Take advantage tackles one of the many time-consuming tasks in film and television development: script coverage.
The new summary tool powered by ChatGPT is designed to summarize scripts and books in minutes, producing detailed summaries, loglines, synopses, character analyzes and tonal assessments.
Avail also created a Q&A assistant to help production companies and talent agencies brainstorm ideas and ask questions about content. For example, it may suggest a list of actors who might be suitable for the roles or make comparisons to other movies/TV shows.
Take advantage launched Its open beta earlier this week. Entry-level membership costs $250 per month for four reports and includes a 30-day free trial. Business pricing is available upon request and is based on how much credit a company needs.
For many script readers, executives and assistants, reading and taking notes on a script can be a time-consuming process, sometimes taking over two hours to complete. In addition to managing other tasks, sifting through an inbox flooded with 100-page scripts waiting to be opened can be overwhelming.
“As an executive making decisions about how to allocate your company’s resources to content, there is so much content out there that comes to your desk,” co-founder and CEO Chris Giliberti said during an interview with TechCrunch. “It’s really hard to keep up. What’s unpleasant about it is that if you miss something, it could be a multi-million dollar mistake.”
While it’s not recommended that you use Avail (or any AI summary tool) to do all your work for you, it could be a useful time-saver. When testing the product, a 45-page document took less than five minutes to digest.
“Bigger hardware will take longer … but it always gets the job done,” Giliberti said.
It might seem odd for a company to be selling AI products in Hollywood right now. The writers’ strike ended just three months ago, largely centered around concerns about artificial intelligence. The new agreement between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) states that artificial intelligence cannot be used to write or rewrite any script. The agreement also states that an author’s script will not be used to train the AI without their permission.
“There are concerns that have been raised by the WGA and [the Screen Actors Guild] which are perfectly legitimate and reasonable. We don’t build tools for industry creators. The tools we make are very productivity tools. They are not intended to replace anyone’s work. They’re just classic workplace productivity tools,” Giliberti said.
Avail was built on top of ChatGPT-4 and has a proprietary processing layer that helps provide “reliable” coverage to low-quality documents as well as generate illusion-free summaries, Giliberti explained.
To train the AI model, Avail ran public domain work such as “The Count of Monte Cristo.” Giliberti points out that the company is “very conscious of how we handle creative material,” noting concerns about what source materials are used to train AI models.
There are many lawsuits accusing AI companies of violating copyright law. Author and comedian Sarah Silverman sued OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement, claiming the companies used protected work to train AI models without its permission.
Take advantage writes on its website, “The privacy of your data is of the utmost importance to us… We, and our partners, are not trained in any of the content or prompts you have uploaded. This means your content will NOT end up in any AI model.”
Giliberti previously served as founder and head of Gimlet Pictures, the TV and film adaptation arm of Spotify-owned podcasting company Gimlet Media. He also founded Zestworld, a creator-centric platform for comics. Also on the Avail founding team is John Liu, co-founder of Zestworld and former product manager at Google.
To date, Avail has raised $11.8 million, backed by Seven Seven Six, General Catalyst and Advancit Capital.
In the future, the company plans to add team collaboration functionality so colleagues can work together on documents. Giliberti also revealed that Avail is working with a manufacturing company to build custom models aimed at “production, engineering and programming,” he said. “Which is another huge pain point in Hollywood.”