Essential AI Tools for Speakers and Coaches: Enhance Your Content Creation

Summary

In this episode of Present Influence, host John Ball explores various AI tools that can significantly benefit speakers, coaches, and consultants. He discusses tools such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grammarly, Canva, Descript, Riverside, and Adobe Enhance, sharing his experiences and recommendations on how these tools can aid in content creation, video editing, and more. There is also mention of how these AI tools can be used to enhance productivity and the importance of maintaining human creativity alongside AI usage.

Do you want the free report on AI tools I mentioned in the episode? You can download it here: AI Tools For Speakers & Coaches Shoot me an email if you can't download it.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to AI Tools for Speakers and Coaches

01:28 Overview of Popular AI Tools

03:29 Content Creation and Note-Taking Tools

04:32 Enhancing Professional Communication

05:44 Design and Visual Content Tools

08:21 Video and Audio Editing Tools

13:46 Google Workspace Tips and Tricks

17:46 Ethical Considerations and Future of AI

20:23 Conclusion and Upcoming Episodes

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Mentioned in this episode:

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AI Tools for Speakers & Coaches

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John: [00:00:00] Today I want to talk about AI tools for speakers and coaches and consultants, and share with you some of the ones that I'm using that I find most effective. I asked my paid Google Gemini Pro to. Give me a list of relevant AI tools for speakers and coaches. And it came back and said, do you want me to create a report? And I thought, oh yeah, that may be a good idea. And it's done that I've taken a look through it and there's some good stuff in there.

Some of the tools I'm using, some of them I. Not and haven't yet tried out, but if you would like a copy of that report for relevant AI tools. If this is new to you or you just wanna see what's available for speakers and coaches that might be relevant without having to do your own searching around

then I've made that available to you. So you can go into the show notes or the YouTube description for this episode and you can get a hold of a direct download link. So no emails to exchange, anything like that. Just the document for you, if you are interested, so you can get hold of that report with a list of AI tools for [00:01:00] speakers and hopefully you'll find some of that useful.

You may just want to flick through it and see which tools you may actually want to try out and for what reasons. I hope you'll find this episode helpful as well as I share some of the tools that I use to help me as a professional speaker and coach.

Welcome to Present Influence the show for professional communicators who want to inspire, impact and influence. My name's John Ball. I'm your guide on this journey to mastery level communication skills.

As we kick things off today, what I'm gonna start with is sharing with you the AI tools that I have been using as a coach and a speaker. Ones that I found useful to, for me, especially when it comes to things like content creation.

What I do not endorse or encourage is using AI just to create everything for you. For me, AI is a trust and verify kind of operation. It's a great helper. It's a good tool to get recommendations and suggestions, but it's not yet at a stage where we can just [00:02:00] leave it to its own devices and trust everything it comes back with. So that's my caveat as we start things off. We are probably mostly already familiar with using some of the main AI tools like chat, GPT, Claude, which I know a lot of speakers and coaches do prefer because it seems to flow more easily and be more language adaptable to coaches and speakers.

Gemini, which is Google's own AI system, is one that I have been mostly using and I have recently been using a paid version of Chat, GPT, which I've also to be very good. We've also recently been given the joy of image creation available even on free levels of chat GPT.

One thing I have found before we look at other tools. Is that a lot of people who I follow and get coaching and guidance from are creating their own AI tools. Very often they are sharing those with their memberships and sometimes beyond that as well. But mostly they are creating these [00:03:00] tools to share with their clients and their memberships. So if you really want to use those kinds of tools, and I've got some great value from different tools that different people I follow have created.

You will probably need to go into a paid version of Chat GPT. It's not expensive, it's 20 bucks a month kind of thing, but if you are gonna use it, maybe even just for a month or so, try it out. It gives you so much more opportunity to create and it can do a lot of things for you. I have been using a tool to create mini products I can start to offer on the podcast. Because a lot of us doing virtual work these days, some of the things we're gonna use in AI are built into things like Zoom. Now you may be using already things like Fathom or fireflies as note takers within Zoom and Zoom meetings, which are great, really good tools that can help to recap and save the need for a lot of note taking.

Although I still, no, I'm a bit old school. I still like to take notes myself. I [00:04:00] feel like stuff sinks in more for me when I'm writing it down. So I do have both because there might be things that I missed that I go back to and get from those notes as well. But their great way as a coach to summarize client sessions.

They could be useful for you as a speaker to help to summarize and recap meetings that you have with potential bookers. So discussions and contract negotiations can then get summarized for both of you so long as the other party is happy to have the note taker recording on the call.

Definitely in terms of creation, content creation, and as speakers, we tend to have to do a lot of it. Grammarly is a really good tool, and I think

if you want to be a professional communicator, your communication should look professional and so good. So good spelling and grammar are good ways to help make sure you do that. My only criticism really of Grammarly is not necessarily going to let you write the way you speak [00:05:00] because ~we don't have, we don't have yet.~

~We don't have yet grammar. ~We don't yet have AI tools that are autocorrecting our grammar and punctuation as we speak. I hope, really hope that doesn't come to be honest with you. 'cause that would be so annoying. But we do have that when we are writing.

And I do think a good use of grammar is great, but a perfect use of grammar might actually be unnecessary. I would still encourage you to write and communicate the way you would, not the way Grammarly necessarily tells you to, but do utilize it for basic grammar and spelling mistakes that might just make you look a little less than professional as a communicator.

Another tool that I found really helpful is Canva. And this is another one to be careful of. So I will caveat out this to some degree as well. But in terms of creating content to post on social media on a regular basis, it's fantastic. It's great for [00:06:00] creating covers for things.

It's great for creating images for social media. With the AI tools that are in there now as well. You can have it create AI images that you can use in your posts and your newsletters and whatever else you may be putting out there. You might even want to use some of them in your slideshows.

But as has always been the case with these tools, utilizing in slideshows, just be careful and make sure the images are good and appropriate and that we don't end up with a situation like we did with Clip Up 20 years ago where it just looked horrible ridiculous and cheap and everyone was doing it.

Sometimes using stock images is really helpful and it gets us out of a bind, but there are times where we probably do want to step things up and use our own images, and certainly as speakers, we are the brand of our business. So make sure a lot of your images are including you.

Your clients, your customers, your network. Want to see you. They especially want to see you on stages. [00:07:00] This is something that I have been rediscovering recently of how much of a difference that makes to social media engagement. When you are posting content, that is on stages, even just pictures and images of what you've been up to and doing.

People want to see that. So the reality of your end deliverables of what you do are far more valuable to your audience, are far more interesting to your audience than the conceptual elements of what you do, which are still useful, valuable, and interesting, but not so attention grabbing, not so impactful.

Good to know that and keep that in mind. Utilize Canva by all means. And if you are in a position where you are able to hire people to take care of these things for you to do your Canva designs and things like that, there are probably people who can do design on those tools far better than you and I. And you don't really want to be putting out basic Canva templates as professional images, [00:08:00] especially on your website. But certainly not on social media either. So if you don't have the skills yourself to create things like professional logos or expert looking social media content,

try and get someone to do it who does have that expertise? It may not end up being very expensive for you, but it could make a huge difference to how you are perceived online. Now, as speakers and coaches and professional communicators, one of the things we do have to do a lot of the time is speak, and some of that's gonna be virtual.

Sometimes we'll be on podcasts, maybe our own, maybe guesting on someone else's. Maybe we are just creating video content, video courses, and as such, we're gonna be putting videos online as well. We want those to be as good and easy and effective as possible. And there are a number of tools that can really help you with things like video editing

and with things like posting the videos, creating clips and the likes. One of the tools that I use the [00:09:00] most is Descript. And Descript is essentially an editing tool. I've been using Descript for ages. I've seen transformation after transformation with that company to the point where they now have so many tools that if you want to do professional podcast stuff, video things for YouTube or whatever else, that Descript is probably an essential tool to have in your arsenal for doing that.

They make it so easy to do things like create B roll and put scenes into your videos and script them and transcribe and so much more.

And I use it a lot. It is absolutely worth having. It's not perfect, but it's getting better all the time to a point where they are potentially moving towards descript being able to do most of your editing work for you, so isn't how much time or money that's gonna free up potentially. If you can cope with probably what's gonna be more basic level editing skills that still aren't gonna be up to a professional editor, I'd say no.

If you can afford professional editing. Get [00:10:00] that. But it's probably gonna do the job that most people want it to do for the kinds of content that they're putting out online. Until you do get to those higher income levels where you can afford to pay someone to make it look even more top quality and maybe even more developing your own style for how you do and shoot those things as well.

But another tool that's really good for this is Riverside. And Riverside is an online tool, and very similarly, you can create your videos in there. There's a degree of automatic audio engineering in there as well.

I'll say this, descrip isn't perfect, Riverside isn't great. But they do have automatic AI editing. So if you ask someone who just wants to quickly turn around episodes for a podcast or online content and have it edited how. Fluff cut out of conversations and videos and make it really easy for people to be able to access them direct, upload them to whatever channel you wish to, or even live stream.

This is one function that Riverside has. I think even on the free levels, that could be [00:11:00] great for you as a, especially as a speaker or a coach to be able to do live streaming. It's still very powerful. It scares most people, but if you are up to live streaming, then it could be a good thing to at least try or do now and again.

The only place that I would even consider live streaming to these days are LinkedIn and YouTube. But you may have other ideas and that's entirely up to you. Instagram probably is one of the other better places to do that as well.

Now when it does come to audio engineering, there is a tool that I do use. It does a great job, but it has limitations and it is called Adobe Enhance. It's part of Adobe's podcasters kit, and you may not want to pay for another service, but it is something like $9 a month.

For the paid version, you can process video and audio for the free version. You can only process audio and you're very limited to how much you can do. So if you don't have a rush and you're just doing audio processing and you want the sound enhanced, the tool is excellent, and I probably do [00:12:00] recommend it more for just audio than video.

If you have video that is maybe. I would say you probably want it to be on the lower side of 30 minutes, 30 minutes or less. It will probably do it, and you don't want super high quality video because the higher the file size, the less likely it's to do. So if your file size is over one gig of information,

it just won't do it. At the moment I have been in contact with them and they do say they are going to aim to raise the file size limitations so that we will be able to do longer form video. They have lots of people who are podcasters who want to do video as well, who are feeling like myself restricted by the file sizes that they're currently capable of processing.

However. When it is able to process the files for you, it does a really good job. And now also has the option on the paid version for being able to control how much effect is used on your voice and on your background.

So you have dials for both of those. So you can be somewhat [00:13:00] involved in that processing journey. It used to be you just process the file and you get a decent one back. Now you can really perfect that. It's not the same as professional audio engineering. You will always get a better job from a professional, but if you are on a budget and you want the best audio that you can have for the content you're putting out.

Adobe Enhanced is fantastic for that.

So those are the main tools that I use. I spent a lot of time using Google Gemini. I use the paid version. It's included in my Google Workspace. If your professional email is through a Gmail account and you pay for Google Workspace, you probably already have access to Google Gemini, and I think for a very small fee, they will upgrade you to the professional version, and it's pretty good.

I realized whilst I was editing the episode, so I've come back in to tell you this, that with Google Workspace, I've been paying something like $120 a year for Calendly.

If you're using a paid calendar service like Calendly, [00:14:00] but you also have Google Workspace,

you can essentially do what Calendly does for you within Google Workspace and it's free. So look up calendars in Google Workspace.

If you have a free version of Google right now, you can have at least one of those set up.

But if you have paid Google Workspace, then you can set up multiple calendars with invites. It works very much the same way with Calendly. You can even set up payment options into that as well. So if you're offering paid services, you want them paid in advance, people can pay for that and they can book it onto the calendar.

So. You know, I wish I'd discovered that before. I'd just renewed for another year with Calendly. But certainly next year, sorry, Calendly, be using the booking services in Google Workspace. Now, I haven't even looked to discover what else may be available in Google Workspace that I haven't been utilizing yet.

And it's something I will take some time to take a look at. So I might come back and give you some updates on that. But this is something that's potentially gonna save you money. [00:15:00] And it's a really clean setup that's straight away integrated with your Google Calendar. If you are using that, and of course if you're using other calendars that mix in with your Google Calendar,

it's all gonna fit in well together, and you're not gonna be paying any extra for it. I think we're gonna see a lot more of those kinds of things coming in as AI advances, but that's a great one to save you a bit of time and money I hope.

I haven't used too many other AI tools, but it is pretty good. It does some great jobs, and it's getting better and better as we go along it is important to use the right kinds of prompts for this, but I don't just want to ask AI to do stuff for me. When I'm creating videos, for example, I may go to her and say, Hey, recommend some episode ideas. What would be some good episode ideas? Some are good, some are not, that it comes up with, but I often sometimes get inspiration from some of the things that it suggests as well. So I'm not gonna do exactly that, but I could do this and that would be interesting.

These are good assist tools. But one thing, I actually wanna come back to Ds script from it 'cause there's [00:16:00] some stuff I missed out with that. That's really important. If you are creating YouTube content or the social media content for video, which is a good thing to do as a speaker, I. It will not only give you transcripts and subtitles and clips for the stuff you're doing, it will create show notes.

It'll create social media posts, it will create YouTube descriptions, et cetera. Again, not perfect. It does a good job, but you still need to check what it's doing and you can give it specific instructions for how to do those things. But you can get other AI tools to do those similar things as well.

For example, you can, and I do this put your transcripts from episodes or from something you're doing into AI and get it to create a newsletter or create a summary that you can then share, and that can be a useful tool. And again, you need to check these things. One of the biggest reasons for that is if you are English like me, are not American.

The AI tends to just do everything in American [00:17:00] spelling. Now, you probably don't want to be using American spelling if you are not actually American or based in the us. It might be a small thing, but people do notice it.

But to come back to more general AI tools, it is a really good writing tool. But if you are gonna ask ai, for example, to create a talk for me on this topic, it'll go away and do it. Or give me a 45 minute keynote presentation on this topic. It will do it. But will it be good? Probably not.

Will there be stuff in there that you could use? Probably. But you still have to be very into the creative process yourself. We are not at a level where, and I hope we never really do get to a level where AI is doing everything for us. It would take away so much of our creativity, I think is super important.

I do think it's essential to remember as well that AI is building off of other people's intellectual property and that includes yours and mine. So things that we are using AI for, [00:18:00] it's also using to feed itself and to learn and develop and get better it's gonna use your ip. It's gonna use pretty much everything you've got and share that with other people as well.

There are ways that you can get your AI tools to forget all of your stuff so that it doesn't go into contributing to the greater AI development. And I would suggest you look those up because I'm not an expert in this stuff. I'm just aware that there are ways for you to clear your trail, to clear the path behind you and get AI to remove your contributions so that it's not stealing your work, or at least, hopefully not so much, but the reality is.

The stuff you post is going online anyway. Articles you post the content the video content, the social media posts, everything like that is going online anyway and ultimately is feeding these AI tools 'cause they are scraping it from everywhere. It's gonna be unavoidable. [00:19:00] That we come up with this conglomeration of everyone's knowledge and talent and ability that's gonna feed you back great stuff.

And to some degree, we'll take away a lot of the, a lot of need or requirement for expertise in the future. However, we are never going to lose human connection. And even with things like AI tools. There is an art to prompting them to do more of what you want to do, the way you want to do it. And so now for some of us, it's definitely beneficial to have the AI tools, thinking and speaking the way that we do, the way that we would want it to.

So it sounds like our voice for us, we don't really want it sounding like our voice for other people, but unfortunately it will. The morals or the implications of this are maybe a bit beyond what we can really get into here. It's scary. Some of it's a bit worrying, but I do think this, if we're not really using it or utilizing it right now, we risk being left behind and missing out [00:20:00] on a lot of opportunities.

So I do encourage a lean in to different AI tools. Some of them are just gonna make you life and your processes easier, and some of them are potentially gonna improve your output as well. I guess we'll have, at some point we're gonna have to deal with all of the moral implications of AI tools, but that moment probably isn't today.

I. So one final quick reminder for you. If you want to get hold of the report on AI tools for speakers and coaches completely free, just go to the show notes or the YouTube description for this episode and you will be able to download it from there. You don't need to give me your email or anything like that.

This is no strings type whatsoever. Just go and get the report if you'd like to take a look at it. But I hope this has been useful. So that's it for this episode, or present influence. I'm happy to say. Are we back next time talking to Dr. Thomas Trautman? We're gonna be talking about neuroscience of influence.

Fascinating subject. He's a fascinating man. I encourage you not to miss [00:21:00] that episode. That's gonna be out next Wednesday today I recorded the coaching session with somebody that I'm gonna be publishing into the podcast.

I'm gonna do a bunch of these so you can actually get to see some of the processes that I work with clients on to coach them in their speaking journey to becoming ace professional, speakers. So today's session with Julia was a great one that's gonna be out pretty soon. And more exciting things to come as well with Present Influence.

But make sure you're subscribed to the show if you're not already, if you are on YouTube, hit that notification bell as well, so you'll get notified at all the latest videos that come from the channel.

And I will look forward to seeing you again very soon. So wherever you're going, whatever you're doing, have an amazing rest of your day. See you next time.​