AI had its breakthrough in 2023, and has quickly moved to making highly realistic images, videos and sound. Creative work gets a boost with AI, becoming a handy tool for artists, designers and the average person. It turns thoughts into art, making imagination real by changing ideas into tangible and expressive results.
AI can turn your doodles into polished drawings or enhance your photos with just a click. When it comes to videos, AI can help by suggesting cool effects, animating still images, and even making captions. It can write melodies, mix beats, and create music that fits your style.
In this blog, we look at 6 multimedia AI tools from popular, upcoming and major players in the tech industry. These tools let everyday users like us create beautiful photo collages, lively videos, catchy tunes and engaging narration.
Multimedia Overview
Multimedia is a mix of text, images, audio, and video which creates a lively experience. In today’s digital world, multimedia is everywhere – on websites, in presentations, and social media. The breakthrough of AI gives rise to a new era of creativity. Here, we explore 6 tools: Canva Magic Studio, NVIDIA Canvas, Stable Diffusion, Runway Gen-2, Eleven Labs, and Google Music LM. These smart tools transform ideas effortlessly:
- Canva is a popular and all-rounder platform. Its newly added feature, Magic Studio, uses AI for graphic design, videos, presentations, and brand marketing.
- NVIDIA Canvas turns sketches into photorealistic images.
- Stable Diffusion is a powerful, completely free deep learning, text-to-image model.
- Runway Gen-2 generates videos from text prompts, images, or clips.
- Eleven Labs is a text-to-speech software able to create natural sounding speeches, and
- Google Music LM crafts tunes from text.
Let’s dive in and learn about these innovative Ais.
Canva AI
Canva, a graphic design platform founded in 2013, has steadily grown to over 135 million monthly users in 10 years. Known for its user-friendly approach, the platform started in Perth, Australia, and quickly gained popularity, reaching a billion designs in just five years. Canva’s founders, who began the company in a university dorm, aimed to make design accessible to everyone. Strategic collaborations with groups like Dropbox expanded Canva’s reach in the design field. The platform’s success lies in its simplicity, steady growth, and user-focused vision. In terms of features, Canva has improved its design experience for both desktop and mobile users.
Magic Studio
Freshly launched in 2023, Magic Studio adds the power of AI to diverse content creation.
- Magic Design suggests templates based on users’ words.
- Magic Design for Videos and Presentations similarly let users make videos and slides with a few typed words and one click.
- Magic Switch resizes designs and translates text into different languages. Other features like Magic Morph and Magic Grab enhance design elements, while Magic Expand change photos for different formats. Magic Edit lets users edit certain areas of a photo using AI.
- Magic Animate gives AI-powered animations, saving time for projects with many slides.
- Magic Write with Brand Voice sets a brand’s tone of voice in the brand kit, adding uniqueness to AI-made copy.
Together, these features make design easy and quick for both free and Pro Canva users, giving a set of creative tools without the need for advanced design skills.
NVIDIA Canvas
NVIDIA Canvas, launched in 2021, has become popular as an easy-to-use digital art tool. It attracts both newbies and skilled artists due to ease and flexibility. Since 1993, NVIDIA has grown into a global tech giant with a market cap of 1.194 trillion. Though quite recent, Canvas has made a large impact as NVIDIA’s entry into digital art. Kicked off in 2021, this app is a new phase, giving a fresh way to express creative ideas. The platform has a user-friendly interface and real-time response, setting it apart from others. NVIDIA’s dedicated team constantly refines Canvas, showing the company’s commitment to developing AI capacity.
The app makes doodling easy, smoothly turning simple sketches into lifelike images. It has the following features:
- With user-friendly tools like brushes, erasers, and a paint bucket, drawing becomes a breeze.
- Real-time rendering gives instant visual feedback, boosting the intuitive creative process. The app encourages trying out different materials, adjusting to strokes for varied landscapes.
- Layer function allows safe experimentation without affecting the whole drawing.
NVIDIA Canvas excels in adding depth and realism to basic line drawings, letting you create imaginative, non-existent scenes. It is creative in using different materials like stone walls to break up repetitive patterns. Practical and insightful, Canvas acts as a tool to see ideas before putting them on paper, making drawing accessible and enjoyable.
Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is a tool that transforms text into impressive images using the magic of AI. It was created by researchers from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich’s CompVis Group and Runway, backed by Stability AI. After its release in 2022, the startup Stability AI raised $101 million in seed funding later in the year. It’s free and open-source, easy to install on your computer with a good graphics card. If you’re not into installation, you can still play around with Stable Diffusion on the website here. One click gives four images based on your words. With installation, you can tweak more parameters and get more images.
Stable Diffusion offers different models, which are pre-trained neural networks that have learned different image styles and patterns. Some may be great at realistic photos, while others excel in artistic illustrations.
Three-step process
Stable Diffusion creates high-res images through a three-step process.
- First, it breaks your text into a sequence of standardized tokens (words or groups of words). Each token is converted into a compact representation of the image.
- Second, it refines the image representation over multiple steps (usually 50), gradually improving quality.
- Lastly, it upscales the refined representation to generate a detailed image.
Users have control over the process through:
- Text prompt: describing the desired image in detail leads to better quality
- Seed: for different starting points
- Guidance scale: change how closely the image follows the text prompt
Overall, Stable Diffusion allows users to explore diverse artistic styles and image types. The available multiple models enhances the tool’s flexibility and creative potential.
Runway Gen-2
New York-based startup Runway, who took part in the research of Stable Diffusion, is the creator of AI video making tool Runway Gen-2. Its newest version is making waves in the AI filmmaking scene. Debuted in March 2023, it’s praised as a “game-changer” for its ability to turn still images into lively videos. What sets Gen 2 apart is its simplicity – users can make videos from 4 to 18 seconds by just typing text or uploading images, without needing existing video clips.
Here’s how it works:
- Users start by selecting an initial image, forming the base for the video.
- Then, they adjust technical details like resolution and quality in Runway’s settings.
- Runway takes this input image and interprets it, creating further frames to form an animated sequence.
A recent update added the “Director Mode” feature in September. This lets users control simulated camera movements, enhancing motion quality and making AI-generated videos look even more realistic. One of the handy features is batch processing, which lets users work on multiple images at once. Throughout the process, users maintain creative control – they can review results, delete or rerun specific clips, and try out different images to get the best creative output.
With Gen 2, users guide the process using natural language or by adjusting parameters. This update marks a significant step forward in showing what AI can achieve in the world of filmmaking. Runway Gen 2 is all about giving users the power to effortlessly turn images into high-quality, AI-generated videos.
Eleven Labs
ElevenLabs is a voice AI company founded by Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski in 2022. ElevenLabs was inspired by the desire to overcome the subpar dubbing of Hollywood movies in their native Poland. Their technology generates speech in different voices across 20 languages. They aim to enable multilingual audio support in education, streaming, gaming, and real-time conversations.
ElevenLabs has secured over $20 million in fundings, reaching a valuation of $100 million. The company broadened its offerings with features like Voice Library, VoiceLab, and AI Dubbing. Its main product, Speech Synthesis, is a browser-based, AI-powered text-to-speech software known for its realistic speech.
Access this tool by going to their main page. Type your text, choose from different voices, and hit play to hear your words come to life. The free plan allows 10,000 characters per month, around 10 minutes of speech, and is for non-commercial use. For more features, check out the starter plan at $1 for the first month and $5 afterward. With this plan, you get 30,000 characters monthly (about 30 minutes) and instant voice cloning.
The tool has the following features:
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Speech Synthesis
Fine-tune voices by adjusting settings like stability, clarity, and similarity enhancement. User-friendly interface for generating, listening, and refining text-to-speech. Generate, listen, and refine until it meets your expectations.
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Voice Lab
“Voice Design” option allows customization of gender, age, accent, and accent strength. Set the accent strength, type your text, and click “Generate” for a distinct voice. This can be used for branding and marketing.
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Instant Voice Cloning
upload a five-minute voice sample and confirm rights to generate a personalized voice.
Generate a script and review it in the history tab. You can even download these samples for further use. The software has found applications in content creation, gaming, and publishing. It is widely praised for natural, realistic voices.
Google Music LM
In the last few decades, Google has grown into a tech giant of 1.675 trillion market cap. Once a modest search engine, it now dominates diverse areas. In recent development, Google works with musicians and experts to create MusicLM, an AI experiment that transforms your written ideas into music tracks.
MusicLM is part of Google’s “generating music from text” project, advancing text-to-music technology. It can turn text like “calming violin with distorted guitar” into two high-quality song versions. It excels in generating consistent 24 kHz music for minutes, surpassing previous systems in audio quality. What sets MusicLM apart is its flexibility. It can turn a hum into a guitar riff or convert a simple piano tune into a jazz piece. The model can generate different music genres, from reggae to techno, jazz to metal or pop.
Despite not releasing the code for safety reasons, Google has shared a dataset called Music Caps. The dataset features 5.5k high-quality music captions written by musicians. These descriptions cover how the music sounds, and include 10-second music clips. While MusicLM’s potential for AI-generated movies is impressive, Google emphasizes ethical considerations in developing such powerful generative models. The future of AI-generated music looks promising, offering creative possibilities for various applications.
Conclusion
Of the current AI trend, we explored Canva Magic Studio, NVIDIA Canvas, Stable Diffusion, Runway Gen-2, Elevenlabs, and Google MusicLM. They are part of multimedia Ais, a mix of text, images, audio, and video to create a lively experience.
Canva, as a popular and all-rounder platform, added Magic Studio AI for graphic design, videos, presentations, and brand marketing. NVIDIA Canvas turns simple drawing lines into photorealistic images. Stable Diffusion is a powerful yet completely free deep learning, text-to-image model. Runway Gen-2, with the same company behind Stable Diffusion, generates impressive videos from text prompts, images. Eleven Labs is a text-to-speech software praised for surprisingly natural sounding speeches. Google Music LM is part of the tech giant’s next research project on text-to-music technology.
AI serves as a helpful tool for creativity, improving how artists work. In this blog, we highlighted how AI is becoming more important in creative areas, pushing the boundaries of art. AI works alongside humans, showing ideas visually and new ways of thinking. Teaming up with AI opens up fresh possibilities in art, supporting creativity.
References
Franzen, Carl. “Runway’s Gen-2 update is blowing people’s mind with incredible AI video.” VentureBeat, 2 November 2023, https://venturebeat.com/ai/runways-gen-2-update-is-blowing-peoples-minds-with-incredible-ai-video.
Agostinelli, Andrea, et al. “Musiclm: Generating music from text.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.11325 (2023).