It started like most new ventures. Someone had an annoying problem to solve, but nothing existed that could quite match the needs of the put-out party. When this happens to most of us — our dogs won’t sit, our budgets won’t balance themselves, we lack the diabolical genius to make a small robot to butter our toast for us — we either give in and deal with the status quo, or cobble together a solution through a frustrating set of countermoves.
Jeremy Toeman, the founder of Augie, is not most people.
Toeman is a product developer and serial startup founder with decades of experience launching media tools like Sling. He also worked for CNET for three years in the 2010s. When he wanted to put together a quick, social-focused piece of video content to promote his pandemic project podcast on movies, he realized he had one of those annoying problems: He’s not a video producer.
“I estimate about 40 hours of tutorials later, I had made no progress,” Toeman said via a Zoom interview.
But what Toeman does have is a particular set of skills that make him a nightmare for annoying problems. He called up one of his co-founders, Scott Havird, who has 10 years of experience working in artificial intelligence for companies like WarnerMedia, and started troubleshooting.
“I kind of called him up and said, ‘I wanna do something that listens to my words, understands the context of them and then matches visuals to them automatically. Can you do that?’,” Toeman said.
Two years and $4.1 million in seed funding later, Augie, the AI-assisted, automated video producing and editing platform, has emerged. The platform combines several AI tools into one in-browser experience. Augie is designed to generate and source scripts, voiceover and moving images into a cohesive video using only a single text prompt as the starting point.
It comes during the explosion of generative AI tools, and their ability to create text, video and audio in a flash at the prompt of the user. Other companies are also experimenting with video-generation tools such as OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Lumiere and Microsoft’s VASA-1. You can find more tips, news and reviews of AI tools on CNET’s AI Atlas hub.
Augie creates a script via ChatGPT, generates an AI voice to create narration and voiceover, and it creates, defines and animates imagery. Then it puts it all together to create a finished product in a matter of minutes.
It’s designed for people who need to create video content who have zero experience with editing software, and don’t have time to tackle building a deep understanding of storytelling.
“We tell stories, but what we don’t naturally do is make videos,” Toeman said. “We can record ourselves super easily. We can cut up a recording super easily, but the moment you get slightly more complicated than that, everything sort of comes to a bit of a mental nightmare on how to put all of these pieces together.”
I used Augie to create a promotional video for a fictitious product called TechNeck. My prompt was this: “a cream designed to alleviate neck and shoulder pain from the awkward posture many a computer user adopts during long screen time sessions.”
In about 30 minutes, Augie helped me produce this video, with images courtesy of a Getty license and voiceover patched in from ElevenLabs, an AI text-to-speech software Augie has partnered with.
Ease, expediency and customization are top of mind for Toeman and the team at Augie. He hopes Augie can help launch an era of accessible, on-demand video creation for both individuals and corporate entities.
Augie, currently in beta, offers a free version and monthly and yearly subscriptions from $10 a month to $34 a month with a bespoke option for larger companies that might have specific needs. You can also buy tokens that act as credits for generating animated AI for your video.
This is one of a series of short profiles of AI startups, to help you get a handle on the landscape of artificial intelligence activity going on. For more on AI, see our new AI Atlas hub, which includes product reviews, news, tips and explainers.
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