Bigtincan AuthoringAI

2023 was a huge year for content creation at Brainshark, Bigtincan’s learning platform. Content Authoring, which is Brainshark’s feature for building and editing web-based presentations, went from being a quaint (read: cutting edge upon release 25 years ago) and clunky interface, to being a modern, responsive, and easy-to-use user experience — all thanks to the hard work of the designers, developers, and product managers at Bigtincan.

In 2024, the spirit of innovation that brought Content Authoring into the modern era is as strong as ever at Brainshark, and with Content Authoring’s modern user experience released to the public, Brainshark looks forward. In line with the goals of the Bigtincan platform, of which Brainshark is part, Brainshark sets its sights on harnessing the power of AI to become the absolute best way to create content for learning.

Generate Audio

Brainshark’s existing text-to-speech voice library is a vestige of its time. The voices sound distinctly and obviously computer-generated. The first part of the AuthoringAI effort was to bring state-of-the-art voice generation to the platform. A feature that once was only useful for generating placeholder content to guage presentation timing, can now be used in complement with, or even completely in place of conventional narration.

To reflect this newfound usability, we designed and built a brand new interface. Users now get an at-a-glance view of their presentation, which tells them which slides already have audio, which slides have notes that can be used to generate audio, and, for slides that already have generated audio, which voice was used to generate the audio. From this view, users can be more specific than ever before about which slides they want to generate audio for — instead of only being able to select a single slide or the whole presentation, users can now select any number of slides.

For users who may want to use the legacy text-to-speech voices, they can select the Classic voice library. All users also have access to a new Modern voice library, which has updated voices available for free. Users with the AuthoringAI plan have access to the state-of-the-art AuthoringAI and Custom voice libraries (more on that in a bit).

Generate Captions and Notes

Captioning a presentation is a painful process that most Brainshark customers either don’t bother with, or contract it out to an expensive, third-party service. This is no longer the case, as users can now generate captions for their Brainshark presentations with the click of a single button. Generating captions is remarkably accurate, but in cases of inaccuracy, users can now edit captions without leaving Content Authoring — something that was never possible before.

In addition, users can now generate slide notes based on audio, using the same engine that generates captions. This is particularly useful for users who want to change the spoken content of their presentation, but don’t have a transcript. Users can now generate a transcript of their presentation audio as slide notes, make changes, and, either record new audio using the slide notes as a script, or, generate new audio.

Bigtincan press release︎︎︎