Canva Launches a Slew of New AI Features 🎨!

Let’s be honest: Canva Create 2024 was pretty great! By far, it’s one of the biggest updates we have for you today. 

Hola, and welcome to another stellar issue of the Neural Frontier! 😉

With Canva stealing the show, you might have missed some other pretty relevant AI updates this week. Not to worry; we have all the juicy details right here. 

AI has once again contributed to another medical victory as it helped a stroke survivor revive their bilingual capabilities. In addition, Microsoft’s Build conference has been making the rounds, and for good reason: a truckload of impressive updates! 

Ready or not, here we go! 🏃‍♀️💨

In a rush? Here's your quick byte:

🎨 Canva launches a slew of new AI features! 

🗣️ AI revives a stroke survivor’s bilingual capabilities. 

🤖 Microsoft’s Build conference yields exciting updates! 

🎭 AI Reimagines: The future museum of robotics!   

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making a splash this week.

🎨 Canva launches a slew of new AI features!

Canva is revolutionizing the workplace with a suite of new features and products, transforming itself into an all-in-one platform to enhance how teams create, engage, and collaborate on content. 

Here’s what you need to know:

🚀 New Editing Experience: Canva has unveiled its biggest upgrade in a decade, featuring a redesigned editor that streamlines the design process with intuitive shortcuts, powerful search and filters, and a quick action toolbar for faster access to popular features.

💡 Canva Enterprise: Aimed at large organizations, Canva Enterprise offers a centralized admin console for managing teams and permissions, enterprise-level security features, and dedicated support for design, onboarding, and custom integrations. This new offering is designed to boost productivity and reduce costs for businesses.

📚 Canva Courses: Introducing tools for internal communication, Canva Courses allows teams to create interactive learning materials, assign courses, and track progress from a central dashboard. This feature supports personalized employee onboarding, company updates, and training.

🛠 Canva Work Kits: Tailored for specific professions, Canva Work Kits provide specialized templates and resources for HR, Sales, Marketing, and Creative teams. These kits help teams unlock productivity and scale creativity effortlessly.

🔄 Bulk Create: This new feature enables users to create multiple versions of a design quickly by uploading a CSV or Excel file. It simplifies the process of updating images, text, and graphics across various designs, saving time and effort.

🎥 Enhanced Video and AI Tools: Canva’s video editor now includes AI-powered features like the Highlights tool for generating short clips, and the Enhance voice tool for removing background noise. The platform also integrates with popular workplace tools and introduces new AI capabilities like Text to Graphic and personalized tone of voice for content creation.

Overall, Canva continues to empower individuals and organizations to design and collaborate more effectively. Thus, pushing the boundaries of creativity and productivity in the workplace.

🗣️ AI revives a stroke survivor’s bilingual capabilities.

Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, have developed a groundbreaking bilingual brain implant that uses AI to help a stroke survivor communicate in both Spanish and English. 

Here’s the lowdown: 

🧠 Advanced Brain Implant: The implant uses a neural network to decode brain activity into sentences, allowing the patient, identified as Pancho, to switch seamlessly between Spanish and English during conversations.

🌐 Dual-Language Capability: Pancho, who became paralyzed due to a stroke in the early 2000s, initially regained the ability to communicate only in English. However, researchers later enhanced the implant to decode both languages based on the brain's cortical activity, facilitating bilingual communication.

🔬 Innovative Research: Led by Dr. Edward Chang, the team at UCSF's Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses leveraged cortical activity data and transfer learning to train the implant. This method utilized brain activity related to vocal-tract movements, irrespective of language, to expedite training for bilingual decoding.

Ultimately, this study demonstrates the feasibility of a bilingual speech neuroprosthesis. It highlights the potential of this technology to restore more natural communication for bilingual individuals with paralysis, enabling them to express their personalities and worldviews through both languages.

🤖 Microsoft’s Build conference yields exciting updates!

Microsoft’s annual Build event for developers showcased a plethora of AI advancements, promising significant enhancements for users and developers alike. 

Here are the highlights: 

🚀 Copilot+ PCs: Microsoft introduced a new line of Windows PCs specifically designed for AI applications, claiming they are the fastest and most intelligent Windows PCs ever built. With all-day battery life and features like "Recall," which allows users to retrieve past information effortlessly, these PCs aim to redefine productivity.

🌐 Phi-3 Vision: Microsoft unveiled its new multimodal model, Phi-3-vision, capable of general visual reasoning tasks, interpreting charts, graphs, and tables. Users can ask questions about specific charts or images, and Phi-3-vision will provide text responses. This AI chatbot is currently available in preview.

🧑‍💼 AI Agents: Microsoft emphasized the development of AI assistants, or agents, that can act independently and be triggered by events, not just direct prompts. These agents can assist with tasks such as onboarding new employees by greeting them, answering questions, and setting up meetings.

🌎 Real-Time Translation: Microsoft Edge will soon feature real-time video translation for platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn, offering both dubbing and subtitles. Initial translations will be available from Spanish to English and from English to German, Hindi, Italian, Russian, and Spanish, with more languages to follow.

🔄 Advanced Paste: PowerToys Advanced Paste is an AI-enhanced tool for Windows 11, allowing users to paste text in various formats, such as JSON or Markdown. It also offers AI transformations like summarizing, translating, or changing the tone of the text.

🎨 Bringing Back Paint: Microsoft plans to revitalize its graphics editing platform with a feature that lets users generate AI images based on their doodles in real-time. A new slider allows users to control how much creative license the AI takes over their sketch.

The bottom line? Microsoft’s Build 2024 event highlighted the company's commitment to integrating AI across its products, enhancing user experience, and keeping pace with industry competitors like Google and OpenAI.

🎭 AI Reimagines: The future museum of robotics!

Now, this showcase got us thinking. What if, in the future…we are the showcase? Our culture, our practices, our hobbies—all of it. 

From where we stand, it’s a pretty wild thing to think about. But why think when you can see? 

Dive in here! 🏄‍♂️

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making a splash this week.

Here’s the best part: your weekly roundup of AI-powered productivity tools. Feel free to supercharge your productivity or even just have some fun with them. Anything works😉!

1. 📈 Taplio: Boost your LinkedIn presence with Taplio, an AI-powered tool designed to enhance your reach, engagement, and follower growth. Trusted by over 6,200 LinkedIn experts, Taplio helps you create, schedule, and optimize content tailored to your voice and niche. 

2. 🛍️ Browsebuddy: Browsebuddy is an AI-powered shopping assistant that transforms the customer experience. By understanding your catalog deeply, Browsebuddy enhances shopping journeys with personalized recommendations, effortlessly boosting sales and customer satisfaction.

3. 📹 revid.ai: Transform text into viral videos with revid.ai, an AI-powered tool for creating engaging content on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Boost your engagement, save time, and enhance your content strategy easily.

…Another perfect end to an AI-filled week!

Canva took the spotlight this time around, but who knows who’ll be at the top next week? Maybe the folks at OpenAI might even have a surprise for us. 

Till then, we’ll keep covering the latest and greatest in this space, feeding your curiosity one newsletter at a time! 

PS: Don’t forget to hit the Subscribe button! 😅