A new AI video platform is now in the commercial market. Formerly Aug X, Augie Studio is an all-in-one solution businesses of all sizes can easily use to generate social video content at scale. The company is exiting beta after two years of testing and is launching new pricing tiers, including an enterprise plan for creative advertising and marketing teams.
“When we first started the company, we did a lot of end-user research. What do people want? No one wants us to rebuild [Adobe] Premiere with AI because that’s what Premiere is about to be anyway,” Jeremy Toeman, Augie Studio co-founder and chief executive, explains to VentureBeat. “What people are really looking for is something more like Canva and what it brought to image and banner creation, but to video, which we’d argue is very different than what Canva is, just a different thing. How do you apply the same mentality? How do I make a video product that [we] can use without me knowing anyone’s background?”
The company targets brands looking to create more videos, which Toeman estimates at around 70 percent. It has set its sights on being helpful for social media marketers, social video marketers, brand managers, and creative advertisers, who will likely have no reservations about using Augie Studio out of the box immediately. The platform now counts “hundreds of thousands of users.”
How does Augie Studio work?
Though AI-powered, Augie Studio is not directly competing against OpenAI’s Sora, Luma AI’s “Dream Machine,” or Kuaishou’s Kling. While it can generate a script, voiceover, and images for videos through a prompt, Augie Studio is also partially an editing tool. It offers granular controls to allow users to swap out specific imagery, edit the script, choose a different voice talent, and more. It’s also model agnostic, meaning content creators can use their preferred LLM.
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“When we asked our users what they liked about Augie, interestingly one of the things they say is it’s fun to use,” Toeman boasts. “One of my favorite things I’ve heard is that we’ve actually made video editing fun for people.”
The onboarding process appears to be fairly straightforward. Before you start creating a video, you can choose from nine options. These are suited to specific scenarios, from starting from scratch and wanting to make a video ad or tell a story to having a script and wanting to make an explainer video, having an audio file and wanting to produce a podcast trailer, or having a video and wanting to create a short film.
However, access to these will be limited based on your membership.
Toeman reveals that quite a lot has changed under the hood since Augie Studio first debuted in beta. For example, the version launching today applies computer vision to everything. Moreover, it features a so-called “matchy-matchy” engine (clever name, huh?) that attempts to sync spoken words with the content that makes the most sense.
Other features available with Augie Studio:
- A dynamic asset library to keep assets organized: The company provides an AI-powered search feature that quickly scans B-roll footage to find requested moments/scenes. Plus, some users will have unlimited access to Getty Images’ library of commercially licensed content.
- Automatic content creation: Augie Studio claims it can generate anything you’re missing, from a storyboard to media that matches a script, a clip of a unicorn riding a unicycle, and more.
- Intuitive professional-grade editing: An easy-to-use interface that promises to make editing views, transitions, captions, music, effects and file formats as simple as clicking a button.
With this new version, as Toeman puts it, “everything is basically faster, matches better, performs better, the interface is better, and the feature set is better.” But the team isn’t stopping there. He teases that a collaborative mode will be released later this summer for Augie Studio.
New pricing
Though fun, operating Augie Studio costs money. That’s why the company is instituting three paid subscription tiers. There’s a free version for basic and personal use, allowing up to 60-second videos with a maximum of two total minutes of videos per month. Those on this lite plan will be limited to their own voice and video content.
With the $40 monthly premium offering, creators are limited to two-minute videos and can generate 10 total minutes per month. They will have access to AI scriptwriting, the voice library and more.
The enterprise plan costs $249 per month and allows an unlimited number of 10-minute videos, guided onboarding and training, access to a Slack support community, and prioritized custom features, including having an on-premise install of the platform, direct integration into a Content Management System and more.
Augie Studio says these tiers consider the needs of marketers and creators of any size, from freelancers to small business owners to those in corporate settings.
Scarlett Johansson-free
For brands, perhaps the best part is that everything is safe to use. Toeman declares that Augie Studio has a partnership with Getty Images and has all its content copyright cleared. In addition, “we are using Creative Commons-cleared content. We are using paid background music. We are using sanctioned voices…We are making a profound effort to only use ethically sourced AI services.”
The company also leverages ElevenLabs for its voice work, ensuring that everything is cleared before being used in any of its creations, though creators can upload their own voice.
Toeman believes Augie Studio won’t have the same problem as OpenAI did.
This may be refreshing for organizations, knowing that the content they generate through Augie Studio will not be subject to copyright complaints. In addition, brand marketers might be attracted to the platform because they can use all the functionality with their own sourced content without relying on Getty Images or external data providers.
Not building clip-generating LLMs
In the end, what makes Augie Studio different from the AI video-generating models is that it offers the thing they’re missing: An editing platform. “We don’t care about the LLMs that generate clips for you,” Toeman asserts. “We love when LLMs generate clips for you because that just gives our users more ways to fill their needs.”
Sora and models like it are designed to create something that doesn’t exist. However, Toeman believes business people will continue to need a video editing tool somewhere between iMovie and Premiere Pro. The former is easy to use but not used to promote businesses, while the latter is not. So there needs to be a middle ground, and that’s where Augie Studio hopes it’ll find success.
