🔍️ Google's Ad Revolution

PLUS: Microsoft’s AI reaches Indian villages

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Greetings, fellow humans. 👋

This is Not A Bot - the newsletter about AI that was definitely not written by AI. I’m Haroon, CEO of Autoblocks and founder of AI For Anyone, and I share the latest news, tools, and resources from the AI space.

Happy Thursday. Until last night, this section of the newsletter focused on Ron DeSantis announcing his presidential run via Twitter Spaces and thinking about AI’s impact on the upcoming elections.

But now, we have more important business to talk about:

Nicolas Cage is the new Superman.

Discuss.

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🧵 In today's edition:

  • 🔍️ Google's Ad Revolution

  • 🗣 Spotify introduces AI-voiced ads

  • 🌎 Adobe is taking over

  • 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

🔍️ Google's Ad Revolution

Google

While Microsoft was having its moment in the spotlight yesterday, Google released some big updates of its own.

Ads:

Imagine Ads, not just targeted but specific to exactly what you typed in the search bar. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Advancing their automatically created assets (ACA) for search ads they launched last year, Google will now be able to use content from landing pages and existing ads to generate headlines and descriptions.

For ad managers, Google is also introducing a natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads.

It will help you generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and assets for ads - simply by feeding it your landing page.

Product Studio:

Product photography is often expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes not worth the money spent.

With Product Studio, Google is taking away all those sunk costs, allowing merchants to:

  • Create product imagery for free using generative AI

  • Remove backgrounds or improve the quality of small or low-resolution images.

The feature will be available in the next few months and will also be available on Google and YouTube apps on Shopify.

The search and ads game continues to evolve 👀

Read more: TechCrunch

🗣 Spotify introduces AI-voiced ads

Ad reads have become a popular part of podcasting, often generating podcasters more money than their YouTube views or Spotify streams.

Spotify is looking to make ad reading a smoother experience for podcasters, reportedly developing podcast ads that will be read using an AI version of a human's voice.

The workflow involves getting permission from a human to use their likeness and then using a model of their voice to develop ad reads.

It’s a pretty clever way to:

  • Reduce the time podcasters spend on ad reads

  • Make sure Spotify is not liable for using someone’s likeness without permission.

The ad’s space sure is getting a big AI makeover.

Read more: Gizmodo

🌎 Adobe is taking over

From Adobe. This is unbelievable

Adobe isn’t here to take part. Adobe is here to take over.

For now, consider the Photoshop game officially “taken over.” I don’t know what a photo is anymore. I have no idea what to believe.

Firefly is being added to Adobe Photoshop, allowing users to augment photos using generative AI through the “generate fill” feature.

The idea is simple: you highlight a part of the photo you want to edit, tell the AI what you want (or don’t want) there, and boom - you have a perfectly edited photo that looks like it was the original.

Here’s a cool demo showing off its capability.

Absolutely unreal tech.

Read more: The Verge

🤑 AI Fundraising News

UK’s Moonfire VC raises its second fund at $115M to invest in early-stage startups in AI, Web3, AR/VR, and other sectors.

Figure Raises $70 Million Series A to ‘Deploy Humanoids Into the Workforce’

🗞️ Byte size: AI article summaries

Disclaimer: AI is (partially) used to summarize these articles.

Microsoft’s AI reaches Indian villages [TechCrunch] - Microsoft is partnering with OpenNyAI and AI4Bharat to create Jugalbandi, a chatbot that brings information access to remote Indian villages in 10 indigenous languages through WhatsApp. The chatbot uses language models from AIBharat and reasoning models from Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to respond to questions in text and voice. (Read more)

Google to work with Europe on stop-gap ‘AI Pact’ [TechCrunch] - Google CEO Sundar Pichai has agreed to a “stop-gap ‘AI Pact’” with the European Union’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, who made a public statement after his meeting with Pichai. The AI Pact is a set of voluntary rules or standards while formal regulations are still being worked on. The EU “wants to be proactive and work on an AI pact ahead of incoming EU legislation set to apply to AI.” (Read more)

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As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

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