We’ve been talking a lot about ChatGPT, both its use cases and its shortcomings in our previous series on ChatGPT. Of all of the AI tools, it’s probably the most well-known mainstream application of AI. There are a plethora of other new tools on the market for small businesses ranging from creators to service firms. As of this writing, a number of these tools also offer a free tier.
We’ve been talking a lot about ChatGPT, both its use cases and its shortcomings in our previous series on ChatGPT (at work, for productivity, for moms). Of all of the AI tools, it’s probably the most well-known mainstream application of AI. There are a plethora of other new tools on the market for small businesses ranging from creators to service firms. As of this writing, a number of these tools also offer a free tier.
Jasper AI sits at the top of our list of AI tools because of how frequently we leverage the software for our content writing. Jasper AI brands itself as an AI marketing co-pilot to improve the speed and performance of content creation for enterprise teams. We use leverage Jasper from creating outlines, doing research, and drafting initial versions of our written content across blog articles, Instagram and Facebook posts.
Competitive Edge: The ability to write in a brand voice, the built-in plagiarism check, and excellent templates with step-by-step interactive guide for content creation. With both a chat function and Chrome extension, Jasper AI makes it easier to bring it everywhere.
Pricing: Unfortunately, Jasper AI is relatively expensive for creators (at $39 per month per seat) and doesn’t have a free tier.
Tome AI launched its AI co-pilot for creating presentations in September of 2022. Before that it was already helping millions making sleek presentations. Similar to Jasper AI, Tome AI provides an easy step-by-step process to create presentations from text outlines. With its suite of templates, software integrations, and customization features, Tome provides a suite of tools for creating presentations.
Competitive Edge: A complete platform for creating presentations, proposals, or any customer facing visual content. Even without its AI features, Tome stands out with its sleek templates and stylings. At its core, its elevated design is its competitive edge.
Pricing: Tome starts out with a free tier and has a creator tier for $16 per month.
Descript AI was in on AI before it was cool. Dating back to 2018, Descript had been a platform launching AI features and even raised a round of funding from OpenAI back in 20221. Descript is an all-in-one platform for making and editing video and audio content. Descript’s AI features include creating an AI voice for video and various editing features such as eliminating background noise, changing backdrops, and editing out audios based on text.
Competitive Edge: Its all-in-one platform for video and audio editing makes it a one stop solution for creators. Alternatives tend to focus on either video or audio editing. Further, its text based editing feature is also different than most of the typical video editing solutions.
Pricing: Descript starts out with a free tier and has a creator tier of $12 per month.
ElevenLabs is new to the AI scene and was founded in 2022. The use case for ElevenLabs feels particularly narrow because its focus is on creating AI voiceover for video content. However, its voiceover is superior to other out of the box solutions. Beyond that is their focus is on multi-lingual translation.
Competitive Edge: It is one of the few generative voice AI software that supports multiple languages. ElevenLab’s voiceover also sounds more natural than other solutions. However, given its narrow scope, even with a superior product, it would need more integrations with other software.
Pricing: A free forever tier and its first priced tier is $5 per month (with first month for $1).
GitHub Copilot for programmers has probably been the most impactful use case of AI to date. Most entrepreneurs will likely not be writing code with GitHub Copilot, but we’ve included it here as a showcase of how impactful AI tools are and widely adopted when they’re integrated natively into users workflows. With over 1 million paying users2 and an estimated half of code being created by AI3, its listed here because of its impact as probably the most successful AI tool.
Competitive Edge: It’s built into Github where all software developers already live, and it’s free for students. There’s nothing quite like making something free and integrated into existing workflows.
Pricing: Starts at $10 per month. Free for students, teachers, and contributors to open source software.
AI is not here to replace humans but to be our copilot in our day to day activities. Instead of hiring for help we can’t afford, we can make client presentations, write papers, and perform our day to day activities with the help of an affordable AI assistant. What used to require teams can now be done solo, freeing up time for entrepreneurs to do more of what they love at lower costs. Adopting AI tools today will allow small businesses to operate with the capacity of a big organization.
2 https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-has-over-a-million-paying-github-copilot-users-ceo-nadella/
3 https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-ai-rewiring-coders-brains-github-copilot/
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