Digital Horizons

How AI Avatars Will Change Content Creation Forever

• James Walker & Brian Hastings

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Ever wondered if you could tell a real person from an AI-generated avatar? Prepare for an eye-opening journey as we explore the uncanny realism of AI avatars created through HeyGen. Setting up these lifelike avatars takes less than five minutes, and they can mimic human gestures and speech so convincingly that distinguishing them from real footage is almost impossible. We'll share our firsthand experiences with HeyGen, marvelling at its ease of use and rapid setup, and then dive into its game-changing applications in digital marketing, lead generation, and staff training. We also tackle the pressing societal and ethical implications of this rapidly evolving technology, highlighting HeyGen's unique features like multilingual and multi-accent support, and its seamless integration with ChatGPT for automated content creation.

Looking to supercharge your marketing strategies with personalized video content? This episode uncovers how AI-driven video generation can transform client interactions, training sessions, and webinars by incorporating custom audio and dynamic video creation. Learn about the power of dynamic video for high-volume applications like sales outreach, with the added personalized touch through CRM integration. We also spotlight innovative uses for universities and businesses, showcasing how early adopters of this technology can gain a competitive edge. As a fun finale, we introduce an intriguing experiment involving AI-generated outros—can you guess which of us is the real deal? Tune in, comment with your guesses, and immerse yourself in the future of AI avatar and personalized video marketing.

Check out the video on our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalHorizonsOfficial

The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:

James Walker - Managing Director Walker Hill Digital
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous

Speaker 1:

The squinting the eye movements, the movements.

Speaker 2:

yeah, it's just. It's learnt it from watching just two minutes of video, so Incredible.

Speaker 1:

How are we going to believe?

Speaker 2:

political videos from now on or anything from a celebrity.

Speaker 1:

This is absolutely incredible. This is so good.

Speaker 2:

Today we're talking about AI avatar generation and just how fucking good it is Like blown away. We've just tested this tool. So normally we look at some of these tools and we're like, hey, this is kind of cool, but this one is kind of like it makes you a little bit worried about what the power of this is going to be in terms of future in preparation for this episode, I looked at a few YouTube videos of people who have tried these avatars and I could clearly tell it was an avatar of that YouTuber.

Speaker 1:

This one is different. This one I had to pause. I had to watch it through twice to spot the difference. This is a game changer.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I mean, I showed a few people around the office today and they just thought I was just showing them a video of myself and they were wondering why? Because I film a lot of content. They're like why are you showing me this? I've got better stuff to be doing right now, but this video is. I mean, what we're going to do is go through the process to understand how this was created and then, I guess, talk about some use cases as to how we feel that this could be used in terms of I mean, we're talking about AI, but we're also talking about digital marketing, marketing in general, and how this can impact your marketing campaigns, and then maybe we might finish on just some of, I guess, maybe the concerns and worries that might have about this kind of technology that we're looking at right now because it is so powerful.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, my brain immediately goes to the positives of how we could use it for lead generation course materials, staff training, video production at scale. There's so many potentials for it. Obviously there's going to be political and wider society issues, but that's not where my brain immediately goes, so I'm so excited to get into it and share with you guys what this looks like.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I mean, what we're talking about is a platform called HeyGen. It is a AI video avatar that you can create, and I just went through the process of setting this up, which you would have just seen in the opening here, and the process of doing it was so simple, so it literally took me less than five minutes to go from creating an account to having that video that you've just watched up and running and so sign up for HeyGen. I think there's even a free trial that I was able to create this with, so it didn't even cost anything to see how the quality of what was going on, and then it just asked me to upload two minutes of video of me talking to the camera.

Speaker 2:

So I mean being that we're creating content all the time. That was probably a little bit easier for myself, because you've got a whole bunch of backlog of content that I was able to just pull from an upload. But it basically was me sitting in this scene, sitting in this chair, where I'm now talking to the camera, so it's not like an avatar that you can just put wherever and anything like that's the scene.

Speaker 1:

It's a sure you have a pre-recorded scene and it will move your face and mouth and arms within that scene correct yes, and I mean that was one option.

Speaker 2:

There was another option where you could actually be walking around and it gave instructions as to how to film that content as well, and I had an example of a guy walking through a park or something to a camera, and so that was also an option there. But I just went for what I already had available because I was trying to pull this together quite quickly. That's incredible. That's what's come about In terms of the audio side of things. There was two options, two options. I could either type out a script and then it had all different, like I mean English, but it had all the different accents, so it could have done Australian, english, american English, british, whatever, or any other language you can think of. I mean, we might put a clip of this in the video here and show what this video looks like, with me talking in a different language to see how well it actually does that as well.

Speaker 2:

I mean it's going to look weird for me if I'm speaking Chinese in this video as well, and how it would be interesting to see how natural it looks.

Speaker 1:

I'm imagining Spanish Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story when they flick his switch, that'd be awesome.

Speaker 2:

We'll pull that up and let's flip and see what that looks like. So there was an option of the script which is, I think, super powerful because that's where we'll get into the use cases, but that's where you could just generate content at scale.

Speaker 2:

It has a direct plug-in to ChatGPT as well. Generate content at scale. It has a direct plugin to chat GPT as well, so you don't even have to write the content for yourself, and then you can create the video content, which is super cool. The option that I did to have my voice on there was I just recorded what I wanted the AI to say.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that probably helped with how natural it seemed and sounded, as opposed to some of the YouTube videos of AI avatars where they were using the dynamically audio generated stuff. But for the quality that came out of this using your pre-recorded, except for one cut which I thought was a cut in the video, not a glitch.

Speaker 2:

So what I think that happened there, though, is I've fumbled my words, so I feel that it's because I was reading the script and recording it and I sort of fumbled it a little bit. So I think, that's why it glitched out a little bit.

Speaker 1:

It did cut as well.

Speaker 2:

But it cut it quite well. I mean, it could have just been a bad edit.

Speaker 1:

If you've ever watched Digital Horizons, they cut me about 35 times per sentence.

Speaker 2:

Well, that's because you've got to re-say everything, so I't tried the text-to-speech side of things, but I feel that if I actually typed it out, then that's going to be really smooth because, it's just going to be reading out what was said there rather than trying to mimic what I was saying through the microphone.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I mean, the technology is super cool and it works. I mean, that's a video I would actually use in a marketing campaign. I can't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to use well, not the actual video, but the quality of video is something that I would be comfortable putting out in terms of campaigns.

Speaker 1:

So there's obviously many different areas. You could use this and, before we get into that, just getting back to the process that you went through, you said it was really easy, but was there any part of it that didn't meet your expectations or that was a bit you know? Will the typical marketer find this to be a pretty easy process to do?

Speaker 2:

I think it'd be so simple. Like anybody, you don't even need a bill of market. I mean, if you, if you've got access to a computer, and I mean a microphone and a camera, you can, you can create this in a few minutes. It didn't even and what I was expecting it to when it said provide two minutes of video. I thought it would have been scripted Like it would have told me hey, you need to say these things or you need to do this to get the outcome.

Speaker 1:

So it wasn't even a script that you had to hear all the ways you say S's and T's and everything.

Speaker 2:

No, I just recorded two minutes of footage from a couple of weeks ago. And that was it, and it was just me sitting here, Dawn, you know, sitting in that scene. But here, Dawn, you know sitting in that scene. But there was nothing following anything that, any guidance at all. I think that the walking around one had a bit more structure around it. I mean, the only thing it was saying is make sure you're in good lighting and it's quiet and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:

But I mean, it's expected if you're going to create a video anyway, right, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

Now it's. That's really quite scary that anyone could be training an AI video avatar without even knowing it. If someone has video of you, sitting in a quiet spot. That's correct you know if you've got some video of your boss, you could get them on camera saying that you deserve a pay rise. Yeah, your landlord saying we're going to lower the rent, so you can have it on video. That's just wild.

Speaker 2:

Very big future problem for everybody.

Speaker 2:

So I guess, like I mean, the technology is good, as we've worked out here, so then how are we going to use it?

Speaker 2:

So what are going to be some really effective ways that you think about, like all the time constraints that you have as a business owner, as a marketer, as an entrepreneur, that you know you've got all the other shit you want to be doing, but then you're like I wish I was creating all this content as well.

Speaker 2:

I wish I had time to create their onboarding process or onboarding course or whatever it is that you want to do. This now gives you that power to do it, because all you need to do is set up for two minutes and then you can then start using ChatGPT to help create your onboarding documents. So I'd say that that's probably the first instance I'm going to be using it for is starting to help us with a custom onboarding experience for our clients, and being that we can then incorporate dynamic fields into it so we could make sure that's pulling the data, say, from HubSpot or CRM the customer, our client's name. It can then tailor the content to actually be talking to them. So it is going to look like a very tailored piece of content for each person.

Speaker 1:

So I see it splitting into two categories of use the version where you upload your own audio, where something needs to be clear enough and well-presented enough that you would spend the time to record your own audio, where something needs to be clear enough and well presented enough that you would spend the time to record your own audio.

Speaker 1:

And then the dynamic video generation which can be used from your text being added, where you've trained an avatar and you've got people in your marketing team or other people making videos on your behalf, even automating that process through HubSpot or your lead generation platforms, like you said, adding those dynamic fields, which is coming back to the high quality and I say high quality, but the other version is still quite believable.

Speaker 1:

But the high quality version where you've recorded the audio maybe that's a voice recording or a screen recording that you've done and you wanted to add your picture in the bottom corner presenting to camera of like a loom video or a training video, but you never recorded anything. You just recorded yourself, your screen while you move things around and recorded the audio, enhancing so many potential videos that you have an audio message after you've met a client and you just wanted to send them a video wrap-up. You could create that audio message and just load it in and create a video from that in situ in the studio, where it looks quite amazing but it's still using your voice. Then there's presentations for events or presentations that you wanted to record and host as a webinar, let's say. Those sorts of things are possible where it doesn't require that dynamic insertion of many different variables. But then there's the high volume stuff which is-.

Speaker 2:

Sales outreach like mass volume sales outreach. Imagine you went to an event and then you were able to send a personalized video to every single person at that event in their inbox five minutes later. And that's all you're going to be doing is pulling from your HubSpot or your CRM and then having a pre-written script and then just being able to send that out to everybody. Like I think that would just be such a powerful personal touch because I mean, to be honest, they're not going to know it was AI generated, but I mean it might be worthwhile mentioning it but just shows an additional level of, I guess, personalization to that experience that you've had with these people.

Speaker 1:

I think immediately, it's going to be impressive as marketing agencies if we start including this sort of stuff in our marketing to prospective clients, because that's probably the first place you'd expect to see it that cutting edge marketing and video generation. I'm even thinking an example for a university that we work with. We do a lot of their email marketing automation. Imagine, following an open day, everyone who attended and who they know, what sort of university course they were considering having a dynamic video from the lecturers or the key people at the event. Hell, even if you captured video at a stall at the event of the prospective student themselves and then dynamically created a video of them talking back to them, yeah, I think filming students might get in a bit of trouble there.

Speaker 1:

If they're at least university students. But if they're interested in that type of field and you said, you know, ask them to participate in this thing. Imagine getting a video of you from the future saying I'm you, if you've joined this, you know, if you signed up to this university degree, this is what you could experience. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And how weird getting a video of you saying something else back to them. That's right and that could be a cool, a reason to attract people over at conferences and market stalls and things like that, because everyone's looking for those reasons to bring someone over and attract them to talk to you at a booth or something like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I really feel like this is kind of like a bit of a secret weapon at the moment. Right Like at some point not too far off, it's going to be everywhere, like you're not going to be able to believe anything. You're seeing that's been like video content, whatever, being that, how powerful this technology is. So I feel like right now is the time to start getting ahead of it, start using it, because at some point, just like spam on every sort of scale, you are using this at mass sort of at a mass level in terms of, say, I don't know whatever. If you're trying to use this on a way to accelerate your growth on sales or whatever, you want to sort of be the first one doing it.

Speaker 2:

Otherwise it's just going to be like oh, it's another one of those AI guys that have just done the same thing, like when you get. I used to get emails and it used to be like hi, sir, I still get quite a few of those emails, but now it's actually hi, james, you know, and that personalization got into emails and now it's just the normal.

Speaker 1:

If someone doesn't say that, you're kind of annoyed.

Speaker 2:

I still get from salespeople where they've taken one photo four years ago of them holding two coffees and one has my name on it dynamically inserted.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it was cool. It was cool then and now I'm like there's no coffee, you're not even in the city. This will have that, you know, first to market advantage or first mover advantage, while people aren't picking up on it that it is fake or auto-generated.

Speaker 2:

I mean there's still some effort going into this though, right, I don't feel like it's a completely like oh, they didn't think about me. I mean you're not. Well, I mean some people probably will set it out to just a million different people and hope something's going to come back on this mass program. But I mean, if you're using it as part of your client acquisition strategy I mean we were just talking about before the use case so you can integrate into Shopify and then you could be like hey, thanks for your purchase, really happy that you're now a customer of ours. We'd love if you could give us a review. Yeah, like something like that and that looks personalized from the owner of the Shopify store. More likely to go and jump on and give those guys a review than I would if I just get a generic Yopo email that says, hey, greatest out of five out of five. I mean that's sort of the kind of stuff that I feel that people should start taking advantage of now, because we're going to see it everywhere.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. And the power of that video, that post-purchase video that is either recommending new products or asking for a review that says your name and what you ordered, it will be much more powerful than just a generic request video for a review. The power of that personalization in video is going to make the sort of the watch percentages and the watch completion, but also the engagement rates, peak through the roof. If we see this volume of improvement from a static image ad to a video ad, imagine a tailored and customized video ad to an existing customer it's going to the potential is endless.

Speaker 2:

It is, isn't it? I mean just a thought, then as well is in terms of upsell opportunities you could have on your post-purchase email. Hi, I'm you know whatever owner of store. I just noticed you've just bought this. If you buy this right now, in the next 24 hours, we know like we'll give you a discount and, using your and using your AI, knowing if someone does buy this, they're likely to purchase this one and just inserting those products into it dynamically, based on the product that they're buying again.

Speaker 1:

it's just another massive way to increase your average order value and personalised I think the other thing you mentioned at the beginning was lead and prospect nurturing or prospect, you know, warming prospects up to have a higher likelihood at conversion. But that would need to be prospects who'd already given their email address. Let's say, in a B2B environment. Someone's contacted Walker Hill Digital via the website. We talked about an AI calling bot a few weeks ago.

Speaker 1:

This could be an automated video that is sent to them via email introducing James or the employee at Walker Hill Digital that's going to speak to them in the meeting, introducing a little bit of background about the company and its size and structure and what it does and how it's different. Not replacing that first meeting, but getting people excited for that first meeting so that when they come into the first presentation or the discovery meeting with you guys or with now so with any B2B service they're already a little bit further sold or excited about what they're going to hear. You can get straight into what they need and understanding their specific issues and you be ahead of the other one or two agencies that they're probably looking at. People will think I want my marketing to be like that, I want to have that in my marketing and we've never experienced anything like that before. But that's that first mover advantage it is, you need to get in sooner rather than later.

Speaker 2:

And so I guess thinking about well, the technology is cool, we know these are some use cases for it, but what are the concerns around this? Like I already know, when I'm uploading stuff on YouTube, there's a button now that says has any of this content been AI generated? Which, for the first time, we're going to have to tick when we're uploading this into YouTube. It's going to be interesting to see how YouTube deals with that in terms of are we going to get in front of anybody when we're uploading this video Because it is using AI generated content? I know that on social media platforms, they're also labeling AI generated content as AI. So yeah, will that?

Speaker 1:

limit the effectiveness.

Speaker 1:

Because that's one other use case that we didn't really delve into, which was ads and organic social calendars, you know, for the clients, like a home builder, let's say, where it's really difficult to get that person, the business owner, in front of the camera a couple of times a month, with them trained. We can just ask it to answer questions and create a social content calendar with our client's base and video for them, get them to approve it and then post it. But if it's going to be limited by the social platforms because it's known to be AI generated, is it going to be worth doing?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it may not get the reach that you're looking for. It might be better to actually use other formats, but I guess this is all going to be stuff that we're going to be testing and finding out. Well, you know, how is this going to impact our performance campaigns?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and should they limit AI generated video if it's done for the right reasons or done with the consent of the person pushing the video? It's just another way of recording it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, apart from just flooding the internet with more junk.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

But what is the negative? I mean, if you and I wanted to create a promo for this episode right now and we wanted it to be fully AI generated, is that hurting anybody by it being AI generated or by it not being authentically recorded in real life? Where does that matter in terms of what people's perception of the value of the content is? As well, if it is generated, even though we've taken the time to set it all up, type out the scripts, everything we just were feeling a bit sick that day and couldn't get in the studio to record it. Like, is that a negative or should that just get the same reach as an old piece of content? Like I guess these are all going to be things that we're going to be discovering is how it's going to be handled.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, isn't that a way or an approach that we can use to release much more content than we would have been able to?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well that was actually a piece on the Haygen thing is like uploading blogs Every single blog on your website. You could just have you reading out the whole blog content, throwing it on your YouTube channel and there's a whole bunch of content that you could be uploading that potentially could be very good content. If you're really happy with the content of your blogs, yeah your blog.

Speaker 1:

It might not be that conversational, but I think there is that truth element or that people not wanting to feel duped. If you are reading out blog content, you might want to highlight that this is an AI avatar, yeah yeah, so when it gets to the part of a blog sentence that doesn't feel like the way you would speak. People aren't figuring it out for themselves. Yeah, but for what you showed me in the video introduction.

Speaker 1:

I don't see any reason to say I'm an AI bot, or in a presentation. I mean learning and online training course materials incredible. No one needs the oh, this is an AI, so don't believe it Like if the information's wrong. It's just helping you engage in a better way because there's someone talking to you 100%.

Speaker 2:

I'm more excited about this than any other AI. Well, I mean, bland was great. That was one that we really are testing at the moment as well, but I think that this one just adds a whole other level. Imagine this one just adds a whole nother level. Imagine when you can do both. Imagine when you can use the AI that's plugged into all your website content and then you're using that as your customer support officer. You could have your client success team and then they're answering questions in video based on a database of information on your website. That's just going to take what Bland's doing to the next level if they throw the video avatar into that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. I think we've talked about a lot of use cases today, but the integration and the fueling your marketing automation platform to send the right video about the right content, covering off exactly what that prospect or existing client or past client needs to see at that moment is where I can see huge potential for brands trying to convert, keep or grow the spend of their clients.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we're going to create a AI outro for this episode and try and work out which one, brian or I, are the AI generated and who isn't, and hope that it is able to fool everybody, because, I mean, this technology is looking like it probably could from what we've seen.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, comment below who you think it is. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening, see ya.