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NEWSLETTER 131
 
VIRTUAL EVENTS GROUP
 


The average office worker spends 57% of the day communicating online in meetings, emails, or chats, according to new Microsoft data.

 
 
 
 
 
 
June 15 | 3PM EDT | Zoom
 
Hungry for Community
 

We are, by nature, tribal. And while the pandemic may be in the rearview mirror, the hunger for virtual communities remains strong. Join the wonderful Felix Zeltner (Remote Daily), along with Alex Lindsay (Office Hours), Denise Hayman-Loa (Carii Network), and Jerry Li (Gradual) to discuss the power of community and how to build yours.

 
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All AI, All the Time
 
 
 

Last week there were 50 of us online during the Virtual Events Group meeting to learn and explore AI together. We talked fast and furious, guided by Ben Parr, Evo Heyning and Renee Teeley, our megawatt guides. They dove into some of the most popular AI chatbots in use today with an emphasis on working with text, image creation, and video. As promised, here are the highlights from the list of tools we discussed. (You can watch the re-runs here.)

 
 

The Big Guns

ChatGPT is the turning point. When we look back at history, we’ll say the world changed when ChatGPT made its chatbot publicly available in November 2022. It’s a conversational system that can generate responses because it’s been trained on a large-scale language model. You can use it for everything from writing research reports to creating outlines and from spec’ing RFPs to poetry. 


Midjourney
may be the most exotic and conceptual of the generative AI graphics creation tools, Midjourney is trained on the language of image creation. It’s instructive to learn from other users’ prompts on MidJourreny’s Discord server. Here’s a nice image and prompt from Tokenized to get you started.

 
 

Stability AI is a suite of tools for harnessing the power of all open-source AI. It’s best known for Stability Diffusion, its image generator.

DALL•E 2 is the godfather of image-generative AI. Like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, it creates images from a prompt that describes them. 

 
 

Emerging Winners for Everyday Work Flows 

  • For presentations
    Tome is a mashup of Powerpoint and AI. There’s still lots of manual work to be done, but you can prompt Tome to generate the key points of a presentation. 
 
 
Image Credit: Tome
 
 
  • Notetakers
    Notion AI and Otter.ai are smart notetakers that are used during your meetings to provide summaries and insights. 
  • Video-makers
    Augie from Aug X Labs turns your words into videos by seeking out corresponding images and footage.
    vidIQ, designed with creators in mind, can generate a name for your channel, provide a rough script, and answer your questions about how to increase your views on YouTube. 
    Kaiber creates videos from your uploaded photos, videos, and music based on a prompt that you provide. 
 
 
Kaiber lets you create a video from a simple prompt like this one.
Image Credit: Kaiber
 
 

Runway is a new suite of “MagicTools” that lets you turn text into video, create your personal video avatar, and more. 
Modelscope synthesizes video from text using AI.

  • Video Repurposing
    Descript edits videos and podcasts from your own video files with automatic video-to-text translation. 
    Opus Clip can edit your long videos into short clips using AI intelligence. 
  • Whirlwind Tours
    Want more? Watch this video that whips through hundreds of some of the best (and most unusual) AI tools. Also check out There’s an AI for That. When last I checked there were nearly 4,500 AI tools in a searchable list. Visit our AI section of the Virtual Events Group in the database. It’s a curated list of tools that meeting stakeholders will value most.
 
 
Scuttlebutt
 
 
 

Orlando’s Digital Twin
No, it’s not an evil twin, but if things keep heating up between “The Mouse” and “The Governor” you may want to do your business virtually. Between space simulations and theme parks, Orlando’s got a lot of simulation mastery. To show it off, they’ve built a 3-D map (it cost one million dollars to build) as their gateway to attract tourists, businesses, and events. 

All Eyes in and on Apple’s Headset 
It’s been a while since headsets were on anybody’s gift list, but Apple’s going to try to change all that with the introduction of its new AR/VR mixed reality headset this fall. What we know through a variety of reported sources, is that it’s priced like a summer vacation ($3,000), looks like ski goggles with a battery pack, and knows it needs a killer app by launch time. So the question is: would you rather spend $3k to don a helmet and goggles on the slopes of Chamonix or spend it with Apple? Read more on Tech Brew.

The Mad Libs School of Prompting
Those of you who grew up learning to distinguish nouns from adjectives by doing MadLibs will appreciate Renee Teeley’s MadLib approach to prompting. Here’s an example of how she fills in the blanks specifying everything from audience to tone of voice. 

 
 
Renee Teeley reminds us to think of the AI prompts like a Mad Lib. Just fill in the parts of speech.
 
 

Maker Music
If you’re feeling trapped thinking about virtual design for events, grab a peek at Maker Music, a celebration of new sounds, new instruments, and new ways to celebrate music. Sherry Huss, a long-time friend of VEG, helped spearhead this effort with software development from Joe Szuecs and Freeman Co’s support.

 
 
UPCOMING
 
Events
 
 
Should College be Virtual?
Augmented World Expo, San Jose, CA
May 31 | 4:30 PM | GRAND BALLROOM A
 

Steve Grubbs builds digital twins of colleges where students can get their degrees via headset. John Katzman, a well-respected educator, argues that we'll lose the gist of the college experience. The audience will decide the outcome.

MORE INFO

 
 
 
Generative AI Will Change the World, For Better or Worse
Augmented World Expo, San Jose, CA
June 2 | 11:40 AM | GRAND BALLROOM C
 

Four Generative AI experts will take the stage to try to persuade you to consider the possibilities of a Generative AI-filled world and what your place in that world might look like.

MORE INFO

 
 
 
Dust or Magic
June 2-4 | Asilomar Conference Grounds
 

On June 2nd, a discussion of how generative AI is raising "Generation AI."

 
 
 
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Robin Raskin | Founder
917.215.3160 | robin@virtualeventsgroup.org

Gigi Raskin | Sales/Marketing

917.608.7542 | gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org