In this week’s newsletter, we’ve got AI voice tech with Cartesia, YouTube video summaries made in a snap, AI for savvy thrift shoppers, and a seriously ‘smart toilet’ that inspires flush-friendly health.

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AI Productivity

AI voice technology has made incredible leaps, producing lifelike voices and seamless translations. We've discovered a powerful, easy-to-use tool that lets you transform your words into natural-sounding speech or even adjust your voice to sound completely different.

Cartesia.ai is a groundbreaking platform reshaping the AI voice space with three powerful features showing just how far this technology has come.

Text to Natural Speech: The app's primary strength is turning written text into remarkably natural speech. Unlike the robotic voices of the past, Cartesia.ai offers a range of lifelike voices to bring your words to life. Whether you're creating content, need an audio version of a document, or just want to experiment with AI voices, the process is as simple as pasting your text and choosing a voice (we tried “polite man” and “British Reading lady”).

Voice Transformation: Want to hear how your recording would sound in a different voice? Cartesia.ai can transform any voice recording into another voice while maintaining the original emotion and inflection. Team member Justin tested this feature by reading a news article, and then converting it to different voices - the results were impressively natural. You can listen to one of them below:

Voice Cloning: For those ready to dive deeper, Cartesia.ai offers voice cloning capabilities. By recording a few paragraphs in your own voice, you can create a digital version that will speak any text you type. 

Ready to explore AI voice technology? Cartesia.ai is a great place to start. We’d love to hear about your voice experiments - share your experience with us at [email protected]! 

Best of all, Cartesia offers a free plan with generous credits to experiment with these features. If you get hooked and want to clone your own voice or use it regularly, paid plans start at just $5 a month.

AI Video Summaries

Do you have a list of bookmarked YouTube videos you’re eager to watch but can’t find the time? NoteGPT is here to help you make sense of those TED Talks, expert interviews, and in-depth discussions in less time.

How It Works: Paste a YouTube link into NoteGPT, select "Generate Summary," and instantly access both a full transcript and a brief, structured summary. The transcript is organized by sections, making it easy to skim or copy specific parts, all at no cost.

We tried NoteGPT on Microsoft’s “In Conversation with Kevin Scott: Putting AI into the Hands of People Everywhere.” At 33 minutes, the video was dense, but NoteGPT distilled its key points, highlighting themes like “AI’s Transformative Power,” “Building Trust in Technology,” and “Expanding AI Access.”

Our recommendation: When we needed more detail, we used the NoteGPT transcript with ChatGPT to generate a six-paragraph overview, drawing on the most relevant themes. The result? A coherent summary that captured the essence of the talk without the time commitment.

NoteGPT offers a practical way to absorb important insights, making high-value content more accessible when time is short.

AI & Online Shopping

AI could reshape a booming market for old stuff. Ninety-three percent of Americans now hunt for secondhand treasures online, helping drive the U.S. secondhand market to $53 billion in revenue in 2023, according to research from CapitalOne. While saving money is the top motivator for thrift shoppers at 85%, consumers also score environmental wins. Each secondhand clothing purchase saves 8.41 pounds of carbon emissions compared to buying new.

ThredUp is an online marketplace where users seeking stylish, affordable, pre-owned fashion can buy and sell gently used clothing from a range of brands. Now, with an AI-powered upgrade, ThredUp is reimagining the secondhand shopping experience.

Here’s how it works:

• Visual search: Users can upload a photo of an item they’re searching for, and ThredUp’s AI scans its massive inventory to quickly find similar pieces, saving time and surfacing relevant options.

• AI-driven chatbot “Style Chat”: By describing an item or asking questions in natural language, users get targeted search results—bypassing the need to sift through unrelated listings.

• Curated shopping: Together, these AI tools create a faster, more personalized shopping experience, helping users navigate the vast secondhand marketplace with ease.

In other AI thrift news, former Apple engineer Alex Ruber and partner Parth Chopra are developing Encore, a Y Combinator-backed search engine for secondhand items, aggregating listings from sites like Poshmark, the RealReal, Grailed, Etsy, and eBay. Encore offers partial prompts like “Outfit inspo for” and “Shop from the Show” to guide users in crafting searches, making it easy to explore options without needing to know exact search terms.

AI in resale may redefine thrift shopping as we know it, but at what cost? For some, the magic lies in taking time to browse, exploring unexpected finds, and embracing the joy of discovery. Or perhaps better said, it’s the journey, not just the destination.

AI Health & Wellness

Austin, Texas-based health startup Throne is turning the bathroom into a health-tracking station with a device that clips onto your toilet. Currently in beta, Throne’s “smart toilet camera” provides a first-of-its-kind tool for monitoring gut health and hydration—right from home.

Traditional gut health tests offer valuable, though occasional, snapshots of your microbiome. Throne's device aims to fill in the gaps, providing continuous monitoring that could benefit older adults and people with chronic digestive conditions, such as Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, and IBS. Imagine real-time insights on gut health—right on your phone.

How it works:

• The device attaches to the toilet rim, capturing brief videos of your stool.

• AI, trained by medical professionals, analyzes the footage, updating users on their “digestive and hydration status” via a smartphone app.

• It even flags potential early warning signs of conditions like gastrointestinal bleeding.

Skeptical about a camera in your bathroom? Good news—Throne’s lens stays focused on bowl contents only, and non-essential data goes down the drain. TechCrunch reviewed the privacy policy, giving Throne’s approach a cautious thumbs-up.

Throne’s device is available for preorder at $299, though the price will rise to $499 after early access ends. In a world of heart-rate trackers and sleep monitors, Throne’s toilet cam may just flush out a new category in home health tech.

AI in the News (in case you missed it)

• The Vatican & Microsoft create AI St. Peter's Basilica to allow virtual visits. Read here.

• Future passenger planes could use AI to eliminate turbulence. Read here.

• The AI Machine Gun of the Future is Already Here. Read here.

• Robert Zemeckis Breaks Down the Cutting Edge AI Tech That Powered ‘Here’: ‘We Could Not Have Made This Movie Five Years Ago’ Read here.

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Here.Now.AI Editorial team: Lori, Justin, and Lisa