Video platform Vimeo LLC today announced plans to help creators get things done with video creation needs through the addition of new artificial intelligence-powered tools and features, including a script generator and a text-based video editor.

Vimeo provides web-based and mobile video creation and recording tools that already make it easier to produce one-shot content in an intuitive user interface that allows users to build, edit and customize their creations. Straight from production, users can also share their content on Vimeo’s website with all the trappings of social media.

However, Ashraf Alkarmi, chief product officer at Vimeo, told SiliconANGLE in an interview, the company discovered that providing advanced tools isn’t always enough to give users the best experience. “We have seen that 80% of people believe that video is the best way to communicate, but there’s a barrier to producing it and we’ve seen this with our own data.”

The company saw that half the customer base was doing multiple retakes of their videos and that those doing shorter videos, closer to 10 minutes, would do even more retakes, with 25% of customers doing five or more takes. That could mean that a single customer could take an hour or more to make a single 10-minute video.

“So, we thought about how we could take this full flow and take it end-to-end and make it amazing,” he said. “And the thing is that we found the answer in AI.”

First, Vimeo added an AI-powered script generator, allowing users to offload the necessity to write scripts themselves before they even sit down to produce a video. To create the new feature, Vimeo tapped into a generative AI model from Open AI LP, the same company that provides the popular ChatGPT AI chatbot.

It can produce a complete video script from a brief description and a drop-down, including a tone such as inspirational, formal or funny, and a set length of time such as one, five or 10 minutes. Once the user completes that, the AI generates a script that can be edited or regenerated.

After the user is happy with the script, a video recording can be done and it will put the script into a teleprompter on the screen that stays about eye-height right beneath the location of the camera, so the user doesn’t need to look away from the screen.

Finally, the video editor now has a text-based capability that allows users to see a transcript of what they actually said and they can edit their video alongside the timeline-based editor using text. Timeline-based editing allows users to cut and clip pieces of a video based on where a video is in time, but with a text-based editor, they can pick out when specific words were spoken and have them removed.

With the power of AI, however, Alkarmi explains, it can get even better. Not all people are great public speakers, they might have the teleprompter to help them along, or they want to do the video off the cuff, but either way, they’ll probably have some hiccups in their speech along the way. As a result, they’ll have some filler words or phrases, such as “um” or “ah.”

“Once you’re done, we added this magical last step,” said Alkarmi. “We find all the gaps and the ‘ums’ and the ‘ahs,’ and there’s a magic button where you can just delete them and we auto-stitch the deleted sections together with one click.”

Alkarmi revealed that the first time that he used this feature that he discovered that in a 10-minute video, he discovered that he had almost three minutes of “ums” and “ahs” that the feature discovered and removed. The benefit of the feature is that even if people stumble during their videos, with this feature, they can keep going, and when the stitching happens in post, the deleted sections together invisibly.

The new suite of AI-powered features will be available starting in July, which users can access as part of a free trial and after that Vimeo’s Standard and above plans. Users are also invited to sign up to be invited to be the first to try the new services as part of early access at the company’s website.

This is only the beginning of AI-powered features for Vimeo, Alkarmi said. “We want to be the all-in-one complete end-to-end video experience platform so you don’t need to go to seven different products to get one flow in video and using AI for that mission will be what we’re focused on,” he said.

Image: Vimeo