There’s a new entrant in the social video creation space and it’s betting its simplistic workflow and use of artificial intelligence will win you over. The brainchild of Aug X Labs, Augie aims to turn your script, narration or your webcam recording into a custom video. It’s now available in a public beta.
The Shift From One-Dimensional Content
Built by serial entrepreneurs Jeremy Toeman, JT White and Scott Havird, Augie’s ideal customers are small businesses, advertisers, marketers, podcasters, and content creators. (Disclosure: Toeman and I used to work together at Stage Two)
The app launched in alpha late last year and the company says “thousands” of customers have used Augie to create “commercial videos of all kinds, such as explainer videos, product demos, company announcements, HR/Training videos and more.”
“Finally marketing teams and entrepreneurs alike can be as prolific in professional-looking videos as teenagers are on social videos,” Toeman remarked in a statement. “We believe Augie will be the tool that helps drive the next generation of creators, as they look for innovative, creative, and most importantly, fast ways to create engaging video content.”
Augie is a user-friendly tool that simplifies the process of creating videos. You can easily generate a storyboard by uploading any text, voice or webcam recording to the AI. Although Augie provides commercially licensed clips, you have the option of using your own. Personalize your video with various effects, such as split screens, subtitles, closed captioning, background music, and much more. Augie also allows you to modify video clips and text to ensure that the video meets your requirements.
Augie: A Light bulb Moment
Toeman told me the team is using a combination of large learning models to train its AI: “For script generation, it’s GPT 3.5. For images, we have both DALL-E2 and MidJourney. For storyboard generation, it’s a homegrown model. And we also have a model for optimizing the human-in-the-loop interactions.”
He also said Augie has been a light bulb moment for marketers: “The moment the conversations begin, marketers ‘get it’ — it’s like all of a sudden having a Philips head screwdriver when you only had a flathead before. You never actually knew all the things you could do.”
“We’re so predisposed to think that making videos is what some other people do, those who were blessed enough to learn how to use the Pro tools – which is truly impressive. So when they realize their social team can create multiple videos per day instead of per month, it’s like the light bulb goes on.”
Make Your Content More Visually Appealing
Content marketing has been trending toward video for a while now. In the past, creating video content required the skills of a video engineer or someone who knew their way around software like Adobe Premiere.
Repurposing written content into multimedia had a steep learning curve. Apps like Descript, Augie, Capsule, and Veed have made it much easier to create custom audio and video content. It has eliminated or reduced the barriers to entry, making high-quality content accessible to more people, without needing the skills of a video engineer.
You can now expect output on par with Premiere from these apps.
And access to high-quality video production had been relegated to those with huge budgets or work at large companies. The introduction of Augie and its peers makes it so content creators/influencers, small businesses and marketers can be on an equal playing field and dedicate their resources elsewhere.
In a way, you could think of Augie as the video equivalent of Descript. It ingests audio content to provide a transcript output and you can use it to produce a soundbite/audiogram. But if video is more persuasive, you’re out of luck with Descript. Augie will handle that for you, though one question that marketers should be aware of is if the quality meets their standards or if it’s just going to be cookie-cutter.
Augie is an extremely useful tool that can create videos for any format or platform. Whether you need a vertical/portrait video for Instagram Reels, TikTok or YouTube Shorts, or a horizontal/landscape video for YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, Augie automatically adjusts the video orientation to fit the platform. This feature saves countless hours by eliminating the need to create multiple iterations of the same video.
Augie Now Available in Public Beta
The company shared this launch video, which was created using Augie.
Augie has three tiers available. It offers a freemium option for individuals and non-profit organizations. For $40 per month, you’ll receive additional content tools and watermarking removal. Finally, there’s also an enterprise tier ($95 per month) with content management system integration and collaboration features.
Interested? You can sign up for Augie’s public beta here.
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