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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
Happy 🦃 Day to those celebrating!
Today we’re diving into a few recently launched products that might help you save a buck or two on your Christmas shopping.
Today we're getting real and showing you how to get rid of FILLERITIS* 😶
*noun. The verbal habit of using an excessive amount of filler words in one’s sentences. An inflammation of filler words.
OpenAI has been making headlines the past few weeks and not only because of AI-generated art. The San Francisco startup launched OpenAI Startup Fund last year in partnership with Microsoft on the premise of making ‘big early bets’ on the best and brightest in AI. They recently announced Converge, a $1M equity investment and 5-week accelerator for early-stage AI companies. Last week we learned they led Mem’s $23.5M Series A, and this week they announced leading a sizeable $50M Series C for Descript.
Descript is a video editor to make editing recordings as easy as editing a doc. YouTubers, podcasters, and influencers have been using and loving it since its first launch in 2017. The latest update has a lot of folks excited. The New Descript uses AI to edit the "ums," "likes," "you knows," and "uhs" out of your recordings and clones your voice to add new lines to your script. There are 30+ new features, which also include the ability to insert media into your project with keystrokes, green screen your background away, and add stock b-roll footage.
The relationship that Descript is building with OpenAI could give the video platform an edge. Startups in the OpenAI Startup Fund don’t just get the boost in funding – they also get early access to OpenAI’s future systems. Descript CEO Andrew Mason defines OpenAI as part investor, part partner, highlighting that “Sometimes you find investors where there’s also strategic overlap.”
The team is running a live tutorial and AMA on Thursday if you want to get a closer look. Or just get to it and…
We’ve seen AI do a lot over the past few years, from creating houses out of thin air, to generating weird and wonderful profile images, to becoming your second brain for work.
Now Notion just dropped their latest feature: an AI assistant built directly into your workspace. Notion AI is currently in Alpha, but it can handle quite a lot already. It’s kind of like a new co-worker that lives in Notion and saves you a ton of time or helps you spend it more wisely.
What it can do: Co-Founder Ivan Zhao gave a taste of Notion AI in a demo video, which included summarizing those long Zoom meetings, instant language translation, automatically generating a list of ideas about any topic to get those creative juices flowing, and even being your personal editor.
What we’re watching for: We’ve seen A LOT of AI writers launch over the last few years. What will it mean for them, now that workspaces like Notion are building AI directly into their products? Google, of course, already integrates some AI into your docs (thanks, autocomplete), but it's only a matter of time until we see giants like Google with AI integration at Notion’s scale.
Notion AI is currently using a waitlist but Notion said it's giving more people access every day.
Don’t you love it when you design a beautiful landing page, show your friends, family, co-workers, or anyone who will take a peak, and then remember you have to do it all over again, but this time using code?
Yeah, didn’t think so.
Fortunately, the times are changing. FUNCTION12 is off getting attention with its launch today. It automates the design to developer workflow by taking your handcrafted designs and exporting production-ready code in an instant. As founder and CEO Shawn Park put it “based on our beta testing, a mobile screen that would normally take 6 hours when coding in hand took only 16 minutes to export.”
Why people care: What makes FUNCTION12 unique is that there are no plugins or apps to install. Once you’re happy with your design, simply copy your Figma file link and paste it onto the FUNCTION12 landing page. You’ll get a platform to nail down the nitty gritty such as inspecting your components, configuring your layout, and adding actions before exporting your code.
Worth it? At $1 per month, FUNCTION12 could be worth trying out, especially if you have been delaying coding up that landing page of yours.
Who doesn’t like seeing their face on camera or hearing themselves talk? 🙋
Unfortunately for those of us in that boat, there’s no substitute for capturing knowledge via video. That’s why How-To videos are the top-4 category on YouTube, according to the team at Guidde.
The Guidde browser extension is attracting new users with its launch today, and not just because it lets you skip having your voice and image in your recording. Guidde helps you create guided How-To videos that would normally require multiple tools and hours of animation with ease. As one user put it, “Finally someone created a tool that lets me easily generate a video without the hassle of a video.”
How it works: When you record a video with Guidde, it automatically creates highlights and call-outs for your workflows. You can then edit and enhance your videos like you would a PowerPoint. When the video is done, you can share it in a click as a GIF, share it as a page with steps automatically broken down into its parts, or export or embed the video file.
When to use it: Guidde doesn’t have to be a literal alternative to video recording tools like Loom (even the Guidde demo video itself is a screen recording with voice-over.) But it could help team members who tend to revert to text and screenshots over video to explain themselves. Many users also instantly saw the immediate benefit of using such a tool for their help centers and support channels. And don’t forget about those YouTube videos.
The extension is free, so go ahead and it a try for your next explainer.
