Beyond ChatGPT: These GenAI Tools Offer HR-Specific Benefits

It may seem like OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the only game in town for HR professionals looking to use generative AI (GenAI) tools to save time or boost their performance. But many other GenAI-powered apps are available that are specifically designed for HR or recruiting purposes such as creating training videos, summarizing notes from job candidate interviews, crafting HR policies or onboarding documents, and detecting cheating on candidate assessments.

Here are some alternatives to ChatGPT suggested by HR professionals who’ve used the apps and technology analysts interviewed by SHRM Online. The tools profiled here are primarily stand-alone apps and not GenAI functions built into the suites of HR technology vendors. Most of the providers offer both free and paid enterprise versions of their software.

Creating Training and Informational Videos

Learning and development professionals are tasked with creating a large volume of training videos, and many turn to Synthesia to save time and improve video quality. The GenAI tool employs text-to-speech technology that transforms typed training scripts into audio. Designers can then match one of 160 different AI avatars to the AI voices generated to create lifelike video presenters. The AI voices come with a variety of dialects, accents, and styles.

With AI prompts, users can quickly generate their own training scripts, using templates to add AI avatars, layouts, fonts, and AI voiceovers in multiple languages to customize videos to their specific needs and work cultures.

Speechify is another app in this category that uses text-to-speech tech to create GenAI-driven voiceovers that go beyond the robotic audio of the past for use in training videos, podcasts, and other HR content. Speechify allows users to edit its AI voices for tone, emotion, speech, and more. Videos also can be automatically dubbed into other languages.

Learning executives told SHRM Online that one benefit of Speechify is it allows them to avoid the considerable expense of hiring external voice-over talent or having to “insource” it for training video production. One challenge with the latter option is maintaining continuity in video production when in-house voice talent leaves an organization.

Writing Inclusive Job Ads

Recruiters often struggle with creating inclusive language in job ads when they’re seeking to attract a more diverse candidate pool. That task becomes easier with the use of the AI-powered app Datapeople, which provides guidance and tips for creating inclusive job posts.

An AI-based Smart Editor in the tool helps recruiters avoid small mistakes in language or phrasing that can impact how candidates perceive messages, ensuring posts and job descriptions don’t appear sexist, ageist, or discriminatory toward other underrepresented groups.

The app also helps recruiters avoid using corporate cliches and superfluous language in job ads. The tool, which is compatible with applicant tracking systems, also offers guidance on writing more effective job titles to reduce confusion among candidates and ensure job titles better match job requirements.

Combating Cheating on Tests

The growth of remote testing and online candidate assessments during the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the rapid adoption of GenAI tools like ChatGPT in the workplace, has elevated HR concerns about candidates cheating on online assessments used to evaluate their skills or knowledge. As a result, some vendors have created AI-powered products designed to detect and deter such cheating.

One such provider is Xobin, a platform that uses AI algorithms and machine learning to detect unauthorized assistance, content sharing, or plagiarism by candidates during online assessments. The proctoring tool has anti-cheating features including question shuffle, randomization, and cut/copy/paste disabling. It monitors whether candidates navigate outside the online test interface and ensures that candidates remain in their seats and don’t block their webcams.

Another provider of AI-driven assessment proctoring is Glider, which automatically tracks elements like suspicious eye movements of test takers, detects whether people other than the candidates might be in a test room, and monitors whether candidates might be getting help via external apps or are traveling to different websites during a test.

Summarizing HR Meeting Notes, Interviews, and Long Emails

Metaview is an AI-powered note-taking app designed specifically for recruiters and hiring managers to use during job candidate interviews and intake meetings. The app automatically takes, summarizes, and structures notes from candidate interviews, saving time and freeing recruiters to focus on fully engaging with and listening to candidates during interviews.

Recruiters can query the app after an interview to access key conversation details or have it synthesize patterns across question responses. Metaview integrates with commonly used calendar software as well as videoconferencing platforms for candidate interviews.

Otter AI is another app that automatically takes notes in real time during Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or Zoom meetings, allowing participants to concentrate on what’s being discussed in the meeting. It also records discussions when HR professionals miss a meeting or arrive late.

Otter AI also automatically creates action items and hyperlinks to meeting notes, eliminating the need to write long summary emails following meetings. Users can query a chatbot to access information from previous meetings they’ve recorded with the app, and Otter AI can also generate content such as emails and status updates.

Wordtune can summarize lengthy HR or recruiting articles, paraphrase long emails, and capture key points from YouTube videos or websites to save busy HR professionals time. The app also helps those with writer’s block by creating drafts of emails and text messages, providing a variety of writing templates as starting points.

Major competitors to ChatGPT such as Microsoft Co-Pilot and Google Gemini also have built-in meeting transcription functions. Copilot can be used within Microsoft Teams meetings, for example, to summarize key discussion points—including where participants are aligned or disagree—and suggest action items in real time during a meeting.

Similarly, users of Google Meet can employ Google’s Gemini GenAI tool (formerly called Bard) to automatically capture, summarize, and share meeting notes and video snippets. The tool also has a “summary so far” feature for those who show up late to meetings.

Developing HR Document Templates and Managing Email Inboxes

Design software company Canva now offers AI-powered templates designed specifically to help HR teams use a “visual-first” approach to creating internal communications and other documents. The “HR Work Kit” templates cover onboarding guides, town hall presentations, employee handbooks, and much more. Apps in the offering including AI Presenters and AI Avatars make human-like video avatars available to help enliven content, and an AI-powered photo editor makes it easier to edit and improve objects in images.

Inbox Zero helps manage and declutter overflowing email inboxes by automatically unsubscribing users from unwanted marketing spam, promotional newsletters, or other “cold call” emails, saving HR practitioners time and headaches in managing their inboxes.

The platform allows users to see which marketers email them the most, how often they receive emails from specific senders, and how often they’ve opened certain emails before. Users can unsubscribe in bulk with a single click or choose to auto-archive emails for later review, depending on the rules they create.

Collaborating in Teams and with Videoconferencing

AI has brought important new functions to the videoconferencing platforms commonly used by HR teams. Over the past year, Zoom, for example, has added a host of new AI-powered features to its Workplace platform that include a GenAI tool called AI Companion that can automatically summarize meeting discussions and chat threads; provide reminders about next steps that employees have promised their colleagues; and jump-start drafts of emails, texts, meeting agendas, and more.

AI and other technologies also are now used in videoconferencing platforms including Microsoft Teams and Google Meet to enhance the video and audio experience for hybrid work teams. These new features suppress background noise in home offices, illuminate participants in poor lighting conditions, automatically create background images, and more.

FigJam AI is a digital whiteboard that uses AI to bring enhanced features to HR brainstorming sessions, strategic planning discussions, and other meetings that require a high level of team collaboration and participant input.

The whiteboard is easy to use for those who aren’t naturally visual thinkers and seeks to reproduce the feel of in-person collaboration. AI prompts allow users to create over 300 meeting templates for use with the whiteboard, including flow charts, calendars, and more. Its features enable teams to complete tasks such as automatically sort the digital sticky notes used on the whiteboard into themes and summarize team input to identify post-meeting action items.

Dave Zielinski is principal of Skiwood Communications, a business writing and editing firm in Minneapolis.