You (Version 2)

This Month

• NEW Bootcamp: Become an AI Trainer

• Want to join the AI for Non-Techies team?

• Clone Yourself in 3 Ways:

  • Your Face

  • Your Voice

  • Your Brain

• Beware: The Dangers

🎓 Fancy Becoming an AI Trainer?

I’m fully booked up to mid-Feb 2025. It’s a fantastic feeling, but when a big brand comes to me looking for AI training before then, I struggle with who to refer them onto. There’s a real lack of top quality AI trainers around. Couple that with massive demand, and we have ourselves a serious opportunity.

For those looking to reskill, upskill or who are just plain curious, I’m running a brand new bootcamp: Become an AI Trainer, on December 11-13 this year. I’ll be 3 × 90 min workshops online, with homework tasks in between.

Find out more by clicking on the image below or go to this link.

👀 I’m Looking for Some Help

Speaking of AI trainers, I’m looking to find a UK-based trainer to come and help me at AI for Non-Techies. I’ll mentor this person personally, and they’ll be working with big brand clients in the UK and Europe.

The role will include:

• In-person training (in-house and at client premises)

• Online training - from 2 hour snapshots to 12 month programs

• Live sessions on the AI for Non-Techies Learning Hub membership site

It’s offered on a part-time, freelance basis to begin with.

I’m looking for someone who is full of warmth, energy and enthusiasm, and has a real love and fascination with all things AI. You’ll If you’re interested, come along to the bootcamp and make yourself known, so we can have a chat about it.

Right, that’s the AIFNT news sorted, let’s get on with the show.

👬 Clone Yourself in 3 Ways

How many times have you wished you could clone yourself? A second you to take all that endless pressure off. I’m madly busy right now, so it’s something that massively appeals to me. Same results, less time? Yes PLEASE.

I’m sure I’m not the only one, we’re going to explore 3 very different tools to create that second you:

🎤 Clone your voice with ElevenLabs
😀 Clone your face with HeyGen
🧠 Clone your brain with Coachvox

Let’s have a look, shall we?

😀 Clone your Face: HeyGen

Price: 1 avatar for free
Website: https://www.heygen.com/

For a good couple of years now, we’ve had AI avatars. You’ve probably seen a few of them around - they look like this:

At first, they were jerky, creepy and unrealistic, but they’ve been changing fast. They’re actually real people; actors who have sold their digital likeness to HeyGen. (Quite why anyone would do that, I’ve no clue).

Recently, they got even more realistic, with much stronger movements and emotions, in realistic and more useful settings:

The problem is, these avatars are very finite, and there are a LOT of people using them. I keep seeing the same avatar faces popping up on my LinkedIn feed - especially in ads.

There’s one way to stay truly original: create your own avatar. Now it’s easier than ever to create your own moving, talking, multi-lingual AI you. Just a couple of minutes of video, a little waiting time and then there it is. Zero technical skill needed to get lifelike results.

Step 1: Go to https://app.heygen.com/avatars
Step 2: Pick Create Avatar
Step 3: Follow the simple instructions - it guides you through
Step 4: Wait a bit for it to be generated, mine was overnight but sometimes it’s much quicker

Meet AI Heather (and check out her sassy eye rolls) - she kind of gets more realistic in the second half, I reckon:

But what are the actual use cases for these things?

Right now - I’d say very little. The LinkedIn ads I’ve seen with AI avatars feel weird and wooden beyond a couple of seconds.

In the very near future though, maybe in 3-6 months or so, when you can control hand gestures, vocal intonation and emotion a little more, I think they’ll be used for:

• Social media videos

• Sales outreach videos

• On-demand training

• Client onboarding

• Next-level proposals

• Employee onboarding

• Cold email outreach

• Newsletters

It brings up a big issue around transparency, though. Should we always be saying “This was made using AI” when we make stuff like this?

On one hand, it protects us from misinformation. These avatars will soon be indistinguishable from real humans, so it’ll erode our ability to trust anything we see.

I spoke at the conference of a big brand recently, and they were talking about their stance on AI disclosure over the next year. They have decided that AI usage does not need to be disclosed, because AI is a tool just like the internet: we wouldn’t say “we used the internet to make this”, would we?

🎤 Clone your Voice: ElevenLabs

Price: $5/mo for voice cloning, but you get lots in the free version
Website: https://elevenlabs.io/

I’ve got a Brummy accent (meaning I’m from Birmingham in the UK). It’s an accent that is consistently voted horribly unattractive over here - and was once voted “less intelligent than complete silence” in a national newspaper, so you might wonder why I would want to clone it. But hey ho, I wanted to give it a go.

Voice is tearing ahead in the world of generative AI, as anyone who’s tried the podcast feature on Google’s NotebookLM will agree. It’s much more believable than the visuals, with almost perfect intonation and timbre at times, i.e. it’s more useful right now.

Elevenlabs leads the way when it comes to AI voice.

Look around the site and you’ll find hundreds of ways to create, edit and manipulate both real and synthetic voices.

You can even have your favourite books read using real, iconic celebrity voices:

The feature we’re interested in for this newsletter is the ability to clone your own voice, which is available on the $5/mo Starter Plan (or for an even more professional one, you need to upgrade to the Creator plan, which is $11/mo. A lot cheaper than your average $20/mo AI tool.

As with HeyGen, it’ll need a sample of you in order to be “trained”. You can either talk live for 2 minutes (I read a book out), or upload some existing audio for a bit more of a natural effect. You then describe the voice in text, agree to the privacy terms and you’ve got your cloned voice.

Naturally, I tried this, but I thought the results were mixed. It both sounds like me and doesn’t. I’m guessing there aren’t that many examples of a Brummy accent in its training data, so it doesn’t know how to replicate it. I sound…posh.

🧠 Clone your Brain: Coachvox

Price: $99/mo - but there’s a free 14 day trial
Website: https://coachvox.ai/

Aimed at coaches, mentors and consultants, this clever tool creates a ChatGPT-esc version of you, that your clients/customers can then interact with. You can use it to:

Add value by answering your client’s questions 24/7
Create new leads by using it as lead magnet (it collects data for you)
Build a new revenue stream by charging for access

It’s actually really quick to get set up. It’s just 3 steps:

1. Set the personality (the questions help you a lot with this bit)

2. Upload your knowledge into the Content Bank

3. Fine tune it by playing with it and rating the answers

The bit that takes a while is organising all the stuff to put into your Content Bank. If you’re more organised than me (which is most people) you’ll find this more quickly.

Click below to meet and play with Jodie AI, an AI business coach set up on Coachvox by its Founder, the talented Jodie Cook. (Bear in mind the first question you ask takes a little longer to respond, then it’s fine after that).

☠️ The Dangers

Of course, with all this easy, non-techie cloning, there are major risks:

• How will your image/voice/knowledge be used by the AI tool? Is it safe?

• What about deepfakes?

When it comes to deepfakes, it’s definitely tougher to clone someone’s face, as you need to say a code out loud when you start recording with HeyGen. But they also released a ‘photo avatar’ tool recently, and there doesn’t seem to be any guardrails there, it just works from a photo. Same goes with voice - they don’t stop you from uploading anything.

With all AI tools, I highly recommend you do your due diligence - check what they’re saying about the security of your data. In fact, I interviewed a tech lawyer and two AI tool founders about this topic - here’s what they said.

Generally, I’d say never upload anything sensitive to a free tool. The free ones openly use your data for training, i.e. your data could get into the wrong hands. I’d only use paid, reputable tools with sensitive materials and I’d make sure I’d dug into their security before using them first. It’s a faff, but it’ll be worth it.

So, what do you reckon?
Will you be making a You (Version 2)?

Until next time folks,