The Ultimate Guide to AI Tools: Part 2

Posted on 10th November 2024

Created with MidJourney AI

In the first post in this ultimate guide to AI tools, we introduced the first three AI apps in our curated list of the very best AI can offer to creatives, writers and entrepreneurs in late 2024. We have tested each product in all parts of our business over the last 6-12 months. We have received no reward for recommending these tools. Part 1 started by explaining the ins and outs of Chat GPT, Claude and Gamma AI. This post focuses on Midjourney – an AI Image creator; Notebook LM – A research tool; and Eleven Labs for audio – a text-to-voice generator and voice cloning tool. Part 3 gives you our costed conclusions and recommendations on how to build your ultimate tech stack.

Midjourney

Access here: Midjourney

Midjourney is an AI-powered image generator that creates amazing visuals based on text prompts. It’s designed for artists, designers, and creators who need unique artwork for projects, like marketing materials, social media posts, or creative concepts. Midjourney transforms simple descriptions into detailed, visually appealing images, making it easy for users to bring their imagination to life without design skills. Automating the creative process opens up new possibilities for artistic expression and speeds up the production of high-quality graphics. Here are a few examples that we have created for our projects:

Price Range: $10-30/month
Best For: High-quality AI image generation

Strengths:

Exceptional image quality – see the image featured post here
Strong artistic style control – great examples and user interface
Regular feature updates
Active community for learning – all sharing amazing images
Versatile application possibilities – it’s a potential business in itself

Limitations:

Steeper learning curve – it does take a little while to get used to how it works
No free tier available – but you can join for a month and then cancel.
Queue times during peak usage – I haven’t experienced this ever in 3 months of using it
Prompt sensitivity requires practice – yes it does.

Ideal For:

Designers and non-designers needing quick concepts
Marketing teams creating visuals for a publication or a campaign.
Content creators – for blog posts and documents.
Social media managers – ditto
Brand identity development –

NotebookLM by Google

NotebookLM: Developed by Google, NotebookLM is an AI assistant designed to support research and knowledge work. It uses advanced language models to help users organise all kind of notes, summarise information, and generate insights from their curated sources.

Access here: NotebookLM

Price Range: Free (Currently) to Google Account holders
Best For: Research organisation and content synthesis, and an amazing “one-click”podcast tool.

No ultimate guide AI tools in 2024 would be complete witout a look at Google’s NotebookLM. We were amazed by this when it came out. You drag in documents and Notebook LM analyses them and offers almost instantaneous analysis of them and automated standard outputs like FAQs, content summaries, and Learner guides with knowledge testing questions. You can also use it like chat GPT to interrogate all of the source materials to compare, contrast, test and synthesise. we have used it extensively to bring course notes, visuals and briefing documents together in one place and then ask the tool to create original content based on our (finally) collated source notes.

NotebookLM Strengths:

Excellent document analysis capabilities of many forms of documents from Word through PDF and URL
Strong integration with research workflows
Built-in fact-checking features
Clean, intuitive interface makes it so easy to use
Efficient information organisation and access
‘One click export’ to create a high-quality, 2 voice podcast out of your generated content- example here:

Limitations:

Limited availability (still in beta) – but it works and will only get better.
Requires Google account – but it’s a small ‘price’ to pay.
Fewer features compared to competitors – true
Limited export options – cut and paste is a bit fiddly.
Sometimes struggles with complex queries

Ideal For:

Researchers, students and academics – recommended it to my son at University for research purposes, and he loves it.
Content creators requiring fact-checking – and marketers looking for evidence.
Students organising study materials
Professional research projects
Knowledge management

ElevenLabs

Access here: ElevenLabs

Eleven Labs: Eleven Labs specialises in advanced AI voice synthesis. It’s a tool for creators who want to generate lifelike, expressive speech from text. Useful for podcasters, audiobook creators, and content producers, Eleven Labs can convert written content into human sounding audio, offering lots of customizable voice options. By simplifying voice production, it saves time and adds a professional touch to audio projects. You can even clone your own voice if you have the time to record up to 2 hours of your own voice.

Here’s my voice cloned version of this last paragraph. You can hear how I tweaked the delivery from first (too forced) to last (spookily like me).

Price Range: Free (Limited), $5-330/month
Best For: Professional voice synthesis and audio content

Strengths:

High-quality voice synthesis and voice cloning
Multiple language support
Voice cloning capabilities – from quick and easy to much more real.
Good emotion control – as proved by the demonstration above.
Regular quality improvements

Limitations:

Premium features can be expensive – you buy tokens and longer documents can be expensive.
Limited free tier – but both it to try it out.
Some voices sound artificial – so do some voices in real life, but there’s a great range.
Resource-intensive processing – yes but not too bad on a modern PC or laptop.
Language limitations for some features

Ideal For:

Podcast creation
Video narration
Audiobook production
E-learning content
Multi-language content

These 6 tools have really added an extra edge to our business. We pay maybe $120 per month to have all of these tools in our arsenal, and we use them a lot. If I had to pick just one to rely on it would be Chat GPT because it does everything the others do from creation, analysis, coding, research, writing and image creation albeit to to a lesser degree. If I had to choose two I’d choose Chat GPT and GammaAI because Gamma is just so good a turning content into beautiful documents, presentations and websites. But the choice is yours:

Making Your Choice: Key Considerations

When selecting AI tools for your business, consider:

Use case:
- For writers it has to be ChatGPT or Claude
- For Designers it has to be Gamma with it’s excellent AI Image capability
- For Researchers, students and academics it would be either ChatGPT (With Canvas) and NotebookLM (because it’s free)
- For artists and visual creators then it has to be Midjourney for the pure brilliance of its output.
Budget
- Free tiers for testing – and try as many as you can
- Scaling costs with usage – only really relevant with 11Labs and Claude if you have a novel to write
- Return on investment potential – of course
Integration Requirements
- Compatibility with existing tools
- API availability for more advanced chatbot and automation projects
- Export options – but there’s always a work-around.
Learning Curve
- Available training resources
- Community support
- Interface intuitiveness
Output Quality Needs
- Professional requirements
- Brand alignment
- Consistency requirements

Part 3 gives you our costed conclusions and recommendations on how to build your ultimate tech stack.

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Jim Harvey

Managing Director at The Message Business

Jim is a serial entrepreneur and the MD of The Message Business, a company which helps international and FTSE 100 companies sell themselves, and their products more effectively. Jim has many years of experience speechwriting, presentation coaching and motivational speaking, all over the world.