Compelling, conversion-worthy visual experiences fill shopping carts. A recent Cloudinary global e-commerce consumer survey backs this up. Of the nearly 3,000 survey respondents, 47% credited their purchasing decision to user reviews that included images. More than a quarter stated that branded videos were a must-have for them to make a buying decision. In a Hubspot study, 60% of U.S. digital shoppers said they needed to see an average of three or four images when shopping online. While 65% said they are more likely to purchase an item if they can see it from all angles.
Delivering the persuasive, eye-snagging visual experience that makes the sale entails more than uploading images and videos. A tremendous amount of labor, a lot of it tedious and repetitive, goes into the management of a retail website. Every asset must be sized, cropped, formatted, and optimized for a consistent user experience across multiple devices and browsers.
For many businesses the ongoing activity of prepping and managing the imagery on their website has been mistaken for “productivity.” The reality is that asset manipulation and management have been, under the best of conditions, a costly yet necessary activity. Under less optimal circumstances, a drain on the business’s resources.
It is these types of pains, costs, and creativity-stifling, repetitive tasks that Cloudinary AI solutions have been created to address.
Here’s a look at Cloudinary’s most recent AI advancements.
Accurately portraying a product online in just a few images and videos — especially furniture, apparel, personal care products — is best done by showing the item in context. When done well, showing your products in situ will answer questions like, how does that sofa look in a mid-century modern home? What’s that blue shirt look like with a black jacket?
Cloudinary’s assistive creativity platform, FinalTouch (the debut solution from New Ventures), answers these questions, and more.
From your uploaded imagery, applied generative AI features take simple product images and places that item in a pre-specified environment. Editing tools customize, iterate, and produce product images at scale, without the cost of specialized design expertise or photography.
Remove or replace backgrounds or elements to place products in a specific setting, request a pre-populated style setting ranging from Scandinavian to Bohemian, to Traditional, or any other aesthetic that suits your brand.
The result is studio-quality product shots without the need for expensive equipment or professional photographers. From lifestyle scenes to custom backgrounds, Final Touch creates the immersive shopping experience that captivates customers.
Typically, every video and image a brand uses on its site needs to be coded, cropped, captioned, and more.
Through the incorporation of new generative AI, large language models (LLM), and GPT-based features within its Programmable Media image and video APIs users can create customized, personalized assets automatically. These capabilities include:
- Generative Recolor. Eliminates the need to manually color retouch photos.
- Generative Fill. Resizes any image, transform from vertical to horizontal, and replace backgrounds.
- Generative Remove. Removes unwanted objects, text, and specific user-defined regions from your images.
- Generative Replace. Detects, changes, and replaces unwanted elements and colors via natural-language prompts.
- AI-Powered Image Captioning. Intelligently creates image captions for galleries, user-generated content, and product descriptions at scale.
With content-aware AI and ML models, editing bulk assets is more efficient and frees up teams to focus on building an exceptional customer experience.
Ninety-one percent of consumers want more videos from their favorite brands. Yet, with diverse channels and product variations, these engaging videos can be difficult to deliver efficiently.
Cloudinary’s new AI capabilities for video simplify the video creation process These functions, available via APIs, are as follows:
- Video generation feature. Allows brands to automatically generate videos using existing assets, colors, and text.
- AI video cropping feature. Optimizes size, aspect ratio, and focus based on desired device.
- Adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR). Enables fast-loading, high-quality video experiences by adapting the video codec, resolution, and video bitrate.
- Interactive video: Adds relevant interactivity, like shoppable links, to videos.
- Video analytics: Centralized video data.
Cloudinary has been developing advanced AI-driven solutions for over a decade. As AI continues to become more pervasive, Cloudinary will be on the front lines, responsibly developing the tools that comply with standards and practices while delivering value to its customers.
Contact us today to learn all the ways Cloudinary’s AI-powered tools can improve efficiency, get your products to market faster, and drive sales.
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