A team of two. Twenty-six events a year. No, that's not a typo. OpenAI is hosting a free live session Thursday, October 15 at 9:30 AM PT with Larissa Guetter, co-founder of ATV Big Air Tour. Her company runs 26 national ATV events a year with a total headcount of two people. She's going to walk through the actual ChatGPT workflows she uses for merchandise inventory, marketing materials, and when things go sideways operationally. Not a product demo from a sales rep. A real owner showing real screens. If you've been trying to explain to yourself (or your team) why ChatGPT Work is worth the subscription, this is the session to attend or watch on replay. Register here.

HeyGen just knocked ElevenLabs off the top of the voice leaderboard. HeyGen Voice, the company's new in-house text-to-speech model, debuted at number one on Artificial Analysis' controlled-voice leaderboard, beating ElevenLabs v4 Turbo and Alibaba's Qwen Audio. What makes this different from every other voice model announcement: it was built specifically for video, not just audio. That means it understands context the way a narrator would. Three modes ship with it. Adaptive fits the delivery to whatever's happening in the scene. Exact holds the voice consistent across a long recording, so your clone doesn't drift between minute three and minute forty. Expressiveness Boost is a slider that turns up energy without making the voice sound like a different person. Instant Voice is free from a 60-second sample. Professional Voice is a paid upgrade using up to two hours of audio. API access is $30 per million characters, no minimums. If you're already paying for ElevenLabs to power avatar or video work, it's worth running the same clip through both and seeing what you actually hear. Check it out here.

Lovable now runs your ads, not just your app. Lovable started as a tool for building web apps through conversation. It just added something owners who use it for client tools or their own products should know about. In the same chat where you build, you can now ask for a growth strategy. Lovable looks at your app, your audience, your goals, and tells you what it thinks you should do next. If ads are part of that, you connect your Google Ads or Meta account and it generates the copy, images, and short videos from your product directly. You approve the budget before anything goes live. Google or Meta bill you directly, Lovable takes no cut of ad spend. Available on Free, Pro, and Business plans. Details here.

Tools Worth a Look

  • Plaud Ask: Two modes now, Chat for quick Q&A on your meeting notes, and Work for agentic tasks (files, routines, deliverables) that run on Plaud Credits. First credits are free; for owners who want their note-taker to actually produce output, not just answer questions.

  • Morningside AI Workshop, Oct. 21: Free live session with three people who built AI consulting businesses, covering what they sold, how they found clients, and how they delivered. Free; for owners or operators thinking about adding AI consulting to what they do.

  • VoiceStudio: A fully local, open-source alternative to ElevenLabs, voice cloning, dubbing, transcription, and audiobook creation in 646 languages, runs on your own machine with no API fees. (3,538 stars today)

  • context-mode: Cuts the memory your AI coding assistant uses by 98% and keeps it on task across sessions, for owners or developers annoyed by agents that forget what they were doing mid-project. (947 stars today)

  • scientific-agent-skills: 177 plug-and-play skills for turning any AI agent into a research tool, covering biology, chemistry, medicine, and drug databases. Works with Cursor, Claude, and others. (163 stars today)

  • CLI-Anything: Makes existing software talk to AI agents without a custom integration, basically a universal adapter for your current tools. (103 stars today)

  • nvm: Lets developers switch between different versions of Node.js on the same computer without breaking anything, a plumbing tool but a very popular one. (52 stars today)

More Headlines

-Scott

SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.