LookieAI: AI-generated summaries of YouTube videosConfession:

I’m generally disturbed by my generation’s tendency to substitute watching YouTube videos for reading books. But that’s the world we live in, and I’m sure LookieAI will serve those too busy to watch “Crash Course World History” well on their AP Euro exams. Still, I’ll be curious to see whether these text summaries of videos actually take off — my sense is you could get the same value, without the inaccuracies, from full transcripts.

Topics: Personalized Spanish practice for intermediate learners.

Anyone who’s seriously tried to learn a language knows Duolingo can’t take you very far beyond A1, so I’m glad to see Topics is focusing on gamifying the (much trickier) intermediate stage. The app currently only supports Spanish and the free practice texts are limited, but I think the overall concept of presenting readers with narrated, level-appropriate blurbs is pretty good. But what's really missing for a lot of plateaued intermediate learners is intense speaking and writing practice — neither of which the app currently targets.

This is our “staff picks” section — five products that stood out to us this week, whether because we think they’re especially promising, unique or delightful. 

With: 200+ curated questions designed to deepen emotional intimacy and self-awareness. 

This product won’t change the world, but it could change your relationship. The design is gorgeous, and the questions provocative. We think it’d be a perfect date night or dinner party activity. 

ChatGPT Canvas: A new interface that lets you and ChatGPT work side-by-side on documents or code. 

OpenAI is on fire — product-wise, but maybe also internally. (What was the deal with all those resignations?) Canvas comes just a few days after Advanced Voice Mode rolled out to most users. We’re most excited about its writing shortcuts, which include inline edits, automatic reading-level adjustments, and integrated grammar and clarity checks. 

Wispr Flow: A Mac dictation app with autoedits, AI commands, and support for 100+ languages. 

This is a speech-to-text app designed to speed up typing. It works across basically any CMS, and has a word-per-minute output of 220 — around three times faster than the average human type speed. Has writer’s block met its match?

CharacterSDK: Lets developers create multimodal AI characters capable of contextual understanding and real-time interaction. 

There are tons of use cases here, from personalized customer support at scale to task automation, but we can’t help feeling like the biggest potential beneficiaries here are…waifu lovers. You know, people who are in relationships with fictional characters — who have a waifu (or husbando), in Internet-speak. Replika was the go-to, but it might just have some competition. 

Graphite Reviewer: A high-signal AI code review companion. 

Our engineering team is stoked about this launch. Check out the long-form section below for their detailed take.

Have you ever wished you could create an app just by explaining your idea? With LlamaCoder, that's now possible. Developed by Together AI and powered by the Llama 3.1 405B model, LlamaCoder is an open-source web app that turns your prompts into fully functional applications.

Together AI is all about making AI accessible and useful. They help developers and businesses design and manage AI projects using open-source models like Llama. To show what Llama 3.1 405B can do, they built LlamaCoder—a tool that's quickly becoming popular in the developer community.

Since its launch just over a month ago, LlamaCoder has really taken off. It's earned over 2,000 stars on GitHub, and hundreds of developers have cloned the repository. People have generated more than 200,000 apps using the platform.