Serviette makes use of visible AI to automate enterprise storytelling

Serviette is an AI-based software for visible storytelling for enterprise individuals to liven up their shows utilizing generative AI.

It comes from Silicon Valley AI veteran Pramod Sharma and Jerome Scholler, who began Osmo greater than a decade in the past to make use of AI to deliver kids’s video games to life on iPads. I lined their rise and exit, and Sharma got here again to me to do an interview on his subsequent massive concept.

Why is it known as Serviette? In case you have an concept and write it on a serviette — the basic begin of many Silicon Valley corporations — then it is going to generate the artwork and presentation to go together with it mechanically.

Los Altos, California-based Serviette has created a software that empowers you to clarify your concepts visually with no effort. You write out your textual content for a enterprise presentation and, utilizing Visible AI, it is going to rapidly flip your textual content content material into visuals and simply regulate the model, colours, fonts, shapes, and design to enhance your storytelling influence.

I watched Sharma do a demo and he took textual content and the software generated stream charts, pie charts and extra for example textual content concepts. And it wasn’t simply producing one thing excellent each time. Serviette provides you the facility to edit the whole lot and make it good, he stated. You’ll be able to modify titles, captions, and different items of an illustration to deliver it into one thing that’s extra exactly what you need, Sharma stated in our interview.

Presently in beta, Serviette works together with your present workflow in Google Docs, Slides, Canva, Slack, Phrase, PowerPoint, E mail, Textual content, and extra. Now not do it’s a must to wait for somebody who is aware of what they’re doing to generate prototypes of your shows. Serviette will constantly introduce new types and designs to satisfy your storytelling wants.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Sharma stated that all of us have concepts, however successfully speaking them and profitable individuals over isn’t any simple feat. As consideration spans shrink and we hit peak data overload, how can we finest talk advanced concepts? Serviette turns your textual content into visuals with out your having to consider the laborious design complexities. 

Serviette is pioneering visible AI that brings influence and enjoyable into enterprise storytelling. It’s designed for the thousands and thousands of pros who promote concepts, writers, educators, and content material creators, Serviette helps you unlock the visible potential in your textual content content material. And it’s for these of us who could also be good writers however are awful at graphics, shows or artistry (raises hand).

“With the iPhone, Apple made it dead simple for anyone to take photos. We aim to do the same thing with graphics,” stated Sharma. “Visuals are powerful, and we’ve designed Napkin so anyone can easily communicate their ideas through imagery.”

It’s not nearly eliminating jobs or eliminating graphic designers. Slightly, Sharma stated that it’s extra about making design extra accessible, enabling you to clarify your concepts with out spending hours creating the best visible and constructing it from scratch. 

The way it works

Right here’s the way it works: 

• Deliver Your Textual content: Paste your current textual content content material or generate textual content from an AI immediate. 
• Generate Visuals: Click on the “spark icon” on any a part of the textual content, and Serviette will rework your content material into advisable visuals. Inside just a few seconds, you’ll have quite a lot of visuals to select from.
• Customise: With Serviette’s built-in enhancing software, you possibly can regulate font, shade, form, design, and extra to satisfy your model or model tips.
• Embed into Your Workflows: So simple as copying and pasting, you possibly can merely take Serviette’s visuals into anyplace you want: Google Slides/Docs, Microsoft Phrase/PowerPoint, Substack, Medium, Slack, Notion, Canva, LinkedIn, X, Instagram and extra.
• Use it in a Range of Use Instances: Create high-quality visuals appropriate for shows, blogs, pitch decks, social content material, newsletters, information and analysis stories, buyer communications, and extra.    

“As someone without design skills, Napkin is super easy and convenient. Whether I need a quick diagram for a blog post or a chart for a presentation, Napkin generates exactly what I’m looking for within seconds,” stated Jason Miller, COO of Sprouts.ai, in a press release. “Before Napkin, we were constrained regarding what graphics we could access. Now, with Napkin, we have a designer at our fingertips, offering unlimited access to enhance our business storytelling with visuals while achieving significant cost and time savings.” 

On the spot visuals to amplify storytelling

Serviette’s huge design catalog already contains greater than 30 visible design classes, akin to thoughts maps, stream charts, Venn diagrams, bar charts, and extra. 

Serviette’s workforce of NLP, AI, and laptop imaginative and prescient builders, who hail from Amazon, Microsoft’s Analysis Lab, GitHub, Google, and Osmo, is difficult at work supporting extra highly effective customizations and distinctive classes, which they’ll proceed to launch within the coming weeks and months. 

Scholler and Sharma bought their earlier firm, Osmo, whose reflective AI is utilized by thousands and thousands of children and lecture rooms and is built-in into merchandise with Disney and Mattel’s Sizzling Wheels. Byju’s acquired it for $120 million in 2019.

Inspiration

In a weblog put up, Sharma stated efficient communication is essential within the office, whether or not you’re pitching an concept, explaining advanced ideas, or brainstorming new methods. How do you ensure that your imaginative and prescient is known and appreciated by others? This problem impressed the workforce to construct Serviette AI.

“We all have great ideas, but sharing them effectively can be a struggle. At Osmo, an AI gaming company Jerome and I founded almost a decade ago, we delighted millions of kids by making learning fun,” Sharma wrote. “Yet, as leaders, we often found ourselves drowning in documents, 100-slide decks, and long research papers. Occasionally, we’d come across a rare visual that truly captured the essence of an idea, sparking those “aha” moments of readability. We realized that visuals are highly effective communication instruments, but they’re not often used.”

He added, “We started wondering why so few people use visuals when they’re such powerful tools for communication. Our theory is that, from an early age, we’re trained to rely on writing. Text editors make it easy for everyone to collaborate and share their thoughts. However, creating visuals is time-consuming and requires skills many of us don’t have. As a result, most people stick to writing, even though visuals can provide a clearer, more impactful perspective of an idea. This is especially true in professional settings where effective communication is very important.”

At Osmo, he stated the founders spent numerous time on communication, studying proposals, writing talks, creating slides, doing analysis papers, and speaking backwards and forwards.

“It’s very daunting to consume all that information. And as we were looking into it, we realized that one thing we always loved about communication was visual.”

“We realized it’s incredibly hard to make good pictures of things that you’re talking about,” he stated. “Most people have been using generative AI for and for social media. That seems like where everybody gravitated at first.”

However the founders thought small enterprise and the enterprise had been the best approach to go together with AI visuals. The graphics can get fairly advanced with interactivity. You’ll be able to specify boundaries of what you need earlier than you submit the thought to the AI.

“We realized is most people know how to write but they don’t know how to create a visual,” Sharma stated.

However making this look simple is the exhausting half.

The workforce is small with 11 individuals and so they spent greater than a 12 months and a half engaged on instruments.

“We realized that most people don’t have the layer of creativity or the time to come up with something,” Sharma stated. “Very few people can actually start from scratch. And only in our third generation did we realize that what people really want is AI.”

“It’s extremely hard. We are building something almost like a visual engine. I give you bunch of information, and you create the right graphic and dynamically create graphics,” Sharma stated.

Slightly than produce wild and imaginative artwork, Serviette focuses on visuals for data. It’s not Salvador Dali.

“We’re trying to complement the written content,” Sharma stated.

The primary model of an AI software got here within the type of a sketching software to make easy diagrams together with your mouse. Nevertheless, the workforce rapidly found that even with one of the best AI serving to within the background, customers don’t wish to sketch dwell with a mouse.

Within the second model, the creators launched a database of visible frameworks like Venn diagrams and pie charts. Customers may concentrate on discovering a visible to make use of that matched their concepts, as a substitute of sketching. However they found that many individuals don’t know which visuals to make use of or easy methods to use them successfully, even when they’ve entry to them.

Lastly, the introduction of Giant Language Fashions (LLMs) offered the proper complement to the workforce’s efforts. They targeted on reworking textual content into visuals mechanically, assembly customers the place they’re most snug – writing textual content. This marked the start of the Serviette AI you see immediately.

Wanting Forward

Simply because the iPhone made it simple for anybody to take high-quality photos, Serviette AI’s mission is to make visible communication simple and accessible to everybody, Sharma wrote.

“We understand it’s a really hard problem, and we have just started, but we are excited about the progress we’ve made so far. We believe we can achieve our mission by focusing on two core principles: deeply understanding text content and generating a wide range of relevant and high-quality visuals,” he wrote.

Accel and CRV are the buyers within the mission. You’ll be able to write them at workforce@serviette.ai and be part of the beta at serviette.ai.