Meet your AI avatar 🤝

Hi Non-Techies,

I’ve banged on about NotebookLM before, but last week I found a great resource for those of you who aren’t yet using it to its full capacity. Today I’m sharing it.

I’ll also be talking about some of Zoom’s new features, reflecting on last week’s Zoomtopia, introducing you to Notion’s new, super smart AI agent and sharing some other cool stuff my team and I have stumbled upon over the last week.

If this newsletter were a cheeseboard, it’d be a full spread. Baked camembert in the middle, breadsticks, carrot batons, the works.

We demo a lot of these emerging tools in live sessions over at the AI Academy. It’s the best way to get a proper feel for how they actually work (and whether they’re as good as they claim). Want to join one? Click the button below for a 7-day free trial.

Say goodbye to bedhead on Zoom 😂

It’s been a big week for Zoom, so this is the first of two sections about their AI offerings.

Live AI avatars are coming to Zoom. It’ll let you create a photorealistic version of yourself that will sync up to your real-time movements, but will spare you any blushes if you’re not quite “camera-ready”.

Zoom users (Zoomers?) can already use AI avatars for pre-recorded messages, but this is the first time you’ll be able to use them in real-time video calls.

You can also change your avatar’s outfit, so if you want to look more professional but can’t be bothered to change out of your pyjamas, your AI avatar can don the power suit on your behalf.

The natural concern here is fake avatars, but Zoom has a solution for that already. To prevent people from pretending to be someone they’re not, they’ll use real-time authentication to ensure the person on cam is the same person as their AI avatar.

The best NotebookLM resource I’ve found 📍

You know when you’re shopping for a car, and then you start seeing it everywhere?

Google’s NotebookLM is a bit like that. Since I’ve started using it all the time, I keep seeing it in the wild. And it’s always stuff like this:

Anyway, the most helpful resource I’ve found to get you acquainted with NotebookLM is, shockingly, their own introductory guide. Not only is it a great explainer, but it’s also a living, breathing example of what NotebookLM can do.

If you’re not familiar with it yet (or its new features, like quizzes, flashcards, upgraded reports and additional audio overview formats), click the button below to find out why so many of its users shout about it in capital letters on the internet:

“It basically does your job for you” 🤖

People who use Notion tend to love Notion. It creates megafans, not unlike NotebookLM…or The Beatles. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a workspace, primarily for creating documents and databases.

Last week, they announced Notion 3.0, which, in layman’s terms, means “Notion but with agents”.

It’s the latest in a trend of tech platforms releasing super-powerful agents (we discussed Replit’s agent in last week’s newsletter) that can essentially do everything that a human can do on the platform, but way faster.

As the press release states: “Anything you can do in Notion, your Agent can do too. The busywork that fills your day can now be done in minutes.”

It feels like the AI tools that can do, rather than just tell, are going to be the main focus in AI over the next few years.

Which, let’s not forget, should be music to our Non-Techie ears. The more that AI can do for us with a simple prompt, the less we have to worry about the technicalities.

If you’re feeling curious, you can read Notion’s press release here:

Some other cool stuff we found this week 😎

🤷 Can we ever trust online video again? Higgsfield, who are always at the forefront of AI visuals, have released Lipsync Studio, which can make anyone look like they’re saying anything. It’s free to use at the moment, and this tweet (it’s full of profanity, so don’t blast it out in the office) shows it in action. Kinda scary, very amazing.

⏰ This copy+paste addition to any prompt ensures your chatbot knows what date and time it is. Great for time-sensitive research, for example.

🌍 Google have added Gemini to their Chrome browser, with loads of new features (like asking Gemini to clarify complex information on a webpage). Soon, they’ll be introducing an agent that can “book a haircut or order your weekly groceries”. We’ll definitely do a proper section about this once it’s rolled out.

Zoomtopia: Event review [ad]

I attended Zoomtopia last week - did you go too? One of my favourite sessions was the Productivity track.

It was a really interesting panel at Zoomtopia with two completely different business owners - Mitch who runs a consulting business and Bernd who's head of IT at a huge engineering firm.

Here are my 3 key takeaways:

1. Content Repurposing
   Mitch records every client call and podcast interview, then asks Zoom AI Companion to turn those transcripts into LinkedIn posts, newsletter articles, even custom proposals. One conversation = weeks of content, without the need for an extra AI note-taker. Definitely one I’ll be trying.
   

2. AI That Actually Holds People Accountable
   Bernd showed how Zoom AI Companion can automatically catch when someone says "I'll handle that" in a meeting and turns it into an actual task…with reminders. This could save so much mental energy tracking what everyone promised to do.
   

3. One Platform Instead of Tool Chaos
   Both of them basically live in Zoom now - meetings, documents, tasks, even phone calls all in one place with AI helping everywhere. Bernd mentioned they even integrated their email and calendar. I think we’re all worried about having too many expensive AI tools - so the ones that offer a lot of use cases in one place will win.

You can register to watch the whole Zoomtopia event on demand right here:

Okay, excuse me while I pick out some outfits for my Zoom avatar. It’s like having a Tamagotchi, but with your own face. And with that rather disturbing image burned into our brains, I’ll see you next week.

Heather and the AIFNT team.