Overview
The speaker reviews Google's new Opal platform for creating and sharing AI-powered mini apps using natural language prompts. They demonstrate several workflows, highlight the platform's strengths and limitations, and suggest its potential to revolutionize no-code automation.
First Impressions and Platform Overview
- Opal allows users to describe, create, and share AI mini apps through simple prompts.
- The interface is straightforward and sign-in is via a Google account.
- Automations are built in a manner similar to N8N, but entirely through natural language input.
- Users can choose different AI models for workflow steps.
- Platform experiences initial slowness, likely due to high traffic at launch.
Workflow Demonstrations
- Used Opal to test a blog post writer, which produces an outline, researches, generates a banner, writes the post, and displays the result.
- The outputs are generally high-quality, though image/logo generation can be inconsistent.
- Tried a YouTube thumbnail generator using an input URL, resulting in relevant and context-aware thumbnails derived from video content.
- Demonstrated rapid and effective thumbnail generation, including text and visual elements matching the video theme.
Experimenting with Social Media and News Automation
- Attempted to create an automation for scanning TikTok profiles, extracting top videos, and rewriting scripts, but platform limitations prevent direct social media/API access.
- Successfully created a similar workflow for YouTube, summarizing top viewed videos when provided.
- Tested generating scripts for viral AI news, which involved scraping, summarizing, and providing TikTok-ready scripts for trending stories.
- Impressed by the platform's speed and capability to do in minutes what would otherwise take much longer.
Additional Template Exploration
- Reviewed Opal’s video maker template, which automates product video creation from name and audience input.
- Tested making a promo video for a hotel booking site, achieving a usable ad with minimal prompts.
- Platform offers numerous templates such as stylus, playlist generation, and learning tools.
Platform Evaluation and Future Potential
- Opal's simplicity and power suggest it could quickly supplant other workflow tools like N8N.
- The speaker anticipates the emergence of an app store for sharing mini apps.
- Positive community response and engagement is noted, with growing interest across platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
Action Items
- TBD – Speaker: Continue exploring Opal’s template options and custom app creation.
- August 17 – Speaker & Nate: Launch and facilitate the 21-day AI boot camp community.
- TBD – Interested Users: Join the boot camp waitlist and experiment with Opal workflows.