Powered by AI: New ways to enhance your demos and learnings from the building process.

We're delighted to announce that we now support some of our most requested features with the power of AI:

• Synthetic voice: Add smooth and seamless voiceovers to your Arcade with text-to-voice. We support over 20+ languages!
• AI-powered captions: We generate captions based on your voiceovers.
• AI-powered copy generation: Based on the information we know about your product and past Arcades, we suggest relevant copy for each hotspot and callout.

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*These are all available across all plans, including our free plan!

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Synthetic Voice: Professional-grade voiceovers in multiple languages.

At Arcade, we focus on empowering you to build effortlessly beautiful demos. Adding voiceovers to our Arcades was one of our most requested features. Our new Synthetic Voice feature automatically detects the language and updates the speaker accordingly, providing an engaging experience for your audience.

We were at a crossroads when it came to building audio. We weren’t sure whether we would allow users to upload their recordings or utilize synthetic voice (text-to-audio generation).

We built a proof of concept around adding our own voiceovers. When I tried it out, it was extremely challenging. I kept stumbling and re-recording. Then I realized that even when I had the perfect take, after re-listening to it, I needed to correct it. I realized if I was struggling this much with voiceovers, our customers were likely too.

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We decided to use synthetic voice for the following reasons:

• Easy to create in one take.
• It is much easier to translate into other languages (we support over 20+ languages).
• It can be shared across a team — one member can start adding voiceovers, and another can complete the project.
• Easy to maintain or edit - the user can edit the voiceovers as the product evolves.
• Generate accurate captions! (Learn more here)

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This feature has been one of the most adopted features to date: we now have more than 450+ published Arcades using it!

Here are two of our favorites: 

• Wrike's "Advanced Resourcing with Pinnacle"
• Profi's "Scheduling & Video Updates Demo" 

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AI-Powered Captions: More accessible demos.

This feature is near and dear to my heart. I was born deaf and got cochlear implants at the age of twelve. My entire life, I’ve appreciated visual polish and understanding information through many mediums.

I’ve also always been a die-hard “captioner.” This has become a more mainstream expectation of captions across media in the past few years.

When we scoped out audio, I wanted to ensure we supported captions quickly. One fantastic benefit of synthetic audio is that captions are 100% accurate!

We decided to turn these on by default, and the viewer can toggle them on or off.

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AI-Powered Copy Generation: Save time and avoid writer’s block.

A story has two essential parts: the visuals and the copy.

We have leveraged the power of GPT to generate copy as you write your Arcade. You can storyboard an Arcade before you build it — but how do you solve writer’s block?

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Enter Arcade AI.

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We generate smart and intelligent copy for you based on the following inputs:

• Your past Arcades’ copy.
• Your product — we learn more about what your product offers through metadata.
• Our data across thousands of Arcades about what performs well.
• We add some special sauce and filters to make it incredibly crisp 😉.

Honestly, it took us multiple model iterations to get this one right. I thought we would get a fantastic output on our first try. That did not happen. We saw few successful uses when we quietly released it in the product.

We then went back to the drawing board and made a lot of investments into the model and tweaks. We’re pretty proud of where we landed! After unshipping it, refining the model, and re-releasing it, we saw over 6x more use of our generative AI feature and over 2x improvement in our accept rate (the rate at which our creators use the generated copy inside their published demos).

(A random aside — Copy.ai, one of our favorite generative copy companies, uses us on their homepage!)

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This is just the beginning: Arcade’s thesis on AI.

Arcade is valuable for the customer for many reasons:

• An amazing user experience: We’re biased, but we make it incredibly simple for you to build and create an interactive asset. Our design-oriented focus is at the heartbeat of what we do.
• Easy to maintain and re-use: Arcade beats competition and alternatives because as your product changes, we can keep up with the pace of your velocity.
• Insights and data: Understand how your audience is engaging with your demo to make optimizations and know what's resonating.

There are two main ways B2B software has used AI:

• Generative: Creating new content based on inputs and leveraging third-party libraries and datasets to make it easier for you.
• Synthesis: Not to be confused with synthetic, synthesis means aggregating across many datasets to understand learnings or build new content.

So far, we have leveraged the power of generative AI to date. In the future, we will visit synthesis and applications for you as a marketer, product manager, or GTM leader to better decide how and where to market your product.

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Some founder learnings on AI.

Getting to this thesis took work. In this AI journey, we made some mistakes and learned a few things along the way. These are mine:

• Build what is valuable for your customers’ workflows. Start from what they need, and then consider how to leverage the power of AI. For example, audio support was one of our top requested features. Do not do AI for the sake of AI - that is costly and expensive to build.
• Iterate on models. The outputs are only as good as the inputs. I thought we were done once we built our first version on top of GPT. We were most definitely not!
• Be honest with yourself about what you can rent vs. buy. What is truly going to be proprietary for your company? What can you leverage that has already been built? This highly depends on your company’s mission and “competitive moat.” If you aim to build with AI as the core of your strategy, using third-party tools can be an issue.

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We hope you find value in these features and build on our learnings about using AI in your product!

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