With Napkin visual artificial intelligence

Why napkins?

The tool was created by Pramod Sharma, a Silicon Valley AI veteran, and Jerome Schuler, who founded Osmo more than a decade ago to use artificial intelligence to bring children’s games to life. Napkin literally means the same napkin that is part of the food serving ceremony in many restaurants.

The question that arises is, why should the name of this tool be Napkin?

In fact, many business ideas were born during a dinner or lunch date. Writing on napkins to explain an idea or drawing shapes to convince the other party, although it seems strange; But it is a common method among the founders of Silicon Valley startups.

Napkin has created a tool that empowers you to visually explain your ideas effortlessly. You write the text of your business presentation and, using visual AI, it quickly turns it into images, charts, and more, adjusting style, colors, fonts, shapes, and design to improve your storytelling impact.

Napkin is currently in beta and works with your existing workflows in Google Docs, Slides, Canva, Slack, Word, PowerPoint, Email, Text, and more. You no longer need to wait for someone to know how to prototype your presentations. Napkin is constantly introducing new styles and designs to meet your storytelling needs.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Sharma said that we all have ideas, but it’s not easy to communicate them effectively and get people to agree. With shorter attention spans and information overload, how do we find the best way to communicate complex ideas? Napkin turns your text into images without having to think about time-consuming design intricacies.

Napkin is a groundbreaking visual AI that brings impact and fun to business storytelling. Designed for the millions of professionals selling ideas, writers, teachers, and content creators, Napkin helps you unleash the visual potential in your textual content. And this is for those of us who might be good writers; But we are weak in graphics, presentation or art.

“With the iPhone, Apple made photography very easy for anyone,” says Sharma. We are going to do the same thing with graphics. “Images are powerful, and we’ve designed Napkins so that anyone can easily communicate their ideas through visualization.”

It’s not just about eliminating jobs or eliminating graphic designers. Instead, Sharma says, it’s more about making design more accessible, allowing you to explain your ideas without spending hours creating the right image and building it from scratch.

How napkins work

How does a napkin help you with visual storytelling?

• Enter your text: Copy your existing text content or create your own text through an AI command.
• Create images: Click the spark icon anywhere in the text, and Napkin will convert your content into featured images. Within seconds, you’ll have a wide range of images to choose from.
• Customization: With Napkin’s built-in editing tool, you can adjust fonts, colors, shapes, designs, and more to match your brand style or guidelines.
• Embedding into your workflow: By simply copying and pasting, you can take the napkin images anywhere you like: Google Slides/Docs, Microsoft Word/PowerPoint, Substack, Medium, Slack, Noten, Canva, LinkedIn, Instagram and more.
• Use it in a variety of ways: Create high-quality images for presentations, blogs, sales pitches, social content, newsletters, data and research reports, customer communications and more.

User feedback

“As someone with no design skills, Napkin is incredibly easy and convenient,” says Jason Miller, COO of Sprouts.ai. Whether I need a quick diagram for a blog post or a diagram for a presentation, Napkin produces exactly what I’m looking for in seconds. Bell from Napkin, we were limited in what graphics we could access. “Now, with Napkin, we have a designer at our fingertips, offering unlimited access to enhance our business storytelling with images while saving significant time and money.”

Napkin abilities

• Snapshots to enhance storytelling: Napkin’s extensive design catalog now includes over 30 visual design categories such as mind maps, flow charts, Venn diagrams, bar charts and more.
• Strong development team: Hailing from Amazon, Microsoft Research Labs, GitHub, Google, and Osmo, Napkin’s NLP, AI, and computer vision development team is hard at work supporting more powerful customizations and unique categories that will continue to roll out in the coming weeks and months.
• Experience of the founders: Schooler and Sharma sold their previous company, Osmo, whose reflective artificial intelligence is used by millions of children and classrooms and has been integrated into products with Disney and Mattel’s Hot Wheels. Byju’s bought it in 2019 for $120 million.

Motive with Napkin AI

In a blog post, Sharma said effective communication is critical in the workplace, whether you’re pitching an idea, explaining complex concepts or brainstorming new strategies. How do you make sure your point of view is understood and appreciated by others? This challenge inspired the team to create the AI ​​Napkin.

“We all have great ideas, but sharing them effectively can be difficult,” Sharma wrote. “At Osmo, an AI-based gaming company that Jerome and I founded nearly a decade ago, we’ve delighted millions of children by making learning fun.” However, as leaders, we often find ourselves drowning in a sea of ​​documents, 100-slide presentations, and lengthy research papers. Sometimes, we come across a rare image that really captures the essence of an idea and creates those “aha” moments of enlightenment. “We realized that images are powerful communication tools, but they are rarely used.”

“We began to wonder why so few people use images as powerful communication tools,” he added. Our theory is that from an early age, we are taught to rely on writing. Text editors make it easy for everyone to collaborate and share ideas. However, creating images is time-consuming and requires skills that many of us do not possess. As a result, most people stick to writing, even though pictures can provide a clearer and more impactful view of an idea. This is especially true in professional environments where effective communication is critical.”

“We found that it’s very hard to make good pictures of the things you’re talking about,” he said. Most people have used artificial intelligence for social media. “It seems like everyone was leaning towards it at the beginning.”

But the founders thought that small businesses and enterprises were the right place to use AI images. Graphics can be very complex with interactivity. You can define the boundaries of what you want before sending the idea to the AI.

“We found that most people know how to write but don’t know how to create an image or visual form,” Sharma said.

“We realized that most people don’t have the creativity or the time to come up with something,” says Sharma. Very few people can actually start from scratch. And only in the third generation did we realize that people really need artificial intelligence.”

“It’s very difficult,” Sharma said. We are building something like a visual engine. I give you a lot of information and you create the right graphic and dynamically create the graphic. “We are trying to supplement the written content.”

The first version of an AI tool was in the form of a drawing tool for making simple diagrams with the mouse. However, the team quickly realized that even with the best AI helping out in the background, users didn’t want to sketch live with the mouse.

In the second edition, the developers introduced a database of visual frameworks such as Venn and pie charts. Users could focus on finding a visual to use according to their ideas, not the design. But they discovered that many people don’t know which images to use or how to use them effectively, even if they have access to them.

Finally, the introduction of Large Language Models (LLM) provided a perfect complement to the team’s efforts. They focused on automatically converting text to images and met users where they were most comfortable, writing text. This marked the birth of the AI ​​napkin you see today.

The future of napkins

Just as the iPhone made quality photography easy for everyone, Napkin AI’s mission is to make visual communication easy and accessible for everyone, Sharma wrote.

“We know this is a really hard problem and we’re just getting started, but we’re excited about the progress we’ve made so far. We believe we can achieve our mission by focusing on two fundamental principles: deeply understanding textual content and creating a wide variety of relevant, high-quality images.”

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