BB Digest: Alexa hooks up with Claude

Digest #489 → Subscribe | Upgrade to Pro

Hey folks, 255 of you became pro members in the last 7 days!

Welcome to the first digest with our updated format. ICYMI, you’ll receive these digests twice weekly instead of daily emails. We’re trying to cut the noise & drama and focus on helping you actually use AI at work.

You’ll already notice changes in the types of resources we link to—and we’re listening. Let us know what you think.

TLDR; inside today’s newsletter

• noteworthy trends and news from the last few days

• ICYMI: new courses and tutorials for you to learn

• two upcoming expert workshops on the calendar

• snack n skill - a bite-sized lesson to learn on your lunch break

• 6 of the best new AI tools

• 6 interesting posts from around the web

• to-do’s

Alright, let’s get to it!

p.s. next week, when I’m back from holiday, we have two exciting workshops: how to build an AI-powered marketing strategy (prompt cheatsheets included) and How Dan Shipper uses AI as a creative tool.

 🔎 Trends & news

• Amazon is planning an upgrade for Alexa. This new "Remarkable" Alexa is powered by Anthropic's Claude and will launch in October. Amazon plans to charge $5-$10/month for this souped-up version, while the “Classic” version will remain free.

• Meta released a blog about the growth in the use of its Llama models. Part of the blog covers what features large companies enable with these models.

  • Accenture is automating ESG reporting, expecting 70% productivity gains and 20-30% quality improvements.

  • DoorDash built a Q&A chatbot with an internal knowledge base to help its software engineers.

  • Goldman Sachs uses AI to extract information from documents faster.

• Magic AI, an AI programming startup, claims that its new model, LTM-2-mini, can handle up to 100M tokens in its context window. In other words, it can swallow up entire codebases and docs to spit out code that works.

• ChatGPT now attracts 200M+ weekly active users and Zuck claims the number is 185M+ for Meta AI.

• Learn to Optimize Llama 3.1-8B for 32x Savings Over GPT-4o*

  OctoAI proves that advanced prompt engineering and fine-tuning techniques can deliver massive savings, performance, and quality improvements by using smaller open-source models and running them on OctoAI’s performant serverless endpoints. Read the tutorial and data here.
  *sponsored

👀 ICYMI: New stuff we’ve launched

• We now have beginner courses for all the big platforms. Learn how to use ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini.

• Visualize text for presentations - A short tutorial on quickly converting text content into visuals using Napkin AI.

• Write winning responses to “Request For Proposals” (RFPs) with Claude.

• Create custom product usage guides to improve your client onboarding experience.

• Analyze and summarize financial statements to find actionable insights using ChatGPT.

• How to use generative AI for project management.

🍽️ Snack ‘n’ skill

Learn how to create a Gem—newly launched in Gemini

Google has added the ability to create custom versions of Gemini for Gemini Advanced users. It’s called Gems. They behave much like Custom GPTs in ChatGPT. But, all Gems have access to Extensions like YouTube, Drive, Maps etc.

Here’s how you can create a Gem that takes in a YouTube video and outputs a list of sections, allowing you to easily find relevant sections.

Step 1. Accessing Gems

Gems are available in Gem Manager in Gemini. Look for a diamond-like symbol on the bottom left or access it directly.

Step 2. Creating a new Gem

• Click on the [+ New Gem] button.

• Give your Gem a name. I’m choosing YouTube Assistant.

• Add some basic instructions for your Gem.

• Click the magic pencil icon marked by the arrow—it’ll “re-write instructions” to automatically add more details.

• Review the detailed instructions and pick and choose what to keep/discard.

• I tested it with one of the videos above. Notice how it used the YouTube extension for Gemini.

• Then, you can save it.

Note: You can only use Gems if you’re a Gemini Advanced user. To get the most out of Gemini and Gems, you should enable relevant extensions, too.

⚙️ Top new tools

• Playground - Design with AI-generated assets like a pro. T-shirts, logos, posters, memes, and more.

• OpenFunnel - AI CRM for developer-led sales and growth.

• PatchWork - Automatically adds actionable structured logs to your code. (HN post)

• MinutesLink - Get human-accurate minutes for every meeting.

• Bland AI - Automate all of your inbound and outbound calls.

• Ugic - Multi-language Figma drafts based on user component libraries.

More tools here →

 📜 Interesting posts

• Top 10 learnings from Atlassian’s efforts to educate its teams on using AI every day.

• Possible Miami used AI to keep attendees up-to-date with conference sessions.

• How DN Media is using AI to report on business every day.

• Even a hedge fund is using AI to assist analysts.

• 5 ways Gen AI makes my meetings better.

• HR is the New R&D - How organizations can adapt in the age of AI.

📌 To-dos

1. AI for Marketers Summit* - Happening virtually this November 13-14th. Register using this link for 15% off full registration.

2. Sign up for our upcoming workshop, How I use AI as a creative tool with Dan Shipper. 11 September, 21:00 GMT+8. One not to miss!

3. Let us know if you have any tutorials or courses you want us to create—we’re always open to ideas.
   *sponsored

That wraps things up for today! See you again on Thursday. 👋

Ben