Hello and welcome to GG News!

There is an ongoing push for a full return to work which is becoming a battle between commute resistant employees and employers who claim that remote work reduces productivity and effects adoption of a company’s culture.

Whether you agree or not I’m sure most of us do miss some of the interactions that come with working alongside our colleagues in a shared space.

What if I was to tell you that there may be a compromise. Read below to see our impressions of virtual offices with Kumospace. 

As usual you can also see suggestions for AI tools to improve productivity and take a look at the latest tech news!

Thanks for subscribing and please feel free to share this newsletter with anyone you think would be interested!

High quality LinkedIn posts from a few words📣🎉

MagicPost is a multi-language LinkedIn post generator that writes engaging posts from very simple prompts.

MagicPost very vaguely states that it uses “GPT-4 combined with an algorithm” which doesn’t really say much🤷‍♀️.

So far in our testing the team have found the posts to honestly be really impressive and unlike trying the same thing with ChatGPT you don’t need multiple attempts and rewrites, it just seems to do it first time with next to zero changes required!!

Give it a try MagicPost

What have we been having fun with? 🎉

This week we have been using Kumospace. Kumospace is the virtual office you didn’t know you needed.

Kumospace is a virtual space you can build using either the free templates provided or completely from scratch to either replicate your current setup for hybrid employees or to create your very own designer office.

To us it seemed a bit silly at first and maybe even a distraction but within a few minutes of using Kumospace we really started to see the benefits.

Working with a remote team can be difficult, yes, we can have remote meetings and phone calls and yes digitally everyone is “available”, but we found ourselves missing impromptu “water cooler chats”.

Kumospace works in an eerily similar way to a real office. If you are in a room with someone or stood in their vicinity, you can hear and talk to each other. If someone approaches your office and you have closed the door, they can knock or “nudge” you or even send you a message or maybe you have a rule that a closed door means you are unavailable. Like we said, just like a real office space.

With Kumospace you can also conduct meetings or events digitally, where you can share a screen and present. Prior to the meeting people are free to mingle and chat within their bubbles without being overheard and can then join the meeting when it is time or be placed in their seat by the meeting organiser.

It really is good! But Kumospace becomes amazing when you include interactive elements. When we invite customers for meetings, we try to finish the meeting a little early and encourage our guests to “look around”.

We then put a relevant promotional video on loop in the games room so the guest can see what we are currently promoting, we have documents on the reception desk with links to downloadable brochures from our OneDrive account or if during the meeting we shared something the client was very interested in we can make it available in the same manor.

Just imagine saying to a client “oh, by the way the business profile you wanted is on the boardroom table, feel free to click on it and download it to your computer!!”

For teams of 5 or less, all of this functionality is available on the very generous free plan! and the paid plans are really not expensive.

Check it out for yourself at Kumospace.

🍏Personal voice is here! 📰

Personal voice is here, and we gave it a try😊 - Personal voice is the brand-new voice cloning feature that creates a synthesised copy of your voice to enable you to use it for communication over FaceTime, phone calls, assistive communication apps and in-person conversations.

Personal voice has been teased for some time and has been a little slow to come to South Africa but it’s here now and the GG News team were eager to give it a go.

The big boss🦸🏻‍♀️aka gadget gal, aka Clare, has an iPhone 14 Pro Max📱so we politely requested that she took 15-20 minutes away from her busy schedule to set up personal voice.

The setup 🛠️

The process is straight forward and simply involves saying a large number of phrases into your phone’s microphone when prompted. Please be aware though you will need a quiet area and you need to put aside some time when you will not be interrupted - expect it to take around 15 minutes.

Once done, Clare left her phone overnight to process and the following morning it was ready!

The results👩🏻‍⚖️

The results are okay…. Let’s be clear this feature is primarily designed as an assistive communication interface to be used either when you can’t speak or if after you set this up, your speech becomes impaired or damaged in some way. In those scenarios this is a great feature to have available directly on your phone and we’re sure the use cases and apps this can be used with will expand over time.

For those of you hoping this can be used for content creation, to remove the need to record voice overs, unfortunately it just isn’t good enough. The voice is too robotic and nowhere near the quality of something like elevenlabs.

In summary, this is a great step for inclusivity👏and it will probably get better in the future but for now maybe not what some of us were hoping for.

What’s in the news? 📰

Google accused of negligence in motorists’ death - The family of a motorist are accusing Google of negligence resulting in the death of a man after he drove off a collapsed bridge when following Google Maps.

🏥👨🏻‍⚕️Dr Elon will see you now! - Neuralink has announced that recruitment for their first human trials is now open!🧠⚡🔌

🕵🏻‍♀️🚫Facebook - We don’t think people want us reading their private messages - Meta and the UK government are banging heads once again over end-to-end encryption.🥊

🤖👨🏻‍💻US hacked Huawei servers and has had access for over a decade!🤯 - Chinese state security have now confirmed reports detailed in Snowden leaks that the US hacked Huawei servers.

OpenAI unveils Dall-E 3 - OpenAI has released its third iteration of its very successful text to image tool Dall-E with improved safeguards and more accurate images.

Google’s Bard gets an upgrade - Google Bard has been given a series of upgrades including access to Google apps and services and the ability to interact with your documents.

AI tools

1. Resume.io - Build a resume based on field tested templates with AI generated phrases.

2. tldv.io- The meeting recorder that transcribes & summarizes your calls with customers, prospects, and your team.

3. gamma.app - Generate docs, decks and webpages in seconds.

4. Ideogram.ai- AI image generation - comparable to mid-journey.

5. MagicPost.in - Produce attention grabbing high-quality LinkedIn posts from a few lines of text!

Affiliate links

Below are our Affiliate links to sign up for Pabbly:

Pabbly has a special one-time payment plan which gives lifetime access for a single one-off payment, you can see these one-time payment options here.

For those of you who would like to look at their monthly recurring plans please check out the link here.

This week’s quote:

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”
― Chinese Proverb