Peggy K's Creator Weekly: YouTube Create app, Microsoft AI Tools, Facebook Profiles

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Peggy K
September 23, 2023

This week is all about AI, as Google, YouTube and Microsoft announce new generative AI tools available now and in the near future. YouTube also launched a new video editing app; there are updates for Facebook, X and Mastodon; and Google Meet meetings and Google Chat have new tools to help foster collaboration.

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10 Years of Tips, Tutorials, and News

This week marks my 10 year blogiversary. Thanks for reading and your support! Click for a look back over the past decade:

10 Years of Creator Tutorials and News!

News, updates and tips for video creators, bloggers, web publishers, and more.

www.peggyktc.com/2023/09/10-year-anniversary-september-2023.html

There have been so many changes over the past decade. I said goodbye to Google+ and Hangouts and a number of other platforms, seen many tech fads come and go, and the launch of many new features.

And I’ve written almost 800 posts, documenting it all.

There’s no way to know what exactly the future will bring, but I know it will be interesting.

New: The YouTube Create App for easy movie editing on Android

This week YouTube launched a video editing app for Android. It’s got a ton of features and is pretty intuitive to use. It works on phones, tablets and Chromebooks with Android apps and a touch screen.

I have an overview here (or watch the video I created with the app).

It’s very full featured, with the ability to add and edit multiple layers of images and videos, add voiceover and music and more. And despite being a mobile app, it lets you create videos in vertical, landscape or square dimensions.

The main limitations I noticed: it only lets you use media stored on your device (so no import from Google Photos in the cloud), it doesn’t sync projects across devices, and some of the buttons are a bit small.

The official YouTube Blog has an interesting interview with design lead Cielo de la Paz on how the app was developed. It was a massive project that received input from thousands of creators in addition to de la Paz who is best known as an iPhone videographer. She said:

I hope creators appreciate the ease and simplicity of using the timeline. We added playfulness along with function, and I think they'll like the creative ingredients we offer, especially the large free audio library.

Note that the app is in beta and currently only available in India, Indonesia, France, Germany, Singapore, South Korea, UK, and the US.

It will eventually be coming to iOS devices and be available in more countries.

AI Tools Coming to YouTube

YouTube also announced several new AI-powered creative tools that should be available in 2024.

  • Dream Screen lets you use text prompts to generate image or video backgrounds for Shorts. This is rolling out to “select creators” this year, and will be more broadly available in 2024.

  • YouTube Studio Research tools that help generate ideas and draft outlines for videos based on the user’s channel and what people are watching across YouTube. They are testing this year and it should be available more broadly next year.

  • Assistive Search in Creator Music that lets you type a description of your content to get music suggestions. This is currently being tested with a small group of creators in the US, and will expand to more creators in more countries “in the near future”.

  • Aloud lets you automatically dub your videos into another language. This is being tested by a small group of creators and will be available to more creators next year. They are testing “European languages”, Hindi, Bahasa Indonesia, and Japanese. Aloud started as an Area 120 project by two long time friends from Sri Lanka.

And in the longer term, YouTube is working on “features that will allow anyone to instantly reimagine their videos by simply typing in an idea to edit their content or remix existing YouTube videos and turn them into something entirely new.”

Google’s Bard AI Chatbot Now Can Answer Questions About Your Docs

Bard, Google’s AI chatbot, now supports Extensions in English.

  • If you give Bard permission, it connects Google Workspace to access your Google Docs, Drive and Gmail.

  • You can connect to Google Maps, Google Hotels and Google Flights for travel planning.

  • You can connect to YouTube for video suggestions.

Does your data remain private? Yes. Google explicitly states: 

  • Your personal Workspace data is not accessed by human reviewers

  • Your personal Workspace data is not used to train Bard

  • Your personal Workspace data is not used to show you ads

  • Your personal Workspace data is “not stored past the time period needed to provide and maintain Bard services”

You can enable Bard Extensions at bard.google.com/extensions 

Also new in Bard:

  • Use the Google It button to double check answers generated by Bard against results in Google Search.

  • If someone shares a link to a Bard conversation, anyone opening the link can continue the conversation.

  • Many Bard features (such as uploading images with Lens) are expanding from English to 40 other languages.

Google Search Advocate John Mueller had Bard write a rap summarizing the emails he received from Google Search Console and I’ve seen worse!

Microsoft Copilot AI Everywhere

Microsoft hosted an event where they announced new AI features and tools for webmasters.

  • Microsoft Copilot, “your everyday AI companion”, will start rolling out next week as part of a free update to Windows 11. It will be accessible from your taskbar or using the Win+C keyboard shortcut.

  • In Windows 11 there are new generative AI tools in Paint, Photos, and Clipchamp to remove backgrounds, generate images, or help you compose scenes.

  • In Outlook, AI can help you write emails, summarize or refine your documents (although “Copilot and advanced AI features” will be “offered at a later date”).

  • Designer can now use generative AI to expand images or backgrounds. It will also be integrated into Word for consumers so you can add images to your documents.

  • For Enterprise customers Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Chat is an AI assistant that answers questions based on your emails, chats and documents, in addition to the web.

    • Copilot in Word helps you draft, summarize and rewrite documents.

    • Copilot in Excel helps analyze, format and edit data.

    • Copilot in Loop can be used for collaboration and team projects.

    • Copilot in OneNote can be used to generate summaries and ask questions about your notes.

    • Copilot in Stream summarizes Stream videos and answers questions.

    • Copilot in OneDrive lets you ask questions about your files.

  • AI in Bing can now use your chat history when giving you results. This can be turned off in your Bing settings.

  • Bing Image Creator is starting to use the updated DALL.E 3 model from OpenAI and integration with Microsoft Designer makes it easy to edit creations.

  • Swiftkey mobile keyboard has AI camera lenses, new AI stickers (Bing Image Creator), grammar and spelling suggestions.

More Video Creator Updates

TikTok is launching a new tool to let creators label AI-generated content. Their policy requires labeling of AI-generated content “that contains realistic images, audio or video”. They are also testing automated labeling of AI-generated content.

Web Publishers

September 27-28 is WordPress Accessibility Day with 24 hours of free live streamed content on how to make your website accessible. It looks like it’s not just for WordPress publishers.

Google updated their SEO guide for web developers to indicate they “recommend not adding meaningful content or symbols using ::before or ::after CSS pseudo-elements, as it might not be used for indexing your pages. Decorative elements are fine.”

Bing supports the NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE tags for limiting what Bing Chat AI uses for training. Implementing these tags should not affect your web pages appearing in the Bing Search results. The NOARCHIVE tag also prevents Google from showing a cached link of your site content in the search results.

Bing Webmaster Tools Performance Report now combines web and chat clicks, and lets you see performance data for Bing Images, Bing Videos, Bing News, and Bing Knowledge Panel. There is also a new Sitemap Coverage Report that can help ensure your site is crawled.

Bing Webmaster Tools is removing the option to disavow links. Bing says they “have invested heavily in developing and improving our artificial intelligence capabilities, which enables us to better understand the context and intent of links, as well as the trustworthiness and authority of their sources.”

Photos and Image Design on the Web

Canva is removing the option to create a team for free accounts starting October 31.

  • To create a new team, you will need to upgrade to Canva for Teams.

  • Existing Teams can continue to be used, but adding or replacing team members requires an upgrade to Canva for Teams.

  • Canva for Teams of up to 5 people is $300 per year, which includes Canva Pro features.

OpenAI is training their new AI image generation tool Dall-E 3, and they note you can request your images or other content be removed from the training data. The new model is also trained to not respond to requests for images in the style of a living artist.

Flickypedia is a new software tool to help streamline sharing of Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. It ensures images retain their correct attribution and licensing information. Learn more.

Social Media

Facebook now supports multiple personal profiles under a single account. Your main profile is still required to be the “name you go by in everyday life”, but the additional profiles can have any name, as long as it does not misrepresent who you are, your age or your location. Professional Mode, Dating, Marketplace and payments are not available for the additional profiles.

Facebook has tweaked their logo, slightly changing the shape of the f and using a brighter shade of blue. Meta posted a detailed article about that change and other bits of the app redesign.

Meta Verified - paid verification - is expanding to businesses on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. In addition to a verified badge, it includes direct support, impersonation monitoring, and features to increase discovery.

Andrew Hutchinson @ Social Media Today covers the latest updates to Threads, which is hoping to get people to use it more frequently. And no, there’s no option for EU users yet.

X is deprecating Circles on October 31. Twitter Circle was launched in August 2022, and let you create a single “Circle” of people to share posts privately with. After October 31 you will no longer be able to add people to your Circle or create new posts limited to your Circle. Presumably content posted to your Circle before that date will still only be visible to Circle members. Oddly, the only way to remove someone from your Circle is to unfollow them. Following them again does not add them back to your Circle. It’s not clear how many people are actually still using their Circle after a bug in April made private Circle posts visible to all their followers in the “For You” feed.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt calculates that both users and posts appear to be down significantly on X, although X does not share exact figures.

Snapchat has more than 5 million paid subscribers to Snapchat+, which gives early access to new AI features, “Streak resources'' and other features. Snapchat+ launched in June 2022.

The Twitter alternative temporarily named T2 is now called Pebble (pebble.is). What sets it apart is a new Ideas tab that offers personalized AI-generated suggestions for new posts. There’s an overview from Wired with more details. It’s still a tiny platform, with 15,000 users. CEO Gabor Cselle, former Google and Twitter product manager, says “he is taking seriously lessons learned from working on Google+, the search giant’s failed social network from a decade ago, that launching with a “big bang” doesn’t work.” It is opening up sign-ups for all X users, but will vet the content of their X posts for compliance with Pebble’s terms.

The latest version of Mastodon has improved search, and now includes search of posts. You can filter search by those with a link or media, language and more. Having your posts appear in the search results is opt-in, so check your profile’s security settings.

Mastodon also has an improved sign-up flow, that helps new users get their profile set up and find people to follow. And now if you open a post while signed out or on a different server, it more easily redirects you to your own home server where you can share, reply or bookmark the post.

Communication and Collaboration

Google Meet meetings now let you install third-party add-ons to use services inside a meeting:

  • Read.ai : meeting note taking

  • Lucidspark: virtual whiteboard

  • Miro: digital collaboration

  • Polly: Polls, surveys, Q&A

  • Figma: Whiteboard, brainstorming, design

  • Confluence: notes and collaboration

This is available to both personal Google accounts and Google Workspace accounts.

In a Google Meet meeting you can now pair your video tile with someone else in the meeting. It can be used, for example, to pair a speaker with a sign language interpreter. Note that paired tiles are not captured in Meet’s recordings or when live streamed to YouTube. They are also not available in breakout rooms. Learn more.

Google Workspace customers that have in-organization live streaming of Google Meet meetings can now turn off Q & A in the livestream.

Google Chat is getting a new look, with chat bubbles and clearer separation between incoming and outgoing messages. Yes, this looks much more like every other chat app.

Google Workspace users can manage membership in Google Chat Spaces using Google Groups. People can be added and removed from a Space by updating the Group membership. More information.

When collaborating on a Google Slides presentation “live pointers” lets collaborators see each others’ cursors in real time.

More

PetaPixel covers a new report that shows 95% of NFTs are worthless.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay. Free for commercial use.
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/network-circuit-board-circuit-trace-5987786/