Five AI Tools that Everyone is Talking About

Using AI tools for business is starting to become commonplace.  Many companies are already unlocking the power of AI, utilising tools to automate mundane tasks, speed up others and ultimately utilising the tools’ for their main purpose: to free up staff for higher value work. When wielded correctly, AI tools will enhance productivity and could contribute to a colleague's overall job satisfaction, because, let’s face it, many jobs have some tasks that are a little bit, well… less than interesting!

Over the years at Rocketmakers we have already found our own ways to speed up menial tasks, you can read more about how the tools we’ve created save us time and our client’s money here.  In 2023, we have made more of a commitment to using AI tools and now all our crew have access to and subscriptions for the AI tools we’re using as a company.

If you’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed by AI tools and are not sure where to begin, we’ve summarised five tools we use below to help get you started.

ChatGPT - https://chat.openai.com/

What is ChatGPT?

Chat GPT is a large language model chatbot-esque AI tool.  It was launched in November 2022 by Open AI and is the AI tool that is currently taking the world by storm.  GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer" which is what ChatGPT uses to generate its responses to questions.  You can prompt it in several ways, for example, writing code, or basic copy, but it can do so much more than that.  If you haven’t yet had a chance to use it, I urge you to do so as it will blow you away.  You can get very creative with it, for example a prompt could be: “write a song about cheese in the style of a cowboy”, or literally anything else!

How do we use Chat GPT?

Chat GPT is used by most of our crew members for different reasons.  

• For our developers, it's great for technical and general questions. It helps developers write functions in coding languages they are unfamiliar with and can even be used in place of a backend API for prototyping as it can return JSON data as well as plain text.
• The designers use it mostly for writing placeholder content for things like marketing websites, or occasionally for asking questions about a particular subject/domain - it’s quite handy for breaking down complex concepts
• In Marketing, I use it for help with writing copy, mostly when a sentence or paragraph I’ve written doesn't sound right and I need a helping hand with tweaks.

Github Copilot - https://github.com/features/copilot

What is Github Copilot?

Github Copilot turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions across dozens of languages.  It is an AI programmer which speeds up the process of writing code by using an auto-complete style of writing.  You can either start to write the code yourself and it will complete it for you, or write out what you want the code to do in natural language and it will generate the code on your behalf.  Github Copilot was developed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Github.

How do we use Github Copilot?

All of our software engineers have a subscription to this service. It integrates directly into our Integrated Development Environments (IDE's) and works across all programming languages. It learns your code style and can offer very contextually aware suggestions. It will help you complete blocks of code, write tests, check for errors and write documentation. It’s by far the biggest 'breakthrough' tech in tooling for our dev-team.

Midjourney - https://www.midjourney.com/

Midjourney is an image generation AI, currently accessed exclusively through Discord. Midjourney generates extremely detailed images driven from prompts from photographs and landscapes all the way through to user experience design and product logos. 

How do we use Midjourney?

Our design team use Midjourney as a tool to generate ideas, or to quickly mock something up. The vast majority of what it produces needs tweaking in some way, but it is an amazing starting point to get the creative juices flowing!

SparkAI - https://leastsquares.io/docs/unity/spark

What is SparkAI? 

Spark AI is a suite of AI tooling for Unity which helps refactor code (similar to Copilot).  It also adds some Unity specific features like Shader generation, AI debugging, dialog writing, character interactions and character name and background generation.

How do we use SparkAI?

Spark helps accelerate various Unity processes when we’re building 3D or immersive experiences. Shaders and Shadergraph specifically are normally time consuming to handcraft but with Spark just a couple of prompts or phrases can take away a lot of the heavy lifting.

ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io/

What is ElevenLabs?

ElevenLabs is voice synthesis API. It works in two ways:

• lets you create copies of people's voices from a very small amount of audio data 
• lets you design your own voices by setting various parameters. The resulting voices are extremely realistic and you can synthesis any text extremely quickly

How do we use ElevenLabs?

We use ElevenLabs in our internal PORTRAIT project to rapidly synthesise extremely convincing human voices. This is crucial as the core purpose of the project is to try to simulate authentic conversations with AI powered characters and get that experience as close to real life as possible. For this to work we need low latency and believable speech, both of which Eleven Labs excels at.