By Wyatt Bechtel, ACN Board Member
In communications, artificial intelligence (AI) is making a significant impact on the way people work. AI-generated images have sparked criticism on social media, and traditional media outlets like Sports Illustrated are coming under fire for using AI to replace journalists. Despite these concerns, AI does have a lot of potential to be a time saver and improve our communication skills.
Here are a few AI tools that I’ve used to help me with a variety of communication tasks:
Grammarly – Provides editing service powered by AI to enhance your writing. I’ve used the free and subscription versions of Grammarly to help with long-form writing. I see it as a better version of spell check on Microsoft Word. It does an excellent job of pointing out improvements in word choice and where you should include a comma. With the subscription version, you can even hone your voice to ensure you are using active voice instead of passive voice, which tends to be a struggle for me when writing about scientific results. It also scores your writing for correctness, so you’ll know if you are improving.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer – The AI tool is excellent for brainstorming headlines that work best for online audiences. I’ve used it to decide when I’m stuck between different headlines or versions of a headline with different wording that will have the greatest results. The headline analyzer from CoSchedule will score headlines for blogs, YouTube, email, podcasts, social media and more. It scores your headlines based on various factors, including search engine optimization (SEO), word count, clarity and sentiment.
Otter.ai – An audio transcription service that implements AI. As an editor, I routinely used the free service when it had unlimited access, and it was a major time saver versus transcribing interviews myself. A free version still allows 300 monthly transcription minutes but is limited to 30 minutes per clip. For a monthly fee, you can get additional minutes to conduct more transcripts with a longer length per recording. Transcribing complicated topics with terms specific to agriculture may not be super accurate.
Rev – Offers an AI transcription service that costs a fee of $0.25 per minute with a turnaround of 5 minutes. I’ve used this service to transcribe a podcast recording on cattle breeding featuring multiple people, and it did a good job of accurately and quickly transcribing the interview. Rev also has transcripts conducted by humans that are more accurate, but they come at a fee of $1.50 per minute and take longer than the AI transcript. The service does offer video subtitles in English and, for an additional fee, will do subtitles in up to 17 different languages. Between Rev and Otter.ai, my preference is to use Rev.
What AI communications tools have you used? Let us know by emailing the Byline editor, [email protected] – Bechtel is a PR Supervisor at Broadhead