15 AI Tools for Practical Use Cases You Can Try Today

Discover 15 cutting-edge AI tools you can try today, from a high-quality video generator to audio editors and more. Streamline your workflow, boost creativity, and stay ahead of the curve with these practical AI applications.

February 17, 2025

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Discover the latest AI tools and applications you can put to work today, from a cutting-edge video generator to innovative audio and video editing features. This blog post highlights the most impactful AI advancements across various industries, empowering you to enhance your content creation and productivity.

Introducing Dream Machine: The Best AI Video Generator That's Accessible Today

Dream Machine, a new AI video generator by Luma Labs, is being hailed as the best accessible option in the market today. Here's a quick overview of what it can do:

  • Simply type in a prompt, and Dream Machine will generate a short video clip based on it. The results can be quite impressive, with the ability to animate images and create dynamic scenes.
  • Users can upload their own images and have them animated by the model. This seems to be one of the key strengths of Dream Machine.
  • While the quality is not perfect, especially when it comes to details like water, the overall results are very usable and can be great for creating video montages or other content.
  • Dream Machine is currently free to use, though heavy usage during peak times may result in longer wait times for generations.

Overall, Dream Machine appears to be a significant step forward in accessible AI video generation, outperforming other options like Runway and Pixelz. Content creators should definitely give it a try.

Descript's Major Overhaul and New AI Integrations

Descript, the video editing software for creators, has recently undergone a major overhaul. They have added a slew of new features and AI integrations that have pulled them ahead of the big players like Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro in certain areas.

The key highlight is the introduction of a new assistant called the "Underlord". This AI-powered tool provides various editing and enhancement capabilities that can save creators a lot of time and effort. Some of the notable features include:

  1. Eye Contact Correction: This feature can adjust the subject's eye gaze to make it appear as if they are looking directly into the camera, even if they were looking slightly off-center during the recording.

  2. Clip Repurposing: Descript makes it easy to repurpose video clips for different social platforms by providing tools to adjust the aspect ratio, add captions, and translate the content to various languages.

  3. Audio Editing: The Underlord can help with tasks like removing filler words, improving sound quality, and generating transcriptions and captions.

  4. Text-based Editing: Descript's core strength, the text-based video editing, has been further enhanced with AI-powered suggestions to improve clarity and conciseness.

It's important to note that while these AI integrations are a welcome addition, they are not meant to be perfect. The Underlord is designed to be an assistant, and users should still review and double-check the changes it proposes. The goal is to streamline the video editing process, not to replace human judgment entirely.

Overall, Descript's latest updates demonstrate the continued integration of AI technologies into the tools used by content creators. As these capabilities become more accessible, it will be interesting to see how they evolve and how creators can leverage them to enhance their workflows.

Stability AI Opens Source Stable Diffusion and Stable Audio Open

Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion and other models, has made some significant releases:

  1. Stable Diffusion Free: Stable Diffusion is now open-sourced with a non-commercial license, allowing small creators and medium-sized companies to use it freely. This gives access to the high-quality text-to-image generation capabilities of Stable Diffusion.

  2. Stable Audio Open: This is a different release from the previous Stable Audio model. Stable Audio Open is focused on creating sound effects, Foley sounds, background sounds, and isolated instruments. It is fully open-sourced and available for creators to use in their audiovisual projects. The quality is decent, and you can cut and edit the generated audio to fit your needs.

These releases from Stability AI are significant because they provide free and open-source access to powerful generative AI capabilities. Stable Diffusion's text-to-image generation and Stable Audio Open's sound effects creation can be valuable tools for creators and small businesses. While the outputs may not be perfect, these models offer a lot of potential for those who know how to leverage them.

Asana Implements AI Teammates to Streamline Workflows

Asana, the popular work management tool, has introduced a new feature that integrates AI assistants, or "teammates," into its platform. These AI teammates are designed to enhance productivity and streamline various workflows.

The key use cases highlighted by Asana include:

  1. Creative Production Workflows: AI teammates can handle incoming requests, gather missing information, and assign work to the appropriate team members based on the provided context. They can also assist with client research and reporting.

  2. Marketing Campaign Management: AI teammates can help create content drafts, freeing up time for the marketing team to focus on the creative flow and design.

The integration of these AI capabilities into Asana is part of a broader trend where various applications are incorporating AI-powered features to augment user workflows. Similar to the "Underlord" assistant in Descript, these AI teammates are intended to serve as assistants, not replacements, for human workers.

By understanding these AI-powered features and their use cases, users can expect to see more of such integrations across the apps they already use for task management, content creation, and other business processes.

Evaluating User-Created GPT Applications

The section covers the evaluation of several user-created GPT applications submitted as part of a public challenge. The key points are:

  • The creator Brandon submitted "Vau the Vacation Planner", a GPT application that helps plan vacations by asking questions and generating a heatmap of recommended destinations.
  • The creator Christian submitted a "Universal Translator GPT" that acts as a voice assistant and universal translator, with features like interruption handling and automatic language detection.
  • The creator Gahad submitted a GPT application that helps craft bedtime stories for children, with limitations on certain topics.
  • The bonus winner was Jacob mcland with a "Debugging GPT" that can be pinned to the sidebar to help debug issues when building other GPT applications.
  • All of these user-created GPT applications are freely available for others to try out and provide feedback on.

Sonos Allows You to Create Songs from Your Own Audio

I tried to recreate the Sonos feature of creating a song from uploaded audio, but I couldn't seem to get the same results as shown in the video. Here's what I did:

  1. I went to my Sonos account and navigated to the "Upload Audio" section.
  2. I gave Sonos access to my microphone and recorded some random sounds.
  3. I uploaded the audio file, which needed to be at least 60 seconds long.
  4. I clicked the "Extend" button on the uploaded audio clip, hoping to have Sonos's AI generator extend it into a full song.

However, the generations I got were just battle rap beats that didn't seem to have much relation to my original sound. I followed the steps exactly, but couldn't replicate the results shown in the video.

Despite my inability to get the feature working as demonstrated, I believe this is still a useful capability that both Sonos and Yudo have implemented. The idea of being able to upload your own audio and have an AI system generate a full song from it is an interesting one. Hopefully, with some more experimentation, I or someone in the comments can figure out the right approach to make this work as expected.

Mid Journey's New Personalization Parameter and Improved Chinese/Japanese Character Support

Mid Journey has released a new personalization parameter that allows users to create a custom style based on their previous image ratings. If you have rated at least 200 images, Mid Journey will create a personalized style for you. This personalized style will be unique to each user, as it is based on their individual preferences.

Dominique, a member of our community who runs the Mid Journey events, has rated over 9,000 images. He has shared examples of the differences between the original prompt and the personalized style. The personalized style can produce significantly different results, as it reflects the user's unique preferences.

To use a personalized style, you can simply add a code at the end of your prompt. For example, here is the code for Dominique's personalized style: <dom_style>. If you want to use the style of another artist, you can find their code and include it in your prompt.

In addition to the personalization feature, Mid Journey has also improved its ability to represent Chinese and Japanese characters in its latest version, V6. Dominique has tested this and found that the new model performs well in generating text with these characters, with minimal differences compared to the previous version.

Overall, these updates to Mid Journey's capabilities provide users with more customization options and better support for a wider range of languages.

Google's Illuminate Condenses Academic Papers into Engaging Audio Summaries

Google's Illuminate is an AI-powered tool that condenses academic papers into engaging audio summaries. With Illuminate, you can listen to 25-minute summaries of papers related to the AI space, including the influential "Attention is All You Need" paper that introduced the Transformer architecture.

The key features of Illuminate include:

  • Conversational summaries with two voices, making the content more engaging and easier to follow compared to a single voice reading.
  • Concise 4-5 minute summaries that capture the core ideas without losing essential information.
  • Access to 25 paper summaries covering a range of AI-related topics, with the ability to join a waitlist for more.
  • A convenient way to quickly understand the key takeaways from academic papers without having to read the full text.

To use Illuminate, simply visit the website, browse the available paper summaries, and click "Play" to listen. The conversational format and efficient delivery make Illuminate a valuable tool for staying up-to-date on the latest AI research and developments.

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