M13’s RECOMMENDATIONS FOR

AI audio generators

Audio creation was one of the first early mediums where generative AI really took off on, especially in the text-to-audio space. Generative models are particularly adept at synthesizing spoken audio in a variety of different voices, accents, and registers. Recently, full music creation and generation has been improving in leaps and bounds. This could be a space to watch if audio, voice or music is important to your product.

Updated 5/21/24 by MARY & ROB


Maturity: ●●●●● Full Workflow Replacement

Startup Impact: ●●●●○ High

  • Significantly cheaper to create voiceovers as single output or en masse

  • Multi-language products are now easier than ever to achieve

  • Custom audio/sound is attainable at a much earlier startup phase than ever

Areas of Improvement:

  • Genuine fear that AI can stifle creativity and innovation as artists are disincentivized to create new work that will just be sucked into AI models

  • Legal issues abound in the space and concerns exist around intellectual property, alongside privacy concerns about the training data supporting these models

🔥 Trending Tools:

Descript

Best for creating and editing voiceovers, podcasts, and audio content with advanced text-to-speech and audio editing capabilities.

  • Descript stands out for its powerful AI-driven transcription and voice synthesis features, making it significantly cheaper and easier to create high-quality voiceovers and audio content. Its user-friendly interface and robust editing tools allow for seamless multilanguage production and custom audio creation, making it ideal for startups and content creators looking to produce professional audio content quickly and affordably.

Lovo AI

Best for generating realistic voiceovers in multiple languages for videos, advertisements, and other audio content.

  • Lovo excels in providing high-quality text-to-speech synthesis with a wide range of voices and accents. Its cost-effective solution makes it easy to produce voiceovers, while its multilanguage support allows for global reach. The ability to create custom voices further enhances its appeal, making professional-grade audio content accessible to startups and small businesses.

AIVA

Best for AI-generated music composition and soundtracks for various media, including films, games, and commercials.

  • AIVA is a powerful tool for creating custom music compositions with AI, significantly reducing the cost and time associated with traditional music production. Its capability to generate music in multiple genres and styles, along with the option to customize compositions, makes it a valuable resource for startups and creative professionals looking to enhance their projects with original soundtracks.

There has never been a better time to set up a sophisticated eCommerce platform than today. The AI tools available to today's online retail brands are mature, impactful and very cost effective. Every part of your eComm tech stack can be at least partially automated and even supercharged by a number of AI tools. We've grouped them together into a single category, but many of these tools can be used in conjunction with one another, rather than picking one.

AI eComm tools

Updated 7/25/24 by ROB, MARY & AMELIA


Maturity: ●●●●○ Partial Workflow Replacement

Startup Impact: ●●●●● High

  • If done right, can have huge impact on bottom line sales.

  • Most of these tools are mature enough to plug and play with little effort.

  • Can potentially make your site just as advanced as the bigger companies.

Areas of Improvement:

  • Some of the tools are powered by early stage startups, which means they can be more volatile

🔥 Our top picks:

Rebuy

Best for eComm businesses looking to increase AOV with AI-driven personalized shopping experiences.

  • Rebuy stands out for its ability to offer personalized product recommendations, smart upsells, and cross-sells, helping to increase eComm sales. It integrates seamlessly with various eComm platforms, providing real-time data analysis for relevant product suggestions. The user-friendly interface and powerful customization options make it a valuable tool for optimizing sales strategies.

Pietra

Best for new and established brands looking to launch, manage, and streamline their eComm operations.

  • Pietra provides an all-in-one platform for creators to build and scale their eComm brands, offering tools for product sourcing, manufacturing, and fulfillment. Pietra's support for various business operations—from design to logistics—makes it an excellent choice for new and established brands aiming to streamline their eCommerce processes and expand their market reach.

Big Sur

Best for eComm businesses seeking to replicate the in-store sales experience for their online consumers.

  • Big Sur AI helps brands convert website browsers into paying customers with their AI sales agent. This agent seamlessly integrates with websites, assisting customers in finding the right products based on their needs. Ideal for brands looking to test hyper-personalized shopping experiences, Big Sur AI offers an easy-to-implement solution for boosting conversions.

Agentio

Best for leading advertisers in consumer products and enterprise software looking to simplify and scale creator-led advertising on YouTube.

  • Agentio offers a dedicated ad platform for creator-led sponsored content ad reads on YouTube, making it an excellent choice for those scaling this function. The platform's user experience mirrors traditional social ad buying processes, and its matchmaking solutions, focused on measurement and performance indicators, make it a strong choice for brands investing in creator partnerships.

Nectar AI

Best for social-first, eComm brands looking for a community engagement revenue driver, genAI marketing automation & CX conversations platform.

  • Nectar AI is a powerful tool for D2C and e-Comm brands, streamlining multiple functions into a single AI Social CRM for messaging, UGC, and outbound marketing DMs. Their copilot helps social marketing and CX teams stay lean while responding to more customers and influencers, ultimately driving $$$ revenue via marketing DMs. Nectar AI stands out in personalization tech, offering identity mapping from social to commerce profiles and a proprietary commerce-focused LLM that brands can deploy across all customer interaction points. This will be a game changer for brands, especially as they prep for promo season.

Image generation AIs have been making waves, quickly generating just about any graphic you can describe in seconds. Taking what was an incredibly time-consuming, human-powered effort and turning into an easy-to-use tool has many pros, but also some cons. Current solutions are highly usable in cases where multiple variations of images need to be generated within a limited budget & time. These tools have the potential to be very impactful in marketing and product depts.

AI image generators

Updated 5/21/24 by MARY & ROB


Maturity: ●●●●○ Partial Workflow Replacement

Startup Impact: ●●●●○ High

  • Can be super high-impact in performance marketing and product, where budget and time have previously been limitations

  • Allows marketers to create images on demand without the need to go to an artist

Areas of Improvement:

  • AI-generated images can tend to look noticably "AI-generated" to a savvy eye

  • Hallucinations and errors in output are still very common

  • Legal issues abound in the space and concerns exist around intellectual property, alongside privacy concerns about the training data supporting these models

🔥 Our top picks:

Midjourney

Best for interpreting prompts in a highly artistic manner, especially in creating surreal digital landscapes and abstract art pieces.

  • Midjourney has established itself as a prominent player in the space, gaining recognition for its unique approach to interpreting prompts in a highly artistic manner. We found the output quality to be slightly superior to competitors, and its robust feature set makes it a valuable tool for designers and artists.

DALL-E by OpenAi

Best for generating images from textual descriptions.

  • DALL-E has garnered widespread attention, establishing itself as a serious contender in the space. We find that while its output quality is in line with competitors, its ease of use surpasses others in the market. Being an OpenAI product, it integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, particularly for those already familiar with ChatGPT.

Leonardo Ai

Best for helping designers streamline workflows for greater efficiency.

  • Leonardo.Ai has emerged as a mature solution in the AI art creation landscape, especially for designers seeking a Midjourney alternative. Its intuitive interface and advanced capabilities enhance efficiency and creativity, making it a trusted companion for designers looking to produce high-quality artwork with ease.

AI image editors & modifiers

Kate Middleton made headlines for using AI to retouch and edit images of her and her family—but these tools have use in startups as well. They can greatly reduce the time and money needed to make image edits. The real power of these platforms is democratization, allowing relatively unartistic people to make needed changes to existing photos and visual content directly. It's usually no more complicated than drawing an outline a user wants edited and writing a quick prompt. Some of these workflows are finding their way into mainstream tools as well, showing promise for the space to impact professionals as well.

Updated 5/21/24 by MARY & ROB


Maturity: ●●●●○ Partial Workflow Replacement

Startup Impact: ●●●○○ Medium

  • Can edit large numbers of photos quickly and cost effectively

  • Quality is generally good, but hallucinations and mistakes are common

  • Enables smaller teams to function like much larger ones at lower cost

Areas of Improvement:

  • Hallucinations are common

  • It takes a decent amount of practice to get the output to the high level needed

  • These tools can give a user skill, but not taste—meaning creative/artistic direction is still required

🔥 Our top picks:

Adobe Photoshop

Best for professional photographers, graphic designers, and digital artists seeking professional-level image editing with a comprehensive suite of advanced tools and features.

  • Adobe Photoshop is the OG of the image editing world, offering unparalleled control and precision for detailed retouching and manipulation. Its already extensive toolkit has become even more robust with the addition of new AI features, like generative fill and background swapping. As the most powerful tool on the market, it’s no surprise Photoshop continues to lead the way with its innovative AI capabilities.

Luminar Neo

Best for amateurs and professionals looking for a user-friendly yet powerful editing software with AI-powered photo editing and enhancements.

  • Luminar Neo stands out with its AI-driven features that simplify complex editing tasks, such as sky replacement, portrait enhancement, and scene relighting. It's perfect for those who are new to photo editing, as it combines ease of use with its powerful capabilities, making it ideal for achieving professional results quickly. Plus, it integrates with Photoshop and Lightroom, making it an excellent addition to existing workflows.

Lensa

Best for casual users and social media enthusiasts who want quick and easy mobile photo editing with a focus on enhancing selfies and portraits.

  • Lensa is perfect for those who want to enhance their photos effortlessly. With features like AI-powered skin retouching, background blurring, and artistic filters, it provides a seamless and enjoyable editing experience directly from a mobile device. Its focus on simplicity and efficiency makes it a favorite for social media users looking to elevate their visual content.

AI text generators

ChatGPT has obviously taken the world by storm, and most people are now aware of what is possible with text generation and AI. These tools are ready for prime time, and automating copy generation for ads, emails, instructions, descriptions, websites, packaging, and more are now only a simple prompt away.

Updated 5/21/24 by MARY & ROB


Maturity: ●●●●○ Partial Workflow Replacement

Startup Impact: ●●●●○ High

  • Cost savings with agencies, copywriters, and freelancers in this space

  • Quicker to launch advertising campaigns, websites, and other text-heavy projects

  • Fewer hires in specific areas around marketing is possible

Areas of Improvement:

  • GPT output is identifiable for some savvy viewers, requiring some manual work on the output

  • There still are errors in some summaries and facts (hallucinations) in some of these LLMs

  • Humans still needed to proofread and make minor edits

  • Legal issues abound in the space and concerns exist around intellectual property, alongside privacy concerns about the training data supporting these models

🔥 Best-in-Class:

ChatGPT

Best used for generating a range of high-quality content, including articles, blog posts, emails, marketing campaigns, and creative writing.

  • OpenAI is a well established organization known for its cutting-edge research in AI. As the category leader in the space, its natural language understanding is unmatched, making it a versatile tool for content creators and writers.

Copy.Ai

Best for SMBs crafting compelling marketing copy, slogans, ad headlines, and social media posts.

  • Copy.ai has gained significant traction in the AI content creation space and is recognized as a leading provider of marketing copy generation tools. The platform offers a robust set of features and templates for marketing professionals.

JasperAi

Best for enterprise marketing teams looking to generate personalized content for specific audiences.

  • Jasper is a promising emerging player in the AI content creation market. It offers personalized content generation features, but as a newer player, it may still be evolving and improving its capabilities.

AI video generators

Full end-to-end video creation is a little behind imagery at the moment, but advancing rapidly. This is unsurprising, as it's significantly more difficult and taxing to generate fluid video than a single image. Early attempts were simply image-based flip-book generators, but more recently, startups and more established players have been building full video models designed to create passable quality video based on prompts. The issue with these platforms has been directability and editability, but improvements are incoming.

Updated 5/21/24 by ROB & ZACH


Maturity: ●●●○○ Useful Point Solution

Startup Impact: ●●●●○ High

  • Can significantly reduce cost in single use video projects

  • Hundreds of styles, looks, and approaches can be tried before selecting a final video

  • Powerful as a storyboarding tool and in pre-production

  • Some issues in producing a consistent look and feel across a sequence of videos

Areas of Improvement:

  • Not particularly easy to edit or direct, making this content very hard to control and get "just right"

  • Genuine fear that AI can stifle creativity and innovation as artists are disincentivized to create new work that will just be sucked into AI models

  • Legal issues abound in the space and concerns exist around intellectual property, alongside privacy concerns about the training data supporting these models

🔥 Trending Tools:

Synthesisia

Best for AI-generated video content with virtual avatars and voiceovers.

  • Synthesia is a powerful tool for generating professional-quality videos featuring AI avatars. It allows users to create videos in multiple languages with customizable avatars that can speak any script provided. Synthesia is particularly useful for corporate training videos, marketing content, and educational materials, reducing the need for expensive video shoots and enabling rapid production of diverse video styles and looks. Its ease of use and high-quality output make it an excellent choice for single-use video projects and storyboarding.

Runway

Best for creative video editing and special effects.

  • Runway is designed for creative professionals who need to incorporate AI-generated effects and enhancements into their video projects. It offers a suite of tools for video editing, including green screen effects, motion tracking, and style transfer. Runway's AI capabilities allow users to experiment with various visual styles and effects, making it a powerful tool for storyboarding and pre-production. While it still faces challenges with consistency across video sequences, its innovative features make it a standout choice for creative video projects.

Pictory

Best for transforming text-based content into engaging video narratives.

  • Pictory excels at converting blog posts, articles, and scripts into captivating videos with minimal effort. It offers a wide range of styles and templates, allowing users to experiment with different looks before finalizing their videos. Pictory's automatic summarization and visual enhancement features make it an invaluable tool for content creators looking to repurpose written content into video format, significantly cutting down production time and cost.

AI video editors & modifiers

Editors, color graders, rotoscope artists, and others can spend hundreds of hours getting a shot "just right." Today, with AI-powered workflows that exist as plugins or are built right into popular video editing platform, that can be taken down to minutes or even seconds. Color grading, image stabilization, background removal, lip synching, face replacement, and other tools have been added to an AI arsenal that effectively allows a one-person team to put out near studio-quality work.

Updated 5/21/24 by MARY & ROB

Maturity: ●●●●○ Partial Workflow Replacement

Startup Impact: ●●○○○ Low

  • Significant time and cost reduction for labor-intensive tasks

  • Capabilities not achievable for small teams in the past are now within reach

  • Quality is the same and in some cases better than traditional non-AI workflows

Areas of Improvement:

  • Still requires a professional editor for most workflows

  • Efficiency gains sometimes come at the cost of control

  • Low impact for most businesses

Adobe Premiere Pro

Best for professional video editors looking to leverage advanced AI-powered features in a widely-used editing platform.

  • Adobe Premiere Pro offers powerful AI-driven features such as automated color grading, image stabilization, background removal, and intelligent scene editing. These tools significantly reduce the time and effort required for labor-intensive tasks, enabling small teams or individual editors to produce studio-quality work efficiently. The seamless integration of AI within a comprehensive editing suite makes it an ideal choice for achieving high-quality results quickly.

DaVinci Resolve

Best for video editors and colorists seeking advanced AI tools for professional-grade editing and color grading.

  • DaVinci Resolve stands out with its AI-powered features like facial recognition, object removal, auto color correction, and enhanced stabilization. These capabilities make complex editing tasks more accessible and efficient, allowing small teams to achieve results that were previously out of reach. The combination of DaVinci Resolve's industry-leading color grading tools and its AI enhancements ensures that the quality of the output is on par with, if not superior to, traditional workflows.

🔥 Trending Tools:

Opus Clip

Best for teams and enterprises looking to extract highlights from different parts of longer videos and rearrange clips into cohesive short videos.

  • While Opus Clip shares similarities in quality, features, and process with Munch, we found its UI and enhanced editing capabilities slightly more intuitive. Opus also introduces unique features absent in Munch, including team collaboration, simplified script editing, and automatic splicing of AI imagery into videos. These additional features proved to be extremely valuable and time saving, making it an optimal solution for teams and enterprises seeking efficiency and collaboration.

Munch

Best for marketers, content creators, designers and creative teams looking to repurpose long-form videos into short clips for social media.

  • Munch's automated extraction, shortening, and auto-captioning features are invaluable time-savers, making it the ideal solution for repurposing long-form videos into short clips. While Munch and Opus Clip (our runner-up) offer similar quality and capabilities, Munch distinguishes itself with its focus on marketing insights and trending analysis. It identifies keywords and prioritizes clips based on performance potential. Alongside each clip, it also auto generates social post content tailored to platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram, streamlining the entire process. Munch's intuitive UI, ease of use, and forward-thinking approach have us excited for its future as it continues to refine and expand its AI model.

Enjoying RocketGuides?

Have a burning topic you’d like us to explore? We're all ears! Share your thoughts and ideas by taking our quick, :30s survey. We’re eager to hear your feedback (good or bad!) to help us improve.

Rate M13's RocketGuides