into play. With tools such as Magic Replace, Magic Eraser, Magic Edit and Magic Switch, you can easily replace elements in your designs, remove unwanted objects, change entire images and adjust formats - all with just a few clicks.

• And with Magic Media, images and graphics are generated directly based on your text prompt.

• Oh lalala, very nice! With the improved Bulk create, you can simply upload a CSV file and create many variants of a design in no time at all, e.g. for social media campaigns.

• Another practical feature is the new recording feature, which you can use to record your presentations or create product demos to send out. Super handy in our remote age!

• Cutting and editing videos is now even easier thanks to Highlights and Enhance Voice. Cut videos into short clips, remove background noise and add voiceovers to take your content to the next level.

• And as if that wasn't enough, Canva has also bought Affinity! Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher is the Swiss army knife for professional designers.

New opportunities for companies

Over the last decade, Canva has focused on empowering people to be creative. Now it is professionalizing, and the focus is shifting to supporting organizations. No wonder, over 90% of Fortune 500 companies already use Canva.

• Canva now offers an Enterprise solution to easily enable comprehensive settings and user management.

• Data Autofill is a practical feature. It allows you to seamlessly insert business data from sources such as Salesforce etc. directly into your pitch decks or brochures. One click, and everything is up-to-date and up to date. Bye-bye, outdated slides!

• Marketers can now also use Ad Tech Integrations to create and optimize ads directly in Canva - and then (soon) push them directly to Facebook, Google or Amazon. We find this particularly exciting, of course, and will be testing it out.

• In addition, there are now On-Brand Layouts and Style Match, which ensure that all designs are in line with your brand guidelines. Simply select a design, customize and go! We’ve already stressed last week the importance of such brand features for brand identity.

• The Work Kits offer a range of customized templates and resources for HR, marketing, sales and creative teams. These kits are not just about design, but also utilize best practices content. Projects can be started quickly and efficiently without having to start from scratch.

• All of this can also be combined with new apps and integrations for tools such as Asana, Monday, HubSpot and many more, thus improving integration into existing workflows.

• And last but not least: You can now also create courses in Canva! This feature is currently intended for teams, not for public courses.

Our take: Designing has never been easier, and you should take advantage of it.

In all honesty, design is not our strong point, but Canva was already a valuable helper in the past and has now become even more important.

We could write about it for a long time, but the best thing to do is to try it out yourself! Here is a template that you can copy and use to test out the new features directly. Many features can be used free of charge, but a premium subscription is recommended to take full advantage of the possibilities.

📰 AI-News-Quickie: The HAI-lights

A lot has also happened in the rest of the AI universe - here we go!

• Free custom GPTs now available for everyone! GPTs are ChatGPT's specialized applications, and now even free users can use (but not create) them, including features like vision and memory.

• The mega-deal is (almost) official: OpenAI and Apple are working together, and Siri could soon be smarter than ever before. Will we get our first taste at WWDC?

• Claude.ai can now use tools! Technical details here, we will digg deeper soon.

• OpenAI has stopped operations that use AI to deceive in several countries. Russians, Chinese and more have been caught.

• With Suno AI's new feature tease, you can make music out of any sound - now even up to 4 minutes at a time. Competitor Udio certainly has a few more updates on the roadmap.

• Did Sam Altman lie? Ex-OpenAI board member Helen Toner spills the beans and says he lied to the board several times and was fired by Y-Combinator. Get the popcorn out...

• This week is the TechWell AI Conference USA in Las Vegas - get a free virtual ticket here.

• Rise of AI 2024 - All presentations for free! We were attending the Rise of AI conference in Berlin, and able to take away a lot of inspiration. You can find our post about it here. Now all sessions are also live on YouTube, here you can find the entire playlist.

And no need to be sad. The AInauts will be back soon, with new content for you.

Reto & Fabian from the AInauts

P.S.: Follow us on social media - that motivates us to keep going 😁!
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