Episode 356: 5 AI tools that can help right now
In this episode, Fiona shares 5 AI tools that can help your business. She also discusses the integration of AI tools in business operations, emphasizing their potential to complement human skills rather than replace them. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Integration of AI tools in business operations
Utilizing AI to enhance productivity and efficiency
The potential of AI to complement human skills
Benefits and challenges of utilizing AI platforms in business operations
Embracing AI as a means to streamline and optimize business processes
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Often, people think, "If I'm going to use ChatGPT, then I have no use for a copywriter." You have a use for a copywriter, and it may be that you get them to do something else that you've been looking at in your business, such as working on a course or creating different content for you. Writing talks, you can get out and do keynotes and everything else. Maybe the other things that they did, like creating email content or captions can be done by an AI tool. However, you're still employing them, but you're employing them to do something else that their skillset is just incredible for. It's not saying by using AI, you're going to get rid of everyone in your team and you're never going to employ another small business owner or a freelancer. Not at all. It's about just getting smarter with the way that you run your business.
Welcome to episode 356 of the My Daily Business Podcast. Today is a coaching episode and I'm going to dive into five tools that I think can help you write about now. Particularly if you're somebody who is shying away from using AI or perhaps just not very knowledgeable about this and how you can use it for your business, then I urge you to stick around. Before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the land of which I record this and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
I also acknowledge that it is a tough time in Australia post-referendum and also just generally a tough time for so many people in the world. Particularly we think of those in wartorn areas. If you need help please do not be afraid to reach out for help. Go and see your GP in Australia. There are many resources over at Beyond Blue, and if you happen to have an ABN, which is an Australian business number, you can claim its six free mental health coaching sessions through Beyond Blue. If you just Google Beyond Blue Business help or Beyond Blue new access for business owners. You can check that out. Wherever you are reading this, there are usually so many places to access help to get help. Even just talking to a friend and saying, I need to talk to somebody right now. Don't bottle it up. It is a tough time. There is no shame in getting out there and asking for help. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
It's hard to imagine that it is just about a year, just under a year since ChatGPT launched, I think it launched on November 30th, 2022. In the space of less than a year, it has transformed the way that so many people are creating content, writing content, coming up with new ideas, and all sorts of things. As somebody who has worked as a journalist, I studied journalism at university and I've been a writer for 22 years. I have not used it to write yet, but I have been showcasing it to numerous clients when we are going through all sorts of ways that they can come up with content ideas, and look for information about things. I know when I was writing my second book, the temptation to just be like, "Hey, ChatGPT, can you just write the rest of the book?" I did not do that. That's what I'm being paid to do to write the book, but I could see the temptation. I think when it first came out, I was a little hesitant towards it because as I said, I studied journalism, I've been a writer for a long time, and I was like, “No, it's not going to be able to do a good as good a job.” I think it needs still a lot of training and I think there are a lot of factual issues with it.
I know that one of my clients, when we were looking through it together for their business, put in my name and said, give me a bio on her. We just laughed because what happened was that it came in with all these incorrect facts about me, things like I'd started this particular business, it had the name of the business, and I've never started a business under that name. I was like, where has that even come from? It is AI, it's not a human person there. However, it is being powered by so much stuff that's on the internet and it is crawling and looking for every single thing. Plus it's learning as you use it more, the more it learns about your brand. You can ask it numerous questions to ask you about your brand so that it gets to know you.
That has been out for less than a year, and I know so many people who are using it. I know so many people that swear by it. But today I want to talk about five other AI platforms that you might be interested in for your business. I'm using two of these AIs quite a lot and I'm excited to see where one in particular takes me, particularly when it comes to video marketing. But the others are also ones that I think are helpful for people, particularly if you're somebody who struggles with content ideas, and planning out your content. I know that for many people, especially people who are listening to this who might have worked in marketing who might have worked in copywriting or content creation, there can be a resistance that comes up because there's all this talk of they're going to take our jobs and no one will need all these sorts of creative things anymore.
I don't think that's true at all. I think there's still a space for that and a place for it, but I think these things can enhance our time as small business owners. Instead of putting up that resistance, I would urge you to get curious about how could you use these things and what in your business is taking you a long time. What is tedious? Why are you spending a lot of money on outsourcing at the moment that potentially could be used or could be created for you by an AI platform? I'm going to go through five, I have no affiliations to these. I'm not getting paid, I don't have any kickback when I recommend these things, I'm just recommending them. The first one is called Read AI.
Read AI is like an assistant that can come into your calls. I do Zoom calls with clients, but I also do Zoom calls for podcasting and all sorts of things. One of the things you can do is you can set up this tool and I have to give a shout-out to Dave Gray who introduced me to this on a call with him. I was like, “What is that?” He showed me the behind-the-scenes and I was just like, this would help me so much in my business. Read AI is a tool, like a plugin. It can integrate with different platforms that you already use. For example, Zoom or another video platform that you're using in your work, and it attends, it's like a robot that comes in and attends the call.
Immediately after that, probably let's say five to 10 minutes, depending on how long the call is. What it does is it creates a report for me, and in that report is so much information. One is my own coaching and my style and how it could be improved. It'll pinpoint things where I've used non-inclusive language. For example, what I've seen so far is where I've sworn and I get that's not very professional, but in each case, it was one swear word. Then it also pinpointed my words per minute. I did not know how fast I could talk. I've been told my whole life that I talk fast and I know with a podcast especially, I've had people that have said, “Oh my gosh, you're so fast.” I think that's just how I am.
I've always been, I think fast and it comes out fast. But you can always slow me down if you'd prefer no shame. But one of the things that shows me is where the words per minute are going too fast. I'm in the business of teaching and educating, I want people to take in what I'm saying. It pinpoints how much of the call, and what percentage was within a good word per-minute range, and then it will show me where my words per minute are too fast. I looked at one call and it was 235 words per minute, and I was like, “How can I say that much in 60 seconds?” That was in Bright Red, usually, I think it's around 170 words per minute, and that's in this green range.
It's showing me how much of the call was there. It also uses facial recognition looking at myself and the other people on the call to tell me how engaged people are and which topics I'm talking about that are bringing up the most engagement. It also gives you a full transcript of everything that was talked about in that call, but also gives you the timestamp. If you wanted to quickly go into like, what were we talking about when we, when that person mentioned, for example, financial records or reports, I can just click straight on that and it will take me to the exact point in the video. It records the video. It also highlights things like the key themes that were discussed on that call.
Again, the timestamp at which that theme started, it's just incredible, like absolutely incredible. The cost for this at the moment, I think is around $20 US a month. And for what it is giving is just mind-blowing. Also, I tend to write a lot of notes after calls, and it's one of the most tedious parts of my job. I love doing the calls, I love chatting with people, but writing those notes up sometimes, particularly if they're not done immediately, can be tedious and especially if I'm trying to explain those notes to somebody else who may be helping me pull these things into Trello or anything else, it's just time-consuming. This is something that I think is going to revolutionize how I am coaching, not just coaching, but in terms of educating and understanding, I have taught at universities, I have taught many live workshops and you can get that sense of the energy and you feel how people are feeling on a digital platform.
It is harder to get that, not always, but a lot of the time it can feel a little harder. It is incredible to have this tool. I mean, my mind is blown by this stuff because I grew up without the internet. I went to university when no one was using the internet. All of these things are incredible and I'm genuinely there's a little hesitation, but mostly it's just excitement about how AI will shape our entire future. Number two, one of the things that I found is useful for clients, I wouldn't say I would use it necessarily myself, but I think it's a good one. If you are struggling with content ideas, it is called Clever Content AI, and it's created by Mind Studio. I think they've got numerous AI apps.
What this is you can, I think for, I think you get like 20 goes at it for free and then, and then you have to upgrade. But you can plug in a few, it'll ask you a couple of questions. It's like answering a Typeform or a survey in Google Forms or something. You answer about four or five questions and it's like, what is your business? Who's the audience? What platform are you wanting content for? You can put Instagram and TikTok or how many you want, or you can just put one like Instagram and then it will ask you a bit about the brand and how it shows up on social media. You answer all of that. What it does is spit out a two-week content plan for you. That has quite a bit of detail for what it spits out in seconds. I found it when I tested it, just for my own business as, let's just see how this works before I suggest it to some clients, is it recommends things that I would personally never do.
It's just not on brand for me. For example, with TikTok, it was like you should do a dance trend. I've never done a dance trend in my whole life and probably never will. That just seemed a little bit redundant. It's just pulling the bare basics. I'm sure if you upgrade and add more detail, maybe it'll give you more, but I think with all of these, there's still a human element that needs to be put in. As somebody who works on brand, there's a lot of like brand messaging and all this other information, your tone of voice, everything else that needs to go into it. However, I do think that as a minimal starting point, if you are just absolutely sitting there desperate, don't have the money to invest in a coach, don't have the money to invest in a copywriter, don't even have the money to maybe invest in some of these content platforms out there that have a subscription model, then this might be a good place to start because it's free. That one is called Clever Content AI.
The third one that I wanted to mention, and there are many tools like this out there, I think this one is pretty decent for what it is, and that is called Modash. If you are regularly looking for influencers, content creators, people who can help you leverage or get into a particular community or strengthen your relationship with that particular community, or they can create awesome content for you, then this might be a place that you want to check out.
Because what happens is that even today, many influencers will still work with an agency and that agency is set up, they'll usually take a 20% cut, if not a little bit more, it depends on what the relationship is like. That agency wants to get their client to work. They may well be like, the client's got these particular numbers for somebody else they've done well. Check out the impact that they had. That impact may have been four years ago when the algorithms were different when these platforms were different. You're potentially looking at dated reporting that doesn't tell you if that influencer or that content creator is the correct one for you. What this platform allows you to do is to find people based on your particular audience and then their particular audience, how likely that influencer or content creator is to be able to help you achieve your business and marketing goals.
It allows you to go in and find people based on location, based on the theme, based on content, based on all sorts of things, and different platforms, and find people that have a higher likelihood that if you work with them on whatever your said campaign is, that it will achieve what you're trying to achieve, which might lead, which might be traffic, it might be brand awareness, whatever it is. It's using data to be able to generate a list, a dynamic list for you of people that might be a good fit as opposed to thinking that bigger is better or somebody else worked with this influencer because that's great, but they may be after a different audience or different campaign goals than you are. Modash is also great in showing you the average real engagement for different influencers, also showing you the average likes of their posts also, what percentage of their followers are fake.
I think that's an important thing. That's not something that I've seen readily available on some of these other platforms, but I know that it's interesting to see. I've looked up a few influencers, micro and macro influencers, and they're roughly from 17% right up to, I saw one as 39% of their followers are fake. Sometimes that's not the influencer's fault for whatever reason. There are different bots out there that are getting people to follow them, but sometimes these people have in the past paid for people to follow them and therefore you are potentially going with somebody because they've got this big following when that's just a vanity metric. What you want to be looking at is the engagement rate. How many people who follow them engage with their content? That's a hard thing to build up and retain.
If you've got somebody who has a decent average engagement rate, that can be something that might be helpful for whatever you are trying to achieve. You also just want to have a look at the overall demographics and other intel about who is following them, because people can have a huge audience, but they're not the audience that you're trying to go after. Collaborating or working with them in some fashion may not be the right fit for you. It's also just interesting for your own Instagram or TikTok or whatever your social channels are, to have a look at the data that comes up about you and your brand. They claim that Modash has captured the information for every account that has more than a thousand followers on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. It's worth checking out.
Again, like most of these platforms, there's a free version, a trial period, and then they're, they're going to try and up you to the paid version, but it's something to look at, particularly if you are somebody who is working with influencers quite a bit or potentially has worked with influencers or content creators. And I want to specify those are two separate people. Sometimes people get content creators and influencers put into the same bucket. They're not always, sometimes content creators are there to create amazing, interesting creative content and it's not necessarily about how many people are following, or how many people saw it because you, are creating the amazing content for you to use on your platforms. Whereas with influencers, usually, you are leveraging their existing platform, and their community rather than necessarily their creativity and content. They can be the same, but they are not always. Just keep that in mind.
But it's an interesting thing to check out. That is called Modash. Number four is Hitpaw. This is one for creating sharper imagery and that can be video content and static images. What would you call it? Just normal like photography because what can happen is so many people, now we are using our phones to take imagery and it could be images of your product, it could be a great image that you took of your store or an image of yourself, whatever it is.
We can sometimes take these photos. I know that I've taken plenty of photos within the Instagram app and then when I've downloaded them and blown them up, they just don't have the resolution or they're just not great. What Hitpaw allows you to do is to be able to upload your images. You have to download it, it's like AI software, but you download it to your desktop or other things as you would for InDesign or something else like that. Then you input the photos or the video and you can choose from different ways to clean it up so you can make it sharper, and you can fade out things. I mean there's all sorts of things to choose different filters and then you put it through there and it can also, I think, take watermarks off.
Don't quote me exactly on that, but the other thing you can do is bulk upload. You can bulk upload if you've got it, I don't know how many images you've got in a product you can bulk, upload them and fix them all in one go. I think that one is about $20 a month. $19.95 US I'm pretty sure maybe that was in Australian dollars, don't quote me, but around that price, which is about the same, if not a little cheaper than Adobe Creative Cloud or Creative Suite. I have not been paying for that for a while. I used to pay for it in the first few years of business. It's roundabout there, but it can do a lot more things than that and it can help clean up the video.
There's just so much it can do. I just think that it's one-to-one to look at if you are consistently taking your own images or creating content that you think could look a little better, but you don't necessarily have the budget to go out and work with a proper professional photographer. And of course, if you do have the budget, that is your better option because you're going to get exactly what you want and also employ another small business owner. But if you are on a budget or you want to just check out and you play around with this ai, then I would check out Hitpaw. The last one is one that I think is just going to help. I know in my own business, I am excited to look into this further, see what can happen out of it and how it can help me, particularly when it comes to video marketing.
This one is called Pictory. It can create video content, long-form video or short form based on text alone. You can input an article, or a blog, for example, I could input the podcast show notes and it will create a video and you can dictate how long or short that video is. It will use mainly royalty-free images plus any other video content that you might upload. That's one way that you can use it. You can also create a video out of an article that you have not written. As far as I can understand, you can put in a URL. Let's say I read a great article on Mama Mia's website, I might input that article and it can spit out a video, I'd want to credit where I read the article and all of that.
The other thing that's cool is that you can input your own video content and edit it pretty easily. But one of the best things that I think is just exceptional is that you can edit through the transcript. Instead of editing your video and having to stop and start and stop and start and take out things and cut things, if for example, I wanted to put in a group coaching video, like an actual video of me in group coaching with people coaching, I could upload that whole video, which would be quite large in probably an hour and 20 minutes or something. I can ask the AI to, firstly, it'll transcribe that whole video and then on, so you've got two sides of, you've got two parts of the screen on one side, you've got the transcript and on the other, you've got the video.
In the transcript, the text part of it, I can highlight sections and remove them and it instantly removes that from the video. It's just amazing. Let's say somebody talked about mental health or something that is personal and I don't want that going out in a marketing message because it's confidential and all these sorts of things. I can highlight all of that and it instantly gets deleted from the video. The other thing that's super cool is that once that transcript is up, so that happens somewhat instantly, it takes a little while, but after that happens, the AI tool will find what it considers to be the best highlights, the best sound bites, the best parts of that video to then turn into 30 seconds, one minute, two-minute videos. If that's not enough. The other thing to it is that you've got this video sitting there.
You can also say, I want to do this now instead of having this for YouTube, I want to create it for TikTok. You can just change it. What it will do is it'll change that video and you can then slide the video. Let's say you had two people talking next to each other on Zoom, most people can understand what that looks like. You have two people sitting on Zoom talking next to each other. Now if I wanted to change that, which is landscape to TikTok, I'm not going to be able to make it suddenly portrait. What you can do though is I could highlight, I just want it where this one person in group coaching says this great thing about group coaching. For example, it's a testimonial and they say, “I'm so glad I joined this group coaching program. It's amazing.”
What I could do is highlight that, or the AI might've picked it up as a highlight, then I could say, I want to turn this into a 30-second video, and then I could move the video to the TikTok portrait template and just have them talking on the screen. I could have captions with that. Of course, I'd need to ask him if that's okay to use, especially if it was in group coaching where it's not necessarily being publicized anywhere, but it just has this ability to within seconds help you edit videos, create videos, create content. For us, we have been recording all of our podcast interviews with people for at least a year, and we have not been using that video content yet. We are looking at ways to simplify that process as opposed to having to get every single video edited.
I know now there are so many platforms and places where you can record your video and they have like a million cameras. You get it all edited and you get a video recording as well as an audio recording. For people though, like myself who love podcasting, because of the ease of it, I'm not going to necessarily drive into a studio and sit there and put makeup on and do all the other things, but I'm trying to figure out how can we make consistent great videos out of the content that we have and do it within a budget, but also do it like quickly. There's not all this back and forth. I just think a picture is, I mean, I've only literally just been tapping the bare minimum of this platform. I've been using it for about two months and using it ad hoc.
I have to say that I'm excited about getting stuck into it fully for 2024 and just it being a platform like Canva or Xero, all the other platforms are that we use day in, day out in our business. As I said, with all of these, obviously if you've got a budget and you are working with people know I have great videographers that I work with. Bianca Fusca from Bianca Fusca Films is amazing, such an incredible editor as well as a videographer. I've just worked with her again to update our marketing course. But for people who potentially want to look at this stuff themselves or to do huge amounts of work potentially they will pay a videographer to do some of it. But some of it can be done through an AI tool.
It's just incredible what is out there. The five platforms that I mentioned, are Read AI, Clever Content AI, Modash, Hitpaw and Pictory. Again, these things are always changing. What works today may not be great tomorrow. Some of these AI platforms, a lot of them are so new that they're testing, they've still got bugs, and other things are going on. But I'd love to know from you which AI tools you love outside of ChatGPT, like which ones you love, which ones you're using day in and day out, and which ones have freed you up to do other work. I think that's the other thing. Often, people think, "If I'm going to use ChatGPT, then I have no use for a copywriter."
You have a use for a copywriter, and it may be that you get them to do something else that you've been looking at in your business such as working on a course or creating different content for you. Writing talks, you can get out and do keynotes and everything else. Maybe the other things that they did like creating email content or captions or whatever can maybe be done by an AI tool. However, you're still employing them, but you're employing them to do something else that their skillset is just incredible for. It's not saying by using AI, you're going to get rid of everyone in your team and you're never going to employ another small business owner or a freelancer. Not at all. It's about just getting smarter with the way that you run your business. I'm excited about AI.
There are so many things still to learn, but I think it is the future it is the now. It's not even the future, it's right now. It's how can you embrace it rather than resist it. As I said, I'd love to know which ones you use. You can email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com, or you can send us an Instagram DM @mydailybusiness_ or on TikTok @mydailybusiness. Thank you so much for reading. If you want to go through this in text format, you'll be able to find all of it at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/356. If you found this useful, if any of these AI tools have piqued your curiosity, please could you do me a huge favour and leave a review or better yet subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. Thank you so much for reading and I'll see you next time.
