QuickVid uses AI to generate short videos, with voiceovers

Generative AI is coming to videos. A new website, QuickVid, combines several generative AI systems into a single tool to automatically create YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat short videos.

With a simple word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes script and keywords, overlays DALL-E 2 generated images, and adds synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube's royalty-free music library. QuickVid creator Daniel Habib says he's developing the service to help creators meet "ever-increasing" fan demand.

"By providing creators with tools to quickly and easily produce great content, QuickVid helps creators increase their content production, reducing the risk of burnout," Habib told TechCrunch in an interview by e -mail. "Our goal is to empower your favorite creator to meet the demands of their audience by leveraging advancements in AI."

But depending on how they're used, tools like QuickVid threaten to flood channels already clogged with spam and duplicate content. They also face potential backlash from creators who choose not to use the tools, whether because of cost ($10 per month) or on principle, but who could face a host of new AI-generated videos.

QuickVid, which Habib, a self-taught developer who previously worked at Meta on Facebook Live and video infrastructure, built in a matter of weeks, launched on December 27. will arrive in January - but QuickVid can put together the components that make up a typical informative short YouTube or TikTok video, including captions and even avatars.

It's easy to use. First, a user enters a prompt describing the subject of the video they want to create. QuickVid uses the prompt to generate a script, taking advantage of GPT-3's generative text powers. Using keywords automatically extracted from the script or entered manually, QuickVid selects a background video from the Pexels royalty-free media library and generates overlay images using DALL-E 2. It then produces a voiceover via the Google Cloud text-to-speech API. — Habib says users will soon be able to clone their voice — before combining all these elements into a video.

Image credits: QuickVid

Watch this video made with the "Cats" prompt:

Or this one:

QuickVid certainly isn't pushing the boundaries of what's possible with generative AI. Both Meta and Google have showcased AI systems capable of generating completely original clips from a text prompt. But QuickVid merges the existing AI to leverage the repetitive, pattern-based format of high-volume B-volume short videos, bypassing the problem of having to generate the footage itself.

"Successful creators have a very high quality bar and aren't interested in posting content that they don't think is in their own voice," Habib said. "That's the use case we're focused on."

That being supposed to be the case, in terms of quality, QuickVid's videos are generally mixed. Background videos tend to be a bit haphazard or only tangentially related to the topic, which isn't surprising given that QuickVids is currently limited to the Pexels catalog. The images generated by DALL-E 2, on the other hand, present the ...