Top AI Software for Publishers

Machines have been helping deliver news for years. AP began using automation to generate earnings reports in 2014. NYT uses Machine Learning algorithms to decide how many free articles to show before readers hit a paywall. Bayerischer Rundfunk, a German public broadcaster, moderates online comments using artificial intelligence software. 

Recently, CEO Jonah Peretti outlined his plans to pivot BuzzFeed to an AI-driven tech and media company. 

With declining referral traffic and audience attention challenges, efficiency-minded publishers are seizing the opportunity to apply Generative AI tools within their operations to reduce turnaround times, increase outreach, pivot to more engaging formats like video, and efficiently turn time into money.

89% of publishers use Artificial Intelligence.

According to a 2023 Digiday+ Research survey, the number of publishing professionals using AI went from less than half in Q2 to 89% in Q3 - a big difference over the course of just one quarter.

Publishing professionals believe AI-powered tech will affect their business the most in the next few years:

Source: Digiday+ Research check-in

AI models, from Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs) to video generation models like the OpenAI’s Sora, are getting better and more accessible by the day. 

For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT can summarize news stories. Suno, an artificial intelligence tool by Amazon-backed Anthropic, can transform ideas into complete songs. Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion can generate realistic images in a matter of seconds.

For publishers looking to pivot to video, services like Aeon's AI-assisted solutions can create high-quality videos for every piece of written content they publish. 

These models are accessed via API as AI chatbots, making them easy for publishers to use. With proper prompt engineering, their functionality can be adapted for most use cases to streamline workflow and increase productivity.

This blog looks at some of the top AI software for publishers. We’ll update this as they evolve. Drop your email and stay tuned!

Content Creation and Editing

Grammarly

Grammarly is a versatile tool for creating high-quality content. Initially designed to detect spelling and grammar errors, the writing tool has come a long way and is one of the best AI writing tools today. 

Grammarly is the go-to AI assistant for constructing flawless sentences, refining writing styles, and identifying mistakes that might be overlooked. It streamlines the editing process, saving time while ensuring top-notch content quality.

Image credit: DLC Blog

You can create custom profiles that refine responses based on their preferred tone and level of formality. It supports most applications via plugins and browser extensions (LinkedIn, Gmail, Microsoft Word, and more).

Grammarly can summarize email content, generate context-specific responses, or suggest prompts to help guide the writing process. It supports American, British, Canadian, Australian, and Indian English and has an app for iOS and Android devices. However, being cloud-based, Grammarly cannot be used when offline.

Built with high standards for enterprise data security, user privacy, and responsible AI, Grammarly offers both free and paid versions.

Quillbot

Quillbot has evolved into a comprehensive AI writing assistant offering various tools to enhance writing. Its main feature is a paraphraser that supports 23 languages. 

Other key tools include a grammar and plagiarism checker, co-writer, summarizer, citation generator, translator, and QuillBot Flow, a next-generation word processor supercharged with QuillBot’s cutting-edge AI.

QuillBot’s AI trains on datasets, which show it the right and wrong ways to write. For instance, users “ignoring” a suggestion acts as a dataset and helps the tool make better suggestions next time.

Like Grammarly, Quillbot supports most applications through extensions. It offers a free plan that allows users to paraphrase text up to 125 words in two different styles, correct basic grammar errors, generate up to 50 AI prompts daily, and create basic summaries.

Copy.ai

Launched in 2020, Copy.ai is a young company that has managed to rack up 15M+ users, including publishers like The Business Journal. It is designed to assist content creators in overcoming writer's block and procrastination. 

Copy.ai  combines advanced NLP models like GPT-4 and Claude 2 for seamless workflow integrations, creating high-quality, human-like content tailored to your brand voice and guidelines.

Image Credit: The Meta Blog

It claims to be the first GTM AI Platform that powers your Go-To-Market (GTM) chain with AI to reduce bloat.

The platform streamlines your workflow and makes it more scalable. For instance, you can upload CSV files containing raw data, integrate it into your existing workflows via APIs, or connect with integration tools like Zapier.

Copy.AI supports over 3,000 third-party integrations, including Slack, Calendly, LinkedIn, HubSpot, and more.

The basic plan is free and includes 200 “credits” consumed in varying quantities based on the complexity of a task. The Pro plan costs $49 monthly and includes 500 credits.

Hemingway

Hemingway stands out from others for its focus on improving the readability and clarity of content. It helps make your writing “bold and clear.” 

It includes features like readability analysis (difficult-to-read sentences, adverbs, passive voice, and complex phrases) and color coding (see image), which provides a user-friendly interface for spotting errors.

Image credit: Pcmag

The basic Hemingway Editor is accessible for free and highlights wordy sentences and common writing errors. Hemingway Editor Plus ($10/month) brings cloud-based generative AI tools to suggest fixes for each highlighted issue.

Content Curation And Personalization

ChatGPT

Released in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT took just five days to surpass one million users and needs no introduction. 

Publishers can use the chatbot to answer questions, create outlines for different content types (articles, social media posts, ad copy, etc.), summarize large bodies of textual data, understand the sentiment of a piece of text, translate, and more.

While generating whole content using ChatGPT is not a good idea, it is a great tool for ideation:

ChatGPT uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to generate articles, features, and content within minutes. 

For publishers, it's an effective workflow optimization tool that can handle over 80% of the foundational work, allowing them to concentrate on the crucial 20%—refining details and ensuring accuracy, coherence, and adherence to editorial standards.

The model can be trained (with a few prompts) to learn and adapt to your unique writing style. Here is a detailed guide on how publishers can use ChatGPT to improve business processes. 

Individual access to GPT-3.5 is available at no cost. GPT-4, however, is offered as part of a $20 monthly package that includes access to DALL-E (an image generation model), browsing capabilities, advanced data analysis, and additional features.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it is a content curation platform that allows publishers to discover, curate, and share relevant content with their audience. It offers tools to streamline content creation across websites, blogs, newsletters, and social media. 

It analyses content based on previous interactions, making it easier for publishers to discover and share relevant content with their audience.

Scoop is based on Meltwater AI, which uses deep learning, NLP, large language models (LLMs), computer vision, and predictive analytics to analyze billions of data points to unlock the insights you need.

Publishers can understand their audience better, move faster, and drive real impact. You can sign up for their basic plan for free.

Feedly AI

Feedly is a collection of machine learning models publishers can use in their research to gather actionable insights. It has many pre-trained AI models that help automate intelligence-gathering tasks, which is ideal for follow-up research.

It uses AI to analyze, summarize, and prioritize articles, press releases, and social posts from thousands of sources in real-time. 

Access to Feedly’s market intelligence AI Models costs $1200 / month. It comes with 100 AI feeds, company and trend insights cards, team collaboration, five newsletter templates, up to 10 seats, and a dedicated customer service manager.

Curata

Boston-based Curata has been around since 2007. It uses NLP and machine learning to power two software platforms:

• Curata CMP, which offers full-funnel predictive content analytics and editorial calendaring

• Curata CCS: a curation platform that discovers content, filters out noise, sanitizes text, extracts metadata, automatically summarizes, and makes it easy to review, curate, publish, and promote content. 

Curata helps publishers identify content that generates returns, saving time, effort, and money.

Image Generation Tools

DALL-E

DALL-E is OpenAI’s ChatGPT for images. The latest version, DALL-E 3, understands significantly more nuance and detail than previous models, allowing publishers to translate ideas into exceptionally accurate images.

The model understands long, complex queries well and can generate dynamic images. Its conversational-style bot interface allows easy modifications. However, photorealistic results can look fake, and image generation takes time. 

Prompt: “An illustration of an avocado sitting in a therapist's chair, saying 'I just feel so empty inside' with a pit-sized hole in its center. The therapist, a spoon, scribbles notes.” (Source: OpenAI)

Publishers can use it for illustrations to support storylines like the one in the example above. DALL-E 3 is available under OpenAI’s Plus plan for $20 monthly.

Midjourney

Midjourney is another diffusion model considered among the best AI image generators available today. Compared to DALL·E, Midjourney can be a bit awkward to use, but it offers more powerful features. 

Both use a process called diffusion, which starts with random noise and, over several iterations, improves the interpretation of your prompt using a neural network. This is why you may get different results each time, though the prompt remains the same. 

Image created by Midjourney. Prompt details: "Film still in the style of a 2020s cooking program, close up of a plate of food consisting of sea bass fillets sitting on a bed of broccoli with a few capers. Natural light, global illumination, uplight f/1.8 --ar 16:9 --seed 3000 --q 2 --v 5" (Image credit: redsharknews)

Midjourney subscription starts at $10/month and allows about 200 image generation per month.

Stable Diffusion

Stable diffusion is an image generation model from Stability AI, the world's first community-driven, open-source AI company. Its latest model, Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3), is among the most capable text-to-image models.

SD3 brings better text generation, strong prompt adherence, and resistance to spilling, ensuring that generated images match what was requested. 

Key features of SD3 include:

• Multimodal Diffusion Transformer Architecture: separate sets of weights for image and language representations, resulting in improved text understanding

• Superior Performance: SD3 has demonstrated superior performance to state-of-the-art text-to-image generation systems such as DALL·E 3, Midjourney v6, and Ideogram v1.

• Scalability and Flexibility: offers models of varying sizes, ranging from 800 million to 8 billion parameters, to cater to different scalability and image quality needs.

Images created by Stable Diffusion. (Image credit: Xander Steenbrugge)

Stable Diffusion can be accessed as part of Stability AI’s membership plan, which remains free for non-commercial use.

Here is a quick comparison between the three image generation models:

Content Repurposing Tools

Riverside

Riverside is an AI transcriber that expertly caters to publishers' transcription needs. It can be transcribed in more than 100 languages. It combines cutting-edge AI with a user-friendly interface to deliver accurate transcriptions of audio and video files.

It also automatically identifies and labels speakers for easier comprehension. It works with various file formats such as MP3, WAV, MP4, and MOV. Riverside provides free downloads of transcripts in TXT and SRT formats without the need for sign-up.

Riverside also offers Magic Clips, a tool that turns your recording highlights into social growth without extra effort or time. It's highly recommended for podcasters, journalists, and content creators.

Podcastle

Podcastle lets publishers plan, create, edit, and promote podcasts. It generates high-quality audio and video and offers features like AI noise canceling, semi-automated audio clipping, and auto-leveling.

Some of the tools offered include:

Podcastle can transcribe uploaded audio into text, which is useful for generating captions. It also supports voice cloning, which is handy for vlogging and video podcasts. It can record a stream while conducting interviews with up to 10 people.

The free plan includes multi-track recording (10 remote guests), unlimited audio recording and editing, three hours of lifetime video recording, unlimited podcast hosting and publishing, and collaboration tools.

Wordsmith

Wordsmith is an AI-powered content automation tool that can generate natural language narratives from structured data. 

Convert blog posts into podcasts, create visuals, transform content into email series, update and revive old content,  share snippets on social media, transform statistics into graphics, or create guides from old blog posts - Wordsmith AI can do it all. 

Wordsmith includes highly customizable templates for different content types, allowing publishers to tailor the output to their specific needs.

Automated Insights

Automated Insight provides tools that use natural language generation software to automate content creation. It can analyze data from various sources, such as spreadsheets, databases, and APIs, and generate written reports in seconds. 

These reports can be customized to fit specific needs, such as financial reports, product descriptions, and sports recaps.

The Associated Press delivers automated previews for all NCAA Division I men’s basketball games using Automated Insight’s natural language generation platform.

Content Monetization Tools

The range of AI-powered monetization tools available to publishers is vast and growing, making it challenging to list them all. 

Major functionalities of such tools include automated ad optimization, pricing optimization, predictive analytics, personalized content recommendation, ad inventory optimization, performance analytics, CRM integration, revenue generation, and AI-driven customer support.

Spiny.ai, for example, is a complete revenue analytics platform that allows publishers to analyze their authors, audiences, and revenue performance in real-time. It enables data-driven decision-making to optimize editorial strategies for better revenue generation.

Spiny's BidRoll, a header-bidding technology, helps publishers increase ad revenue by eliminating the headache of manual metrics tracking and improving user experience. It brings all this into one unified dashboard:

Image Credit: Spiny

Spiny gives publishers a holistic view of the topics resonating with the audience, examines content virality, sees what competitors cover, and optimizes content SEO through intelligent automation.

Other notable monetization tools include Affilimate, Chartbeat, IO technologies, Parse.ly, and Smartocto. Almost all use AI in some way to help publishers understand and optimize content performance

Text-To-Video Models

Sora

Sora is OpenAI’s state-of-the-art text-to-video model, which can generate high-quality, high-fidelity one-minute videos with different aspect ratios and resolutions. 

It combines the diffusion model (DALL-E 3) with a transformer architecture (GPT) to process videos (temporal sequences of image frames) like ChatGPT processes text.

Sora is currently in its research preview, yet it promises to transform publishers' video generation workflows dramatically. This dedicated article covers Sora in more detail.

Aeon

Aeon leverages Sora-like native GenAI Video models to convert text-based articles to high-quality video at scale while retaining their journalistic voice. 

It streamlines some publisher workflows without the complexities of scripting in Python or managing AI projects on platforms such as Google Cloud's Vertex AI or Amazon’s SageMaker.

For instance, creating a flawless Instagram Reel from a text-based article can be challenging with a native model like Sora or Midjourney, but it's super-easy with Aeon.

With Aeon, publishers can easily:

• Automate text and script for video editing

• Introduce real emotion with ultra-realistic text-to-speech in videos

• Choose the right video format

• Dynamically crop images based on the narrative and visual requirements. 

• Elevate videos with AI-powered music integration

• Automatically caption videos to match the publisher’s brand's style

If you are a publisher, Aeon simplifies these models for your specific use-case. Read why switching to video is the right strategy to futureproof your business and how Aeon can help.