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If you’ve kept up with everything tech-related, you’d probably agree that 2022 is likely to be the year of Artificial Intelligence.

AI adoption across industries is rapidly increasing; 35% of companies are using AI and 42% are exploring it. OpenAI has made its presence known this past year—first with DALL-E 2 (which, as of this week, lets you edit people’s faces using AI), and now, it's open-sourcing a neural net called Whisper.

Whisper is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system “trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.” It’s the latest attempt of a company trying to make speech recognition and translation more accessible. Its focus on improving ASR is especially important—a 2020 Stanford study found that existing ASR systems have a much lower error rate with white users (19%) than Black users (35%).

OpenAI claims that about a third of Whisper’s audio dataset is non-English and that it processes accents, background noise, and technical language at a very robust level. Whisper can translate from non-English to English, which could make speech-to-text translation a much more accessible feature and eliminate the biases we see today.

While Whisper is geared towards enabling developers to add voice interfaces to a wider set of applications, AI-powered products are for everyone.

Here are some new AI-powered products that don’t require any dev experience. 👇

Charlie 2.0 not only has a cute mascot, but uses AI to help you generate HD, 2K, 4K, widescreen, vertical, and square images, and blog content.

Suggesty is an AI search tool that helps you get human-like answers to your Google search without scrolling through all the results pages.

Typed uses AI to help you collaborate with your team to write, research, and view tasks all on one page.

Ever heard the saying “friendship is not about who you’ve known the longest, but who’s shown up for you when it mattered?” Let’s apply that to your toolstack. Yes, you may feel bonded to the productivity tool you’ve used for the past 5 years, but maybe you’re missing out on something that meets more of your needs.

Check out some recent community preferences that are alternatives to popular products 👇

Artboard Studio is like two design favorites meshed into one; Maker Mucahit Gayiran combined the Figma-eque design experience with features that resemble After Effects to help designers turn into animators. It’s cloud-based and works with vectors, images, and videos so you can design anything from Instagram Stories to stationery items.

Looking for an alternative to Typeform or Google Forms? Feathery is a low-code option that connects to over 2,000 tools and helps developers build complex forms.

Cal.com, the open-source alternative to Calendly, re-launched this month with support from investor Alexis Ohanian, and is now available for individuals. You can tailor links per scenario, automate your workflow, avoid meeting overload with buffers between meetings, and more.

Slack is a favorite amongst many for its team-building capabilities, but it’s not the only tool that can help your remote team bond together. Kosy is out of beta and helps remote teams collaborate and have fun together. Teams can build a virtual workspace and keep chats and meetings within Kosy.

If you’re shipping an app and looking for an alternative to Firebase, Appwrite launched yesterday. The open-source tool provides developers with authentication, databases, storage, and real time capabilities to build web and mobile applications.

Will you befriend any of these tools?

Spotify Audiobooks officially launched in the U.S. yesterday, directly competing with Audible and potentially threatening its dominance in the audiobook industry.

Audible, which was acquired by Amazon in 2008, controls 41% of the US audiobook market and critics say it has a monopoly on the industry. Could Spotify’s entry into the space threaten that?

It seems Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek and his team hope so. Nir Zicherman, head of audiobooks at Spotify, especially sees the potential to expand the audience for audiobooks and transform how users interact with content—the audiobook industry is already extremely profitable at $1.7b, but audiobooks represent less than 7% of the entire book market.

Spotify’s grip on all-things audio has already been growing. The platform is already a leader in music streaming services and podcasts, so adding audiobooks to the mix could make it a convenient all-in-one app for users who don’t like jumping around. It could also be a gamechanger for the company’s profits; despite being a leader in streaming, “[Spotify] has still never reported an annual profit.”

Spotify debuted its audiobook catalog with 300,000 titles from best-selling authors like Michelle Obama and Stephen King, and introduced a pay per book pricing model that’s a huge contrast to Audible’s unlimited subscription model.

We’ll be watching to see how Amazon responds to its new competitor. “Just as we've done with podcasting, expect us to play to win,” Ek says of Spotify.

A large part of sales isn’t only establishing trust, but all the grunt work that comes along with tracking your prospects’ needs and meeting them where they are. The transition to a very virtual world has added an extra layer of difficulty.

We’ve collected the latest community favorite products to help with common challenges when it comes to outreach and closing leads. 👇

Nektar is a no-code solution for revenue operations and customer-facing teams. Maker Abhijeet Vijayvergiya came up with the idea when he noticed that sales reps just didn’t have the time to update customer relationship management (CRM) tools, which scattered critical data all over the place and created issues for revenue operations teams. Nektar captures CRM data from sales reps as they go about their day, so key revenue activities and buyer contacts don’t slip through the cracks. It can also be used for the entire customer lifecycle, so it’s not limited to people in revenue ops.

Social selling? Of the sales reps who use social media, 64% hit their team quota, and leaders in social selling create 45% more sales opportunities than their counterparts. Hexospark can take out some of the manual work by helping sales teams find new leads on LinkedIn.

If you’re working with enterprise level clients, or those that require highly secure environments, you know you’ve felt the burden of the 200+ security question requests when procurement teams are vetting a new software. It prolongs the sales cycle. HyperComply solves this by enabling sales teams to respond to security questionnaires faster and using AI and human review to quality-check answers.

Maker Robin Singhvi noticed that his sales reps were struggling to create and present successful product demos to prospects, so he created SmartCue. SmartCue helps sales reps create personalized product demos and a library of demos based on use cases, buyer personas, industries, and more.

If any of these help you ring the real or proverbial gong, make sure to leave some feedback or a review on their pages.

Uber was hacked this past Thursday and a successful social engineering tactic (aka psychological manipulation) was to blame.

If you’re thinking “it can’t happen to me,” you’re probably wrong. The 18-year old Uber attacker tricked an employee by repeatedly sending them multifactor authentication (MFA) login notifications for an hour and then messaging them on WhatsApp pretending to be an Uber IT person. The attacker asserted that the MFA notifications would stop once the login was approved, and it worked.

With just one employee’s information, the hacker gained access to Uber’s cloud infrastructure and OneLogin, an identity and access management service. The attack was a classic case of phishing, a social engineering tactic that utilizes fake emails and text messages to trick users into revealing their personal information. Employees are usually the biggest target, and Uber was the latest victim.

The truth is, no matter how protected you think you are, there’s always room to learn new ways to protect yourself and your company. Hackers are getting smarter and even the most “secure” techniques (like MFA) can’t guarantee that you’re immune from a cyberattack. Less than a month ago, hackers used similar employee-targeted phishing tactics to breach Twilio and DoorDash’s systems too.

Besides not clicking on suspicious links and giving out your personal information to people posing as your company’s IT professionals, there are a few more ways to protect yourself from cyberattacks.

If you’re a maker, we recently covered the security benefits of penetration testing here. Albert, a cybersecurity program for Slack, and TypingDNA ActiveLock (an authentication app backed by Google’s AI-focused fund) could also help. The latter functions by using biometrics-based security to continuously authenticate users based on the way they type. In the first 1-2 days of use, ActiveLock runs in “training mode” to learn your typing pattern. From then on, the app runs in “active” mode and blocks unauthorized users. If an unordinary typing pattern is detected, all devices are locked.

For individuals, a VPN and the CrowdSec Console, a security tool that monitors cyber threats on your online services could help.

If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em?

Yesterday, Adobe announced that it’ll acquire its rival, Figma, for a whopping $20B. The decision was met with mixed feelings from the design community, with many fearful that the deal will have a negative impact on Figma’s direction. Despite confirmation that Figma will remain independent, some people are still not entirely sold (see: the response from our community).

Whether you hate it or are celebrating Figma’s big exit, this pending acquisition has the potential to shake things up in the design space. Adobe has been struggling to compete—even its closest bud, Microsoft, was becoming a Figma fan, potentially threatening a well-known bromance in the tech industry. Now that Adobe and Figma are set to join forces, that bromance is likely saved, but the competition isn’t going anywhere.

Say hello again to Canva, the graphic design tool that wants you to know it’s not going anywhere. If you recall, we recently covered the launch of Canva Whiteboards. A month later, the company’s still in the spotlight and just announced Canva Visual Worksuite. The new products go beyond graphic design and offer the ability to design documents, data visualizations, websites, and more. It’s making Canva look more like a competitor for Google Workspace and Microsoft Office than a graphic design company, although co-founder Cliff Obrecht claimed the company's “entering a new era of Canva” and not trying to “compete head-to-head with Google Docs.”

With post-pandemic inflation woes, more tech companies are struggling to tread water, but Canva’s still going strong off its profitability—last year, it raised $200 million and grew to $40 billion. So while the Adobe-Figma deal makes some question what’s next for its competitors, we wonder how Adobe will utilize the acquisition to set itself apart from high-growth companies like Canva.

Keep the conversation going and let us know what you think.

Not too long ago, we touched on the future of higher education and the growth of online learning. Demand in that space continues to grow, but existing solutions may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Started by the co-founders of Udemy, altMBA, and Venmo, Maven is a spin on the online learning format most of us are familiar with. The makers were frustrated by what they saw as repetitive learning models—aka video-based courses with low completion rates.

“15 years ago, online education was considered a dead industry. VCs literally told me not to work in online learning. We started Udemy anyway and it took almost 5 years for anyone to take us seriously. [We feel as if] there's been almost no innovation since then,” says co-founder Gagan Biyani, who also co-founded Udemy.

Taking inspiration from co-founder Wes Kao’s altMBA experience, the team took a different approach to online learning and developed cohort-based courses (CBC).

The CBC model provides live courses and lets you learn alongside your peers, as opposed to sitting through pre-recorded videos by yourself. If you don’t have the time to keep up with the live class meetings, they’re recorded for you to watch later. While most courses are built for full-time professionals with busy schedules, instructors still put a heavy emphasis on the benefits of an interactive learning environment.

Maven instructors come from different industries and companies like Yelp, Meta, and Google. Prospective students can sign up for different “cohorts” and enroll in courses that are anywhere from 10 days to a few months long. Course topics for the fall cohort include leadership, marketing, product management, and more.

Low competition rates for online courses, which hover around 5-15%, make us wonder if this CBC model will be picked up by existing online learning platforms. BloomTech, an online coding bootcamp (formerly Lambda School), already utilizes a similar model and has a 70% graduation rate.

What do you think—could this format be a game changer for the online learning space?

Let’s face it– many things in life are about who you know, not what you know. Unfortunately, not everyone’s a bubbly extrovert or a natural-born LinkedIn star.

Online networking isn’t a one size fits all philosophy and what works for someone else may not work for you. Maker Peter Johnston had his own gripes with the online networking space, so he created Polywork last year and the word even landed a spot in the dictionary. Today, it’s officially out of beta. ”We started Polywork because we were frustrated by the limited ways existing professional networks allow us to express ourselves (i.e. they focus on job titles and schools attended),” says Johnston.

The Polywork team wants to empower professionals to represent who they are beyond their job titles. They believe that “by empowering people to tell their story and connect with others, we might be able to make the world more productive.” The platform’s features reflect that.

On Polywork, you don’t have to rely on vanity metrics to succeed (they don’t exist). Its “highlights” feature allows you to showcase a timeline of your proudest projects and its profile setup lets you tell the world that you’re both a software engineer and a bookworm. It also caters to the professionals that haven’t found any luck with existing tools and helps them explore more than just full time opportunities. If you’re only looking for a founder to speak on your podcast or you just need mentoring, Polywork could help.

With 28% of job seekers reporting that the job search has negatively impacted their mental health, having new players in the space doesn’t feel like a bad idea. 🤷‍♀️

Let’s keep it a buck—recruiters are often vilified, and a lot of the time, it’s out of their control. Imagine having to maneuver around an outdated hiring technology and an indecisive hiring manager... it can’t be easy.

The good news? Recruiting software is abundant and continuously developing.

Maker Benjamin (Benji) Encz and his team faced trials and tribulations when it came to hiring, which is why they created Ashby, an all-in-one recruiting tool used by companies like Notion and Deel. “Ashby was founded by my co-founder Abhik and I after we struggled hiring large engineering teams with existing applicant tracking system [ATS] products. Recruiting has become a lot more sophisticated over the last few years because competition for talent has become fiercer and we felt that products had not kept up with that,” says Benji.

Recruiters can view things like monthly hires and open job postings, without having to create spreadsheets manually. The candidate experience is also accounted for with its relationship-building email tools and automation that takes the back and forth out of interview scheduling.

Outdated recruiting software is not only an internal problem but one that makes life difficult for the jobseeker too. Candidates often wait a long time before receiving a job update—about 44% hear back after two weeks when applying online. A common complaint from job seekers is that they feel their online applications are ignored, and that’s especially true for underrepresented groups. To combat that issue, tools like Ashby help you track and measure your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals.

With stressed out recruiters and frustrated job seekers, it’s not a bad idea to find different ways to make hiring a breeze. If you are a frustrated job seeker, ICYMI, we’ve redesigned profiles, so make sure to go and update yours here. You never know who might be lurking. 👀 Plus, we’d love to get to know the community better.

From Coinbase to Better, Fintech has been no stranger to mass layoffs this past year. Critics question how the industry went from leading VC fundraising in 2021 with $131.5 billion across 4,969 deals to leading tech layoffs. Despite a year of downturns, would it be shortsighted to say that Fintech’s future is obsolete?

Back in January, Fintech company Wealthfront announced that it would be acquired by Swiss bank UBS for $1.4 billion. That plan has since fallen apart amid “regulatory concerns.” Bank-fintech acquisitions often fall victim to regulatory issues, with many bank regulators wanting to keep the two entities separate.

Although Wealthfront’s failed acquisition doesn’t exactly put Fintech in a positive light, the fact that the acquisition even happened could be a positive indicator of the value Fintech companies present to banks and larger institutions. The industry is set to grow to $300 billion by the end of this year. Last week, we touched on YC S22, and how Fintech was the second most popular category. Here on Product Hunt, Fintech start-ups continue to launch and gain momentum too.

Plasma Wallet launched today and there’s a lot of buzz in the comments. The mobile app lets you manage, trade, and store crypto assets and NFTs. Plasma gives users the ability to view different wallets and balances all in one place.

Beanvest launched last month and helps you track more than 250,000 assets including stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and crypto. It functions as an alternative to manual spreadsheet tracking and helps you measure your portfolio performance.

Peachy Patients is a healthcare platform which helps you manage your medical expenses. It connects with your providers, lets you earn points on the money you spend, and negotiate medical bills.