Tired of spending hours on repetitive PR tasks? AI is here to save the day!
The sharp rise in AI usage businesswise worldwide has not surpassed the PR industry. In fact, the vast majority of PR professionals are already using AI tools each and every day. 83% of the International Public Relations Network (IPRN) confirmed that they are using AI tools to stay ahead in the fast-paced PR sector.
Among the main benefits of AI for PR activities, the IPRN found that its members used AI to help them increase their efficiency (26%), to support research (23%), reduce staff workloads (20%), and help enhance their copywriting and creativity (13%).
AI in PR has many other benefits though, including:
- Time savings: AI automates tasks like media monitoring, data analysis and content generation, freeing up your time for more strategic initiatives.
- Increased efficiency: AI handles larger workloads faster with lightning-fast processing speed.
- Improved accuracy: AI reduces human error with precise data analysis, sentiment analysis and content optimisation. But beware, it is also inaccurate at times!
- Expanded capacity: AI scales your PR efforts by handling tasks at scale, monitoring multiple channels and processing massive amounts of data.
- Competitive advantage: AI helps you stay ahead of the curve by streamlining PR processes and delivering targeted campaigns.
PR specialists are already using AI for tasks such as:
- Idea generation
- Press release creation
- Research
- Reporting
- Monitoring
AI can also schedule and manage social media posts, draft press releases, respond to customer comments, emails, and messages, build media lists, and take notes. With all this lovely opportunity, here are our top 10 all-free except one AI tools for PR to help you get more work done quickly:
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a conversational GenAI chatbot, or virtual assistant, tool that answers questions via back-and-forth dialogue providing users with generated text on any subject. The basic model is free but ChatGPT Plus, which offers access to a more advanced and capable language model giving users faster response speed, costs $20 per month. You definitely need to be careful as it is known to make things up!
Alternative chatbot options include Microsoft's Copilot and Apple Intelligence, and Google Gemini. Jasper – another text generation AI copilot tool, helps PR and marketing professionals easily generate and personalise content for their campaigns. It offers a range of features, including natural language processing algorithms that can detect user intent in real-time, allowing PR and marketing professionals to customise their messages for maximum engagement.
Grammarly
Grammarly is an American tool so the content created by it inevitably includes a wealth of Zs throughout where we in the UK would use the letter S. For example, analyse rather than analyse. So, to make sure any AI-generated content is switched to the correct UK version, Grammarly is a must-have for us though as it can be used across any apps and not just via its own site. For example, it works when you open word or your emails. It is an AI tool that helps you write better, clearer, shorter and more persuasive text. Essentially Grammarly proof reads your text and offers personalised suggestions and improvements, and style guidance to make your content the best it can be.
Other grammar feedback, style, plot and readability AI tools include ProWritingAid, Ludwig and LanguageTool.
OpenArt
A free AI image generator, that makes amazing images for you to use based on photo prompts and via a free registration. OpenArt is also the best alternative to platform-tied options such as Midjourney, which is a text-to-image tool managed through Discord where you can give it a detailed prompt, and it will give you a royalty free image similar to what you asked for…but via a Discord account only.
Otter
This is a platform that transcribes spoken words into written text in real-time. Otter can identify different speakers, edit transcripts, integrate with video conferencing tools and offer various features tied to interview and meeting transcriptions. It captures the words spoken and is perfect for reviewing meetings post-event to highlight notes and actions.
Veed
A text to video GenAI that is ideal for image campaigns, Veed not only creates visuals with word prompts to help you with planning boards, it also allows you to pick an AI human-like character to speak on your video. Other options to tailor your video to your needs are a choice of different layout options (horizontal or portrait), so you can make the video fit the space assigned for it on your website, online or via social, and tags including which audience targets the video should reach out to. You can even edit the suggested script for your AI spokesperson before the video is created.
Please note though that, like many text to video AI tools such as Kapwing, Synthesia and InVideo, Veed is free only to start with. A basic subscription starts from £9 per month per user and we think that is well worth the cost thanks to the multiple options available to create video s that are spot on.
Deepl
A gem of a free translation tool, Deepl’s results are seriously impressive, making this a mainstream tool for me. It auto translates texts so even if you don’t know what language the original copy is, you can paste it into Deepl and this smart platform will detect that original language of the content and then translate it to whichever language you prefer. You can select from every language in the planet via a dropdown for the original or translate to options, so no content will be untranslatable. And, using its artificial neural networks, which have been trained on millions of previously translated texts, Deepl can capture even the slightest nuances and then accurately reproduce those in translations you’ll think you had paid a translator for.
Brandwatch
With most brand snow using social media, analytics tools like Brandwatch are a must-have. They help you to analyse data from millions of conversations across social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, and more to understand consumer sentiment about brand and products. Brandwatch is ideal for “listening” to and proactively managing clients’ social media accounts.
By enabling PR professionals to stay on top of online conversations, Brandwatch lets them suggest and implement improvements as the insights mean PRs can optimise campaigns for maximum results. Brandwatch uses the power of artificial intelligence to track, analyse and monitor not just text mentions of your brand but also visual content related to the client’s brand such as images of company logos and products. The advanced language processing of Brandwatch can even determine if a brand mention is positive, negative or neutral and helps you track all of these metrics in a user-friendly way, so you can proactively address any issues.
An alternative social media management tools is Talkwalker, which is powered by Hootsuite, and QUID.
Cleanup.Pictures
Cleanup.Pictures is an AI algorithm that analyses and retouchs photos, so you can reconstruct an image to remove an unwanted object in just one click. You can also change up the style of a product photo, remove text, and so much more. Simply paste and drop your image file into the app to begin.
There are a wealth of image touch up AI apps online, including remove.photos, Picsart, Clipdrop, fotor and pixelcut so there is no excuse for any poor quality images that aren’t the best creative you need for a campaign.
TLDR This
A free online text summarising tool that automatically condenses long articles, documents, essays or papers into key summaries and paragraphs. TLDR This can take long, wordy text and pull put key points to make a shorter more readable version in only a few clicks. It even uses the URL link of the article too, which means you don't have to copy and paste the online text you want to summarise. It does of course also have that copy, paste option to if that’s what you prefer.
Similar text summarising tools include QuillBot and Summarizer.
PressPal
PressPal is an AI tool for PR professionals by media database company, Muck Rack. It helps you to source relevant journalists based on press release keywords and pitches. PressPal even helps improve PR targeting using MuckRack’s extensive media database and even has a feature that generates a press release based on a brief description and provides a list of relevant journalists to target. This means your content can be sent to journalists that cover specific beats and are most likely to engage with you or cover that content.
CisionOne and Meltwater are also worth noting as invaluable all-in-one online media monitoring, data and communications tools.
One quick word of advice to end this post with, be careful relying too much on AI as AI-generated copy will have a huge impact on search and SEO, where search engines will want to avoid promoting (low quality) recycled content that lacks creativity or human experience behind it. This means that search engines will probably penalise you for using AI-generated SEO copy. So always check your final content against a plagiarism tool to avoid low-quality, recycled copy.
Also, because ChatGPT can’t access the internet (or so it claims), it won’t capture information after 2020, making it a lot less useful.
