Real AI | September 1, 2025

By Kevin Hawkins with Korey Hawkins | Vol. 3 Issue 35

REAL AI is a human-created weekly roundup of all things related to artificial intelligence in real estate and emerging AI innovations in other sectors likely to impact our industry. A favor: Will you please pass this link on to a friend? Our free – realai.blog.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Last week, two vital links went missing from our newsletter and are here: Apple's "The Illusion of Thinking" research paper and Gary Marcus on the ChatGPT 5 mess.

3 mind-blowing AI hacks

These new hacks aren't hype. They are tools that save money, free up time, and make it look like you spent thousands of dollars on marketing.

Best of all, you don't need training. You don't even need patience. A few clicks or a quick prompt and you're done.

Nano Banana photo editing magic

People are going bananas over Google's new code-named "Nano Banana" tech. Hidden inside Gemini Pro. If you pay for Google Workspace or storage, you have it.

It's an image editor that works like magic. Type, "Add a modern sofa and a plant in the corner," and suddenly an empty room looks perfectly staged. Tell it to "remove the car in the driveway" and – poof – instant curb appeal. Is the front lawn summer brown? Make it green. Change the color of your clothes in your headshot? Done.

The best part? It remembers your edits. Unlike other tools, using Gemini Pro for editing doesn't just slap pixels on top. It treats every prompt as instructions to refine a detailed blueprint of your image. That means you can keep tweaking, such as adding countertops, changing lighting, removing clutter, even adding small personal touches – until the photo looks exactly the way you want.

For real estate agents, this is a potentially huge time and money saver. No more expensive staging photos, days learning a clunky AI photo program, or hours of manual photo editing.

Just tell Gemini Pro how you want the image you upload changed, and your off.

One pro tip: make a single editing change at a time. Also, checkout this quick Gemini Pro photo editing training video from AI tech leader Rajeev Sajja (BHHS/Fox & Roach) recently released on YouTube.

RIP: I'd hate to be in the virtual staging photo business today.

5-minute voice cloning
Artlist.io contains a little known treasure trove for stock video, sound effects, and music. But its new superpower is mind-blowing: you can clone your voice in just five minutes.

Record a short sample, upload it, and suddenly you have an AI version of yourself ready to narrate listing videos, podcasts, or social posts – in one take: It's all text-to-speech once you've cloned your voice.

Why does this matter for agents? You can create professional-quality audio that sounds like you: no more paying voice actors or re-recording take after take. Want to update a video script or add narration to property clips? Just type it, and your cloned voice handles the rest in one take!

Compared to ElevenLabs, the industry leader, Artlist is faster and easier. ElevenLabs still wins for sheer variety of AI narrator voices, but if you want your voice on demand, Artlist does it 24x faster and sounds better in our side-by-side comparison.

But at $12 and $22 a month or about $400 a year: get both. Hiring a professional human narration voice could cost you $500 for just one project and these AI voices are nearly impossible to tell they are not human.

Canva's AI video uses Veo 3

Canva Pro is already the best $10 you'll ever spend on marketing. But what most agents don't realize is that Canva now taps into Google's Veo 3, giving you the ability to create short, high-resolution video clips with synchronized real-life audio from text prompts. We typed: "Dallas builders putting up a framed wooden wall on a house" and Canva spits out an 8-second clip with synced audio you can see here.

For real estate agents, this means you can instantly create custom stock footage. Need background video for professional capabilities video? A construction shot to target builders as clients? Or polished footage to add to an Instagram reel? It's all there in seconds, just text-to-video creation no training required.

Look in your Canva Pro account on the left menu near the bottom for the Sparkles Icon and Canva AI text. When you select "Create a video clip" you get both unlimited high-res videos up to 2 hours each or five Google Veo 3 videos of 8 seconds each.

The best $10 a month spend for real estate digital marketing got even better. (-Kevin)

AI Facts and Stats

1. 46% of surveyed senior executives say they are concerned their company may be falling behind competitors in adopting AI agents – PwC

2. 58% of senior managers say their firm has strong AI governance for Agentic AI – Blue Prism

3. 64% of AI agent adoption is centered around business process automation – Lyzr

4. 45% of organizations surveyed are most interested in "multiagent systems" as a GenAI technology development – Deloitte

5. 55% of organizations surveyed rate customer service and support as important for new gen AI initiatives in the next 12 months – Google

Source: Pragmatic Coders (-Korey)

AI Headlines
The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps – 5th Edition | 8/27/25 Andreessen Horowitz
A list of the best top-ranked AI tools.

Google Gemini's AI image model gets a 'bananas' upgrade | 8/26/25 TechCrunch
Gemini 2.5 Flash Image adds 'memory' to give more precise control over photo editing.

New Research: 20% of Americans use AI tools 10X+/month, but growth is slowing and traditional search hasn't dipped | 8/26/25 SparkToro
While AI use continues to grow, traditional SEO remains strong.

Another week, another AI privacy mess | 8/25/25 Mindstream
Hundreds of thousands of Grok AI chats have been leaked to the public and are Google searchable.

Anthropic's auto-clicking AI Chrome extension raises browser-hijacking concerns | 8/27/25 Ars Technica
Claude's Chrome app has the added risk of following malicious instructions.

YouTube secretly used AI to edit people's videos. The results could bend reality | 8/24/25 BBC
"Unwelcomed" Auto AI edits are changing how people look.

NotebookLM's Video Overviews are now available in 80 languages | 8/25/25 Google Blog
NotebookLM's Audio keeps improving, expanding uses.

Create your first Digital Twin with AvatarIV! | 8/26/25 HeyGen
The road to more life-like AI avatars is slowly becoming a reality. (-Korey)

AI Quote of the Week

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