Turn your want-to-read articles into rich audio summaries

A weekly newsletter that highlights new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

Hi all!

Another week, another newsletter! It's hard to believe that this is already the 26th edition of the AI Product Report. That's half a year of writing! I've thoroughly enjoyed researching and testing new AI products each week to figure out which ones are actually any good. While I've discovered a lot of half-baked products that don't do much of anything useful, the good news for you is that I only send you the ones that are worth checking out.

As of yesterday, the newsletter has reached 3,306 subscribers! Phew, that's a lot of people reading this and my goal is to reach 5,000 by the end of the year.

Now, in this week’s issue:

• Turn your want-to-read articles into rich audio summaries

• A simple tool to create you own AI

• AI-powered tools for rappers…and you

• Plus, a recommended read on debunking the “schism” between AI Safety and AI Ethics

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK

After testing dozens of new AI products this week. Here’s my top pick.

Recast: Turn your want-to-read articles into rich audio summaries.

I am a big fan of learning while on the go, especially during bike rides. In the past, I have used podcasts and audiobooks to achieve this. However, with Recast, I can now listen to any article that I’ve bookmarked and haven’t gotten around to reading. A decade ago, a popular app called Umano paid voice actors to read news articles and blog posts. Unfortunately, the unit economics of the business never worked, and it was eventually shut down. Recast has gotten ride of the paid voice actor instead leveraging AI to provide audio narration, and the voices sound impressively natural.

Instead of having an AI narrate the entire article, Recast analyzes it and breaks it into different voices, making it feel more like an audio conversation between people, similar to a podcast with co-hosts. You can discover articles within the Recast app or simply use the iOS share sheet to send articles that you find on the internet directly to your Recast queue.

RUNNER UPS

Two more AI product that is worth your time.

TinyAI: A simple tool to create you own AI. I appreciate simple products. Too often, people create robust products that end up being difficult to use. TinyAI keeps things simple. All you need to do is type into the prompt box what type of AI you want to create. You can teach it by providing any existing knowledge that you want it to know (e.g., a proprietary database), and voila! You have an AI that you can immediately chat with, embed on your website, or share with others.

TextFX: AI-powered tools for rappers, writers and wordsmiths. Although I know that most of you are not rappers, I believe we can all aspire to be better wordsmiths. Improving your use of language enhances your communication skills, which can help you in just about every aspect of life and business. TextFX is a collaboration between Google and Grammy award-winning rapper and record producer, Lupe Fiasco. It is an AI experiment that uses Google's PaLM 2 large language model to create ten tools designed to enhance the writing process by generating creative possibilities with text and language. I found the demo video where Lupe explains how his mind explores words when writing lyrics to be fascinating. The demo video goes on to explain how Google engineers worked with Lupe to create the tools that replicate his methods, so you can do the same.

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news and product launches from this week

Zoom is facing a backlash for quietly changing its Terms of Service in March regarding AI. The changes raise concerns about customer privacy, trust, and choice in how Zoom trains their LLM based on the content of users' video calls.

AI is helping airlines mitigate the climate impact of contrails

The White House's “AI Cyber Challenge” aims to crowdsource national security solutions with $20 million in prize money. The winning systems will be able to analyze and correct vulnerable code in critical infrastructure.

Google and Universal Music are negotiating a deal to create a tool that allows fans to legally generate tracks using AI that mimics the voices of artists.

Salesforce announced Einstein Studio which lets you bring your own model to your Salesforce data cloud.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has avoided discussing AI over the past six months. However, in an interview with Reuters this week, he said that Apple has been “doing research across a wide range of AI technologies, including generative AI, for years.” Cool. Cool. When is Siri going to be actually useful?

Similarly, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, has stated that "every single" Amazon team is working on generative AI. It is unclear what the depth of this work actually is or if it is just buzzwords that every CEO of a public company has to say.

The CEO of Anthropic, an AI safety and research company based in San Francisco, said in a recent interview that human level AI is only two to three years away.

WHAT I'M READING

If you only read one thing this week let it be this.

Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical by Emily Bender

"In two recent conversations with very thoughtful journalists, I was asked about the apparent ‘schism’ between those making a lot of noise about fears inspired by fantasies of all-powerful ‘AIs’ going rogue and destroying humanity, and those seeking to illuminate and address actual harms being done in the name of ‘AI’ now and the risks that we see following from increased use of this kind of automation. Commentators framing these positions as some kind of a debate or dialectic refer to the former as ‘AI Safety’ and the latter as ‘AI ethics’. In both of those conversations, I objected strongly to the framing and tried to explain how it was ahistorical. I want to try to reproduce those comments in blog form here..." MEDIUM

Until next week!

-✌🏻 Tyler

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