Mikes Guides AI tools ebook.pdf
- 2. 1 Mike’s Guides How to Make Money from the AI Boom with These AI Tools (100+ Tools Explained) Mike Lawrence First edition Copyright © Mike’s Guides™ 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or distributed without the written consent of the publisher. www.mikesguides.org
- 3. 2 Disclaimer The following guide is for educational and informational purposes and is not meant to provide specific advice on which technologies you should or should not invest your time and money in. The information contained within is the most recent and up-to-date available at the time of writing, yet the author takes no responsibility for its accuracy or completeness. The author is not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned in this guide in any way, and is not responsible for the content of their websites nor the products and/or services they offer. This guide was written with the help of artificial intelligence…
- 4. 3 Contents Introduction 5 I. Text Input 6 1: Text to Text 6 1.1 Searching, Researching and Automated Communication Using Chatbots 6 1.2 Copywriting 10 1.3 Email Automation 12 1.4 Social Media Posting and Commenting 14 1.5 Text Summarizing 16 1.6 Scraping 17 1.7 SaaS and Other Format-Specific Creations 20 2. Text to Code 22 3. Text to Image 23 3.1 Static Images 23 3.2 Text to 3D 29 4. Text (Click) to Music and Music to Music 30 4.1 Music Creation 30 4.2 Music Editing 32 5. Text to Speech and Speech to Speech 33 5.1 Voice Production, Voice Modification and Voiceovers 33 5.2 Human - Machine Interaction 38 6. Text to Video 39 6.1 Short-Form Video Creation 39 6.2 Avatars 40 II. Image and Video Input 41 7. Image to Image and Image to Video/Animation 41 7.1 Image Enhancement and Manipulation 41 7.2 Image Animation 43 7.3 Avatars From Images 46 8. Video to Video 47 8.1 Video Editing 47 8.2 Real-Time Video Communication 49 9. Other SaaS Tools 50
- 5. 4 9.1 Productivity Tools 50 9.2 Creativity Tools 51 10. Connecting AI Tools 51 10.1 The Benefits and Wonders of Connectivity and Automation 51 10.2 AI-Powered Business Idea - A Full-Service PA Agency 52 10.3 A Few More Multi-App and Connection Ideas 53 III. Conclusion 55 Appendix A - Business Start-Up Template 56 Appendix B - Tools in Chronological Order 57 Appendix C - Tools in Alphabetical Order 61 Appendix D - Tools by Function 65
- 6. 5 Introduction This is how it begins. A friendly, human-sounding prompt asks you how it can help you. It sounds happy to see you, interested in your question and ready and able to give you any information you want. And that’s exactly what happens. You can type in just about any question. “Can you tell me which vitamins are fat-soluble and which vitamins are water-soluble, please?”. “Certainly!”, it replies. And out comes the answer - and it’s clear, relevant, concise and complete. In the past couple of months, I’ve asked it to conjure up information on a range of topics, from the complete code in Python for a trading bot, to summarizing the keto diet. This was my first real encounter with artificial intelligence, or AI, aside from back in 1991 when we all watched Skynet become self-aware and nuke the planet and Arnie played a muscular robot who time travels to prevent that from ever happening. Maybe I should say that chatGPT was my first close encounter, but that too sounds pretty ominous. Whatever AI might entail, chatGPT has taken the world by storm. And AI-powered applications are growing at an exponential rate. The following guide will introduce you to a range of Ai tools, most of them recently developed and released. With the help of these tools, you can improve your productivity, enhance and automate your creative projects, and accomplish a wide range of tasks, more easily, professionally and effectively, in more and more fields. The handbook is made up of the main sections that describe the input / output method. These main sections, in turn, are broken down into concrete application areas, such as video editing, copywriting or email automation. Some of these apps will include other features so they span multiple categories and, due to the breakneck speed at which this industry is evolving, other apps may have added additional features since the time of writing. I tried, however, to classify them according to their main feature to provide a clear overview. The overall aim of this guide is to show you how you can creatively employ these AI-powered applications to start an online business, grow your existing business and, ultimately, take advantage of these tools to make money. The AI boom years are here. It’s time to paint your wagon and get rolling before someone else claims your homestead. Being ahead of the curve offers lucrative opportunities analogous to the growth of today’s tech giants during the dotcom bubble. Whatever your feelings about the rise of AI may be, it’s here to stay and it can make you very good money or it can pass you by. The tips provided in this guide will help you to boost your productivity and creativity. Without further ado, let’s get right into the first section.
- 7. 6 I. Text Input 1: Text to Text 1.1 Searching, Researching and Automated Communication Using Chatbots ChatGPT from OpenAI is perhaps the most easily recognizable example of text input to text output. Text, say a question, is typed into a prompt by the user and the friendly and helpful machine spits out a complete and accurate answer in text form. It’s been said in numerous articles that chatPGT-3 was capable of passing graduate school-level examinations in the lowest ten percentile. chatGPT-4 is rumored to be able to ace any exam, even scoring in the upper ten percentile for the bar exam, for instance. Remember, this is only the beginning. The power of AI is impressive, and can, and should, be exploited by any savvy entrepreneur. One of the best things about basic chatGPT-3 is that it’s free to use. If you subscribe to a paid chatGPT-4 account, you can unleash even more power by getting more up-to-date information since chatGPT-3 can only access Internet material prior to 2021. Simply visit OpenAi’s website and in the top menu go to Products -> chatGPT. Here you can quickly set up your account and start interfacing with the machine. You can also click GPT-4 if you want to start with the paid (and more powerful) version. Here you’ll have the option to use GPT Plus, which is powered by GPT-4, to chat with the bot, or join a
- 8. 7 waitlist for the API to harness GPT-4 for use with other applications. According to OpenAI, “GPT- 4 surpasses ChatGPT in its advanced reasoning capabilities.” “Following the research path from GPT, GPT-2, and GPT-3, our deep learning approach leverages more data and more computation to create increasingly sophisticated and capable language models. We spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.” OpenAI Personally, I’m more than happy to use the low-octane, free version for the information that I want to find and publish. So let’s see how we can best utilize and monetize this technology. Seek and create. Other AI tools allow you to access different data sources than the ones chatGPT can access. You might be surprised to learn (if you didn’t know already) that GPT isn’t connected to the Internet. Instead, it was fed a number of data points from sources such as Wikipedia. For all intents and purposes, you can think of it as a very highly-educated and clever protege who’s able to give you an excellent response whenever you ask it something. But its “education” ended in September 2021, so it can’t give you any information on anything that happened after it graduated from school. If you want to ask about something more recent, say about the latest technology, political events or gossip, then you do have the option of connecting GPT-4 using a plugin available on OpenAI’s chatGPT plugin page. There are only about a dozen plugins that are currently being offered, and for now you’ll need to join the waitlist. We’ll be examining various chatGPT plugins in a later section when we look at combining and connecting AI tools. For the time being, let’s simply look at some other AI tools that allow you to expand your search capabilities. You can begin your search for information out there on the big world wide web, or you can start right at home with your own laptop or PC. Rewind is a tool for Mac (Windows release said to be out soon) that records your activity and, as it says on their website, lets you search for “anything you’ve seen, said or heard”. For some people, present company included, who thrive on chaos and whose files can sometimes look like a tornado just swept past, this tool can be quite helpful for finding that digital needle in the haystack. It also eliminates the need for copious note-taking since your computer now does it for you. Being able to search through information that already has meaning and relevance to you (and only you perhaps) is something that other AI tools, such as chatGPT, largely aren’t able to do (yet). Being able to retrace your steps and pull up those statistics from last month, that article you read about, the notes you jotted down about the next
- 9. 8 big thing in AI you want to work on, the tweet you sent, and much more is frankly amazing and can potentially boost your productivity. This tool is sure to raise privacy concerns with those who feel like you’re inviting Big Brother to come on in and make himself at home on your computer. However, the company assures users that all of the recordings are stored locally and that only you have access to them. In addition, it gives you the option to pause and delete recordings, as well as to exclude apps from being recorded. The company also promises that Rewind won’t tax your CPU while it records. Venturing back out into the virtual online jungle, a tool that claims to be the best chatGPT alternative is ChatSonic. What makes ChatSonic appealing is the fact that it’s powered by GPT-4 and it’s trained and powered by Google Search. This makes it possible to use the tool to access the very latest online content and then let the bot give you a summary like chatGPT would. I believe that plugins will soon be abundant (either on OpenAI’s own plugin page or from other companies) that will make interfacing chatGPT and Google possible and simple. Microsoft has already integrated chatGPT-4 into its Bing search engine, and tech giants, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, are currently investing gigantic sums of money into advancing AI technology. At the time of writing, however, ChatSonic is one of the top, ready-made and ready-to-go solutions. Paid plans start at the very precise figure of $12.67 a month, but you can try the app for free if you’re content to rely on GPT-3.5. Sometimes paying for convenience is better than not having to deal with APIs and plugins (which also might not be completely free to use). How to utilize a chatbot for your business and in projects A chatbot. The first idea for utilizing a chatbot is, well, a chatbot. Distinct from, although similar to, chatGPT, you can offer a bot to provide assistance to your customers and prospective clients. You’ve probably already spoken with plenty of them yourself, even if you didn’t know it. It can be a chat window in the bottom corner of a company’s website, like a bank, where you type in a question and the bot, aka Ted or Vicky, gives you a quick answer and then asks if the answer helped you. Many website building platforms such as Wordpress offer the option to integrate a chatbot directly into your hosted site from a list of chatbot providers, including Zendesk, HubSpot, Smartsupp and Gobot. Wix also lets you add a chatbot, such as Tidio, Wix Chat, or Tolstoy to
- 10. 9 your site from its app market. Both Wordpress and Wix offer a diverse range of packages and features for building websites and ecommerce platforms, depending on your needs, starting for free. Alternatively, you can build a bot and integrate into your site or app by using a company specializing in the creation and integration of bots. Some popular providers include ManyChat, which allows you to use a basic plan for free, and Dashly, which offers chatbot integration starting at $39 with a 7-day free trial at the time of writing. Other top-ranked chatbot providers include REVE chat, TARS, Yellow.ai (formerly Yellow Messenger) and Pandorabots. HubSpot’s chatbot builder is a great option that’s both easy and completely free to use. For seamless Facebook Messenger integration, there’s Customers.ai (formerly Mobilemonkey), which is currently being offered for free. I’ve included tables containing all of the resources mentioned throughout this guide, with links to their sites and current prices, at the end. Nearly all of the bot-builder sites mentioned here use a wizard to take you through the chat-flow process and build the bot step by step. Building and integrating the bot really is a cinch. And all of the platforms mentioned offer adequate and easy-to-use administrative tools and/or integrations for monitoring the conversations, managing leads and conversions and following up. As you on the customer end have probably already realized, having a chatbot as your 24/7 customer service agent makes any website more comfortable and user-friendly. Now if you want to take this idea a step further, then keep reading, because in the next section I’m going to tell you how you can build an entire website around this technology and monetize it even more. Extrawurst - A Chatbot-Powered Service Offering. I like the term Extrawurst, a popular term in German-speaking countries which literally translates as “extra sausage”, but which more or less means “that extra something”. The extra something I’m going to show you now is how you can use GPT technology to build an entire website that caters to a specific audience by offering information and advice on a particular topic. Let me give you one example. Suppose you are a person who dreams a lot. And let’s assume that you have dreams that frequently repeat, perhaps are unsettling to you and you want to know if maybe there’s a message hidden in your dreams. You could write your dreams down and take your dream diary to a psychologist, who can help you decipher your dreams. Or you can visit a site, such as Dream Interpreter AI, which uses a chatbot to source a dream database and provide an interpretation of your last dream, which you enter into the text prompt. You get a similar (or perhaps even superior) psychological counseling session from the comfort of your home or wherever you may be and at a fraction of the cost. Everyone knows that psychologists don’t come cheap, so if you create a site that does the same job as a psychologist but, as in the case of Dream Interpreter AI, is completely free to use, you can be sure it will spark people’s interest and get a good amount of traffic if it’s well advertised. Naturally you’ll need to promote your site and make people aware of your great service. Here once again, you can use free website builders, such as Wordpress or Wix, to get started and build a basic, attractive and friendly user-interface (UI) and then grow and pay as you go. You can then integrate the soon-to-be-available GPT-4 API into your site to provide the service. A similar such site that I encountered which offers legal advice is DoNotPay. This site requires users to register and is a paid service, but offers a free trial. You can select an issue that you’re currently facing from a category and then provide further
- 11. 10 details. Naturally, being a disruptive technology, this technology comes with its teams of proponents and opponents who are ready to battle it out when it comes to usefulness and ethical considerations. No disruptive technology has ever been immediately embraced by all of humankind and probably never will be. But its profit potential is unquestionable. While some will flock to new breakthroughs, others will be more hesitant and it will take time before more and more people finally get on board. Offering any number of counseling services with the help of AI integration is an ingenious way to earn massive amounts of money, especially if you are ahead of the pack. DoNotPay has actually been around since 2014, so it’s got this niche pretty well spoken for. However, there are countless other fields that are just waiting for such a service, and by putting on your creative hat, you will discover which road to pursue now that you’ve got the seed of a great business idea already planted. There are numerous niche markets and lots of people willing to use your service for free or for a fee. For pet lovers, you can consider behavioral feedback and counseling for pets. For people on a diet, there’s nutritional counseling. For DIYers, you can put Bob out of business by offering a handyman robot. The possibilities are truly endless. 1.2 Copywriting First of all, let’s be clear about one thing. Copywriting does not include the copying, slight modification and reposting, republishing or resale of somebody else’s work. That’s not copywriting, it’s just plain copying and blatant and disrespectful plagiarism. By contrast, what is meant here is the AI-supported generation of a text based on short prompts. For example, you or a company you do advertising for has developed a new product and they want a catchy catchphrase and some powerful marketing texts to include in a brochure. AI tools, such as Copy
- 12. 11 AI, Jasper AI, Rytr, or Notion AI will all do the job nicely. All are browser-based tools, however, each one differs slightly in its UI, workflow and pricing. Essentially these tools are quite similar to each other and a quick look at their homepage will tell you if they are better suited for copy ads or blog posts or other text styles, although each one claims to be your one-stop shop for all texts. Copywriters are a talented bunch and, as such, they don’t come cheap. By outsourcing your copywriting needs to one of these platforms, you can potentially save some serious money. Conversely, by offering copywriting as a service, you can piggyback these sites and offer a tremendously high throughput and make a real killing. If you don’t already own a copywriting business, but would like to offer this service as a side hustle, there are platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, where you can post offers for copywriting. If you’re wondering why people and companies don’t simply use these AI tools themselves and save lots of money, the answer is simple. First, they don’t yet know about the availability and ease of these tools. Second, they prefer to have the job done by a person with knowledge, skills, and expertise. Even if they are aware of the existence of AI, it may still be a vague possibility to them with no real ability to create meaningful content. Extrawurst. Paraphrasing and Refining Tools. Let’s assume that, despite all of your precise input into a particular copywriting tool, you aren’t really satisfied with the results that the machine produced. You find some of the formulations awkward or clumsy or simply lacking that certain zing. Well, there are also tools available here that will help you paraphrase and refine your texts. One such tool is Quillbot, a browser-based, AI-powered paraphrasing tool for copying and pasting text snippets. Prior to clicking the Rewrite button, you can specify the tone of the output text. If your input text sounds too formal to your ears and you want to generate a text that’s less stiff, or vice versa, this tool does a very good job of aligning the output with your expectations. Another such tool is Wordtune, a free Chrome extension for clicking and inserting paraphrased sentences into any text, including emails, currently open in the browser. Here it should be emphasized even more strongly that the rewriting and publishing of other people’s words using any such AI tool is not only an unethical practice, but it might potentially land you in legal hot water. However, if used for its intended purpose, namely to give your text the right style and phrasing that it merits, then these tools can help to boost your copywriting projects and business and help you to stand out head and shoulders above the competition. A business idea that lets you capitalize on this technology, although it’s more difficult to scale since a bit of manual processing is most probably required, is to offer proofreading services to
- 13. 12 academics and students. If you advertise in local newspapers, online ad sites or university journals, you are certain to get positive responses. You’ll most probably need to subscribe to a paid service if you’re going to be entering large amounts of text to process, but then simply let the AI do the heavy lifting for you. All you need to do is collect the files to be processed, enter them into the machine (this might require scanning printed material into digital form), carry out a post- edit review of the finished product and deliver the work back to the customer. Of course, if you can develop a system which automates and connects all of these individual steps from start to finish, then you’ll be full AI and the sky’s the limit since you can scale the business. One such model might include setting up your ecommerce website with a landing page to describe your services, a file upload feature, a bot that counts the amount of words to be processed and, depending on other factors such as turnaround time, provides a quote. Then you need to include a payment gateway and a chatbot and/or automated email integration for communicating with the customer. Finally, the finished product can be made available as a download on the website or sent as an email attachment after you’ve checked it over (in other words, performed the only manual task required). I’m not aware of any ready-made systems currently on the market that can do all of this together. But the good news is that many, if not all, of the apps involved in the workflow, such as Square or PayPal for getting paid, can be connected using so-called zaps on Zapier, regardless of whether or not they’re AI-powered. 1.3 Email Automation The very first time I came across the name chatGPT was in the headline of an article in Google News about a company’s CEO who admitted to using chatGPT for answering his emails and who, apparently, couldn’t imagine life any more without this tool. Since then, I’ve also become a huge fan of employing tools in Gmail to assist me with answering my emails, although I’m frankly not as emotionally overwhelmed as that CEO and can still imagine life the old-fashioned way and penning my own mails. Needless to say, having this technology at one’s disposal is a huge time saver and productivity booster. Such email tools provide anything from complete responses to text snippets that you can click on and insert into your email. The AI here gradually picks up your style of writing and so mimics your personal style. All you need to do is visit the Google Chrome web store and select one of the many AI extensions for Gmail. Some of these Gmail extensions help the robot along by letting you select the tone you wish to employ at the outset of your response. The do-it-all hands-down winner in this category is, in my opinion, Compose AI. It’s a feature-rich and free extension that you can easily integrate
- 14. 13 into Gmail. A similar add-on is Text Blaze, which is free to use and can insert a saved text snippet as a template into any open text, be it an email or a chat window. There are quite a few other extensions currently available and some of the ones which I’ve tested and I approve of include Open AI ChatGPT for Gmail, and ChatGPT Writer. Another Chrome extension which has earned a high rating among users is EzMail.AI. A great thing about this Gmail add-on is that it’s also free. As the names of some of these plug-ins suggest, they are powered by the OpenAI GPT-3 engine and some, like ChatGPT for Gmail and ChatGPT Writer, require you to register since they’re paid services. For iPhone and Mac users, you can try Briskine, which is free to use and seamlessly integrates into Safari, providing templates to insert into your Gmail emails. Even if you opt for a paid extension, they are all fairly inexpensive and well worth the cost. After all, time is money. The time you save writing lots of redundant emails can be better invested in more lucrative ventures, thus indirectly making you money. Here, the actual money you make by saving time and focusing your attention elsewhere is somewhat harder to quantify, but it’s nevertheless real. And your email recipients will be none the wiser. I’ve yet to discover an extension that can automatically and appropriately reply to emails the way that a standard autoresponder does, but in a manner that customizes the answer based on stored inputs. However, I’m sure that at the current development pace, this option will also be available in the near future, either as a standalone app or by interfacing your email app with an AI-powered app using a connector such as Zapier. Then you’ll really be able to put your email account 100% on autopilot. Now that you’ve produced text that’s worthwhile for others to see and read, what are you going to do with it? Will you sell it as ad copy? Will you send it to a publisher or a magazine for publication? Will you use it for your column? Will you incorporate it into your automated email campaigns? Or do you perhaps intend to post it in a blog or on social media (in addition to any of these options)? Well, as you’ve probably guessed by now, there are a number of tools to help with that, too. Before we move on to the next section, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that the same AI technology which offers support for emailing is also available for answering your Whatsapp messages. Some apps that automatically respond to Whatsapp messages are Autoresponder.ai and Schmooz. As the latter site says, you can sign up and just start schmoozing.
- 15. 14 1.4 Social Media Posting and Commenting As everyone knows, social media is big business. It’s become the lifeblood of our existence. Enterprises that can harness its power have the potential to earn huge bucks. Giants like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. The slew of newer and up-and coming social media platforms like Mastodon, or companies that are able to offer complementary apps and services, such as getting likes on FB, are also in a position to turn a nice profit. I recently read that YouTube alone has over 2 billion active users. Even if many of these apps offer their basic services for free, there are still numerous ways to monetize the enormous amount of traffic they receive. Monetizing web traffic is a fascinating and multifaceted topic, and it’s the subject of another one of my guides. I’m only going to touch briefly here upon some ways to utilize AI tools to boost your social media following through automated posting and commenting with the ultimate goal in mind of profiting from more traffic. Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay Having a strong social media presence means building a large following of visitors and subscribers. This is a lot easier to do if you’re already famous. But if you don’t happen to be Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift, you’ll need to put some elbow grease into it. People will only follow you if you regularly provide them with content that is useful and/or entertaining. Once your content, your account and, ultimately, you, become noticed and trendy, people will begin to gravitate towards you at an increasing rate. There’s a lot of inertia to be overcome when growing your fan base. In a video about growing your YouTube account, one of its top influencers said that you shouldn’t expect too much to happen for your first one hundred videos. You may not see a large growth in subscribers as you go from one video to the next. It takes time and energy to build a loyal following. But the key, according to him, is to make each video a little better than the previous one. This includes such things as giving it a better title, better editing, a more engaging presentation, more interesting content and so forth. By doing so, you grow your channel or page organically. The same organic growth pattern applies to your Twitter, Facebook and blog posts. As mentioned earlier, there are many AI tools, such as chatGPT and those mentioned in the section on copywriting, that can be used to create text from prompts. There are also quite a few AI tools
- 16. 15 specifically geared towards social media. Using a tool like Postwise can help you out by adding content to your ideas. Here you need to come up with the topics that you’re going to write about yourself since this app doesn’t do it for you. However, you won’t be surprised to learn that there are other tools available, such as the Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator, that can spurn your imagination and provide you with impulses on topics to write about. If you’ve got lengthier blog posts that you want to summarize into a short FB post or a tweet, then Tweetify It can do that for you. If you want to go with what’s currently trending on social media, you can use a tool like ViralViews to discover and track what’s creating a stir across the social media landscape. The key for normal mortals wanting to grow on social media is to grow organically, systematically and consistently. The natural time that this takes can be greatly shortened thanks to AI-powered tools. I don’t recommend taking shortcuts, such as paying to advertise your page with services such as AdWords or people who claim to add subscribers to your profile. While you might receive a good amount of traffic at first by using AdWords, the people who land on your site generally leave within seconds, giving your site a high bounce rate, which can then hurt your standing in the algorithms used to rank your page or video. Equally damaging can be all of the fake accounts sent your way by your Fiverr pal that are now subscribed to your page or channel. Fiverr is a great marketplace for finding good and affordable support for projects. However, from my own experience, anyone claiming that they can “add 5,000 followers” should best be glanced over. It’s more effective to use tools such as the ones mentioned here that use AI to generate ideas, discover and track trends, help you write engaging posts and schedule where and when to display your posts, and all-in-all provide a huge amount of support for growing your social media accounts. Once you’ve reached the level of a social media influencer thanks to your constant flow of engaging content, there are many incredible ways to make money from all of the eyeballs that you’ve now got on you. Commenting is also a way to attract followers by signaling your interest in various topics, discussions and other people in general. You increase your presence simply by showing that you’re on board. Conversely, replying to comments posted to your account shows that you care about the people who care about you. Growing your account means managing it effectively at the same time and there are quite a few enterprise-grade solutions available, such as Hootsuite, that cover everything from start to finish. They offer a whole array of features for posting on all of the major platforms and managing your social media presence, including collaboration tools, analytics and lead management. Due to the abundance of tools and features available, it’s impossible to go into detail here, but some of the most popular social management tools worth mentioning are SocialPilot, Mention, and Sprout Social. If you prefer not to have a big, clunky, do-it-all tool, but rather a smaller tool for managing a more specific task or group of tasks, there are plenty of these as well. One example is Sudota, which lets you scrape and download all of the comments you
- 17. 16 receive across all of your social profiles to a single Google Sheet for giving your approval or commenting back. Whatever you intend to do to grow your account and however you plan to do it, there’s an AI tool (or 100 tools) that can help you do it. Many of them are free for utilizing the basic features or for low-volume use and most of them offer free trials, so it pays to try them out and shop around for the best one to suit your needs. A list containing the tools mentioned in this section, as well as other AI tool sites, is included at the end. 1.5 Text Summarizing I remember back in my high school days that writing book reports was the bane of my existence. I guess I was like any other high schooler in America. I mean, come on, let’s face it. In between basketball practice, math club meetings, community service, piano lessons, weekly chores, test preparation, running a side hustle, not to mention spending the majority of your waking hours in the classroom, who really has time to read all that stuff? Fortunately, we had Cliff Notes. WIth all due respect to the good folks at Cliff Notes (and they do deserve our deepest respect and gratitude), nowadays getting a summary of that 1950’s bestseller is even much easier and cheaper. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got absolutely nothing against reading. On the contrary, I’m an avid reader myself, and someone who savors the idea of sitting down with a good classic novel or a thriller. I find a great work of fiction to be both uplifting and enriching, an activity that expands the mind and arouses the human spirit. That is, provided you’ve got the time for it. High school students today are even luckier to have AI at their side to get that book report downloaded, copied, pasted, and printed in about the same time than it takes to post to Instagram. Unfortunately, if the assignment needs to be turned in in your own handwriting, then you’ll need the help of another AI-powered tool and a bit more elbow grease. High school nostalgia aside, there are many AI tools available that can boil longer texts down to the main ideas and summarize entire books into a few short snippets for whatever purpose. This may not even require any input aside from entering some basic information into a prompt. chatGPT can provide summaries on a vast amount of material, including both fiction and non- fiction. Just ask it for a summary of the book or topic you’re interested in by typing it into the prompt and out comes the summary. Similarly, Genei is a tool that touts the ability to “automatically summarize background reading and produce blogs, articles, and reports faster”. During the 14-day free trial you can test how well Genei delivers on its promise to help you organize and store material with its folders, and linking and referencing features. That’s fine if you want to research and summarize material that’s online and readily-available. But what about summarizing other material, for instance that’s stored locally on your computer? Genei also lets you upload and process documents in PDF format. Slightly eclipsing Genei thanks to its built-in AI-powered text reader is Upword. AI text to speech is an amazing technology, which we’re going to take a closer look at a little later on. With the 7-day trial that Upwork offers you can assess if it’s worth paying nearly double for this additional feature, since Upword currently costs $12.50 a month for an annual subscription and Genei costs roughly $6.25. Whichever one you might choose, both are powerful, versatile and useful tools, and both are available as Chrome extensions.
- 18. 17 There’s no need to spend a penny if all you need are quick summaries of content that you can conjure up with just a single click. Merlin is a Chrome extension that performs such wizardry for you. With Merlin, you can use GPT's capabilities to scrape and summarize information from any website for free. Once installed from the Chrome web store, all you need to do is mark whatever content you want summarized, whether text or video, press Cmd + M (Mac) or Ctrl + M (WIndows), and chatGPT will present you a compact summary in its hallmark conversational style. Paid plans starting from $19 a month are also offered, which enhance the functionality of the app as opposed to adding more features. The free plan contains nearly the same features as the paid subscriptions. Quillbot, the paraphrasing tool I mentioned earlier, also offers a more lightweight tool capable of summarizing uploaded documents in your browser. It also lets you choose if you want the output to be in bullet points or short text blocks and you can also control the output length. Having nearly the same UI as Quillbot, Summarizer does exactly what it says and, like Quillbot, allows you to specify the output type and length. All three of these summarizers are handy tools to have in your browser, and that can save you an enormous amount of time. Summarizing is a double-edged sword that can not only provide a fast-lane to getting together the main ideas of a book or an article, but by doing so, it can also help you to expand your knowledge. If you don’t want to always have to rely on Google and its new vanquisher, chatGPT, for information, then with this learning aid you’ll be able to absorb more key information across a range of fields than would have otherwise been possible if you had to read through all of the content. Simply filter out the important points and move on. Although there are not many opportunities to monetize summaries per se, aside from maybe getting a pay raise from your boss for being a great PA, these tools allow you to increase your productivity while saving time, thus putting you in a better position to make money. Here is where too well-known axioms, namely that time is money and knowledge is power, intersect. 1.6 Scraping If you already have your sights on a few sites that you want to actively monitor, say for the latest press release, product update, new product launch, job listings and so forth, all you need to do is keep checking their website on a weekly, daily or minute-by-minute basis. That probably doesn’t sound like it’s very efficient or fun. I agree. So instead of going through that hassle, you can create a robot using Browse AI and let the robot monitor the sites for you. Browse AI is a data extraction and monitoring tool that presents the results in a spreadsheet, such as Google Sheets. The site offers pre-built robots for many use cases and the ability to train your own robot in no time (2
- 19. 18 minutes according to the site). Here are some of the use cases for data you can extract that are mentioned on the site: ● properties from Realtor.com and Redfin ● realtors from Realtor.com ● job listings from LinkedIn, Indeed US, Monster.com and GlassDoor ● products from ProductHunt and Amazon US ● Hotel reviews from Hotels.com ● sellers and services from Fiverr ● online events from Eventbrite ● plugins on Wordpress ● apps list from Zapier ● Google search results ● apps list from Google Workspace ● posts from Reddit search Practically anything can be extracted from the Internet and put into a spreadsheet using this tool. The benefit of having such a tool that creates lists which auto update is sufficiently clear. And the ability to create a robot for any site means that the only thing limiting your search capability is your own imagination and the site says that the company is adding prebuilt robots every week for common use cases. What’s more, the tool also solves captchas and sidesteps scrolling and pagination and can even scrape data from sites that require the user to log in. Not too bad, depending on your point of view, of course. There’s a free plan that gives you a single robot with once daily monitoring checks and a small number of credits (currently 50), which is fine for trying it out. Paid plans start at $19 a month and really supercharge your monitoring capabilities. There are some other great use cases for scraping tools such as Browse AI that I’d also like to look at. It’s no secret that virtually every business faces competition in some form or another. Part of being competitive in business involves keeping an eye on the competition. As a small business owner or a staff member entrusted with this task, you can use this tool to do just that. Browse AI allows you to monitor your competitors’ sites in order to, for instance, see which products and services they’ve launched, what announcements they’ve made recently, and try to anticipate their next move. What’s more, the bot also lets you cast the net wide and monitor their presence on other sites, as well, such as marketplaces and social media. By nature, every business needs to sell a product or service in order to thrive and survive. Accomplishing this task oftentimes requires generating new leads. Scraping offers an effective and efficient means of lead generation. Browse AI allows you to automatically extract email addresses from a range of sites, such as online directories and marketplaces and put them in a spreadsheet. And it isn’t the only AI tool available for scraping email addresses, not by far. I’m going to just mention a few others here. The first one is IGLeads. This AI tool works with chatGPT to search for and extract email addresses and phone numbers using hashtags (#) to comb through social media platforms. In
- 20. 19 other words, IGLeads provides the GUI and is the connection to chatGPT, the engine that searches. A bit unlike Browse AI, IGLeads only scrapes sites that are publicly-accessible and cannot access sites for which a login is required. Also, the results for your requests are generally not delivered within seconds or minutes after submission, but may take hours (up to a maximum of 6 hours according to the site). The bot itself is very willing and happy to assist you since, if you’re familiar with chatGPT, that’s the bot’s casual and friendly “personality”. Customer support is also offered for those in need of some extra help in finding good search prompts. Entering effective search prompts is a bit of an art and a science in itself, which is why it pays to watch some videos on YouTube about chatGPT prompt engineering. If you visit YouTube and search for “chatGPT” prompts” or “chatGPT prompt engineering”, you’ll find quite a few videos to help you on your way. Knowing how to enter relevant and effective prompts will serve you well in your interactions with chatGPT, whatever the pursuit. A subscription to IGLeads starts at $49 a month and you need to be accepted by the company. It appears to be well worth what it costs since, at the time of writing, they have earned a score of 4.5 out of 5 on Trustpilot. Other possibilities currently on offer depend mostly on what sort of GUI you prefer and the means to export the data. If you’re comfortable using an API, then one product you can take a look at is ScraperAPI. I wouldn’t recommend this site to anyone who isn’t a programmer since it can seem like Greek, and by that I mean the website, never mind the API itself. But for the developers among us, you can get started for $49 a month. For those of us who prefer the user-friendly browser approach, another tool is Bright Data. Bright Data even makes it easier for users by offering templates for various scraping tasks. They also offer a Javascript web scraper IDE for those who prefer to build their own web scraper. Free trials are offered for both options and paid plans start at $500 a month for an annual subscription. Obviously, if you choose a paid plan, then you’d better have some serious scraping planned with this tool, and a good reason to choose it over the other, much lower-priced scrapers. One last web scraper that I’d like to mention is ScrapeStorm. It offers users an easy-to-use visual experience and requires that the program be downloaded and installed locally (as opposed to simply using your browser). There’s a free trial and paid plans start at $49.99, which seems to be the average starting price as far as I’ve been able to see.
- 21. 20 Admittedly, the response rate for blind email blasts is quite low and the bounce rate correspondingly high. Essentially, it’s a numbers game, so it needn’t be discouraging if your response rate never surpasses 5% (I would actually call that pretty good). If you send useful emails, such as a product that they might be genuinely be interested in (because you scraped their email address from a site they were searching for that particular product on), and collect emails that are not off-limits to web scrapers (for instance, on sites that require a login), you can expect to see a higher positive response rate and less visits to the spam folder. 1.7 SaaS and Other Format-Specific Creations In the following few paragraphs, we’ll be looking at some AI tools that will help you create, organize, design and embellish text content for a specific purpose. Whether you need to deliver a presentation, submit a resume, or create a complete website, these tools will help you to achieve your aim easily and beautifully. Starting with presentation tools, you can create an entire, and stunning, presentation from scratch in no time flat. These AI-powered presentation makers are not just yet another lifesaver for high schoolers. Anyone who needs to give a presentation will be just as impressed at the results that these tools deliver as the audience. The first tool is Tome. Its creators describe the product as an AI “storytelling partner”. As such, it can be used to present information across a range of media using multimedia and a library of templates. Users will appreciate the ease with which you can find and add content, and the striking quality of the finished story. It’s a refreshing way to present information to a group of people that veers away from the traditional Powerpoint-style presentations. You can get started for free (and keep it free forever), but if you reach the limit of what the free plan offers, paid subscriptions start at only $8 a month. If you’re looking for an AI tool that can create a presentation in Powerpoint style, then look no further than Beautiful.ai. It’s up to you to provide the text, since the app currently doesn’t do that for you. If you don’t have any content handy at the outset of your project, you can easily search, then copy and paste using one of the tools such as chatGPT, or a combination of AI search tools and copywriting tools, mentioned earlier in this section. You can then utilize the library of templates and the design tools that Beautiful.ai provides to help you with the overall layout of the presentation and the design of the slides. The app even helps to create images that can be added using an integrated AI-powered art tool, which creates images from text prompts (more on this topic in chapter 3). Resume writing is another area where it's important to impress with both the content
- 22. 21 and the delivery. FlowCV lets you create your resume using a design wizard and a library of design templates. The intuitive UI lets you add and remove content easily with just a click, gives you tips on what to add in each section and automatically formats the content to make it as clear and as visually-appealing as possible. The preview window lets you immediately see each change you make. You can download the finished product or upload it online. The tool also helps you keep track of where you submitted your resume and when it’s maybe a good time to follow up. Your first resume is a freebie and without any watermarks. That’s a pretty nice deal in my book. A slightly more comprehensive resume builder tool is Resume.io. Its integrated summary feature lets you easily create cover letters to accompany your resume. It has all of the same features as the previous product and a virtually identical UI. But being a bit better comes at a price. You can use the tool for free, which is always great for simply trying it out, but you aren’t able to export your resume for free once it’s finished except as a web link or a TXT file. The cheapest paid plan costs around 2 bucks a month and gives you unlimited resumes and unlimited downloads in PDF and Word format. It’s also a fairly nice deal if you ask me. If you want to create, in other words design, construct, fill, preview, publish, update, link, market, and keep tabs on your website, there are a few large companies that offer a range of tools for doing this. Along with the two sites that I mentioned earlier, Wix and Worpress, one of the other big names is Squarespace. These website builders are a great example of how AI facilitates the process and makes everything extremely user-friendly and intuitive by being quite intuitive itself and understanding what it is you want to do every step of the way. You don’t need to know anything about programming languages like HTML, PHP or JavaScript. Just pick a template, drag and drop, click to preview and publish, and a gentle nudge if it notices you made a mistake with the content somewhere. All three platforms are quite similar to each other in terms of their features and user-friendliness, making it a cinch to achieve great results. The first two offer free plans that are more basic, but nevertheless quite feature-rich. With Squarespace, all that you get is a 14- day free trial. After that, you’ll need to shell out $16 a month minimum for an annual plan. Wordpress’ annual subscriptions start at around $2 per month and for Wix an annual plan will set you back by a minimum of $10 a month. It’s possible and advisable to make good money here simply by piggybacking on these SaaS offers. You can cheaply and easily take advantage of the services they provide to turn around and sell the finished products to your customers. When it comes to websites, frankly there are already many free platforms, as well as well-established, professional companies ruling the roost. However, with regard to presentations and resumes, there isn't a select group of players dominating the playing field, making it possible to venture into this sector with low entry barriers and a high chance of success. What’s more, these products will always be in high demand. Professionals, companies, entrepreneurs and students will always need to give presentations. Job seekers will always need an impressive-looking and convincing resume for their application. Getting it done right can either be expensive or time consuming. Thankfully, AI eliminates all that. Yet many people don’t even know that this option exists. Or they simply don’t trust machines with such high-priority tasks and prefer to place their project in the competent hands of a human being. That’s where you come in. It naturally takes more active involvement on your part to put these
- 23. 22 If you enjoyed the book so far and would like to own a copy, you can purchase it through any of the links below. Buy Book Kindle PDF eBook Paperback Subscribe to the mailing list and get free updates. About the author Mike Lawrence is a techie and serial entrepreneur. He has been utilizing AI in his various business and projects since it first became widely available. In addition to this guide, he has written articles on the subject of AI and is currently working on follow-ups to this guide. Copyright © Mike’s Guides™ 2023 All rights reserved. www.mikesguides.org