Stop wasting hours making content the old way. The tools I’m about to show you let you produce studio-level videos, graphics, audio, and scripts in minutes. These are the top 5 AI tools that every creator needs in 2026. And after this video, you’ll wonder how you ever got by the old way. Hey, I’m Mike Russell, and when it comes to AI, I love it. So much so that I created another channel dedicated exactly to it. When I’m not editing audio, I spend my day tracking all the latest releases from tech companies and talking about them on my other channel, Creator Magic. Make sure to head over there and subscribe. Anyway, let’s start with tool number five. 11 Labs on my screen right now for AI voice and magic.
It’s become the standard for ultra-realistic voice cloning, multilingual dubbing, and emotional voiceovers. And here’s the craziest part. This isn’t even my real voice anymore. So what’s good about Eleven Labs? Well, as you could hear there, I just type in a script, and it will say whatever I want it to say. So, for instance, here in the text-to-speech box, I’ve typed in, ‘hi, I’m Mike Russell.’ Hi, I’m Mike Russell from Music Radio Creative. And one more time. ‘Hi, I’m Mike Russell from Music Radio Creative.’ Pretty, pretty cool, but it doesn’t stop there. Because I can actually search over here for different voices, not just my own voice clone, for instance, I can type in Zeus, and here we go, the voice of God. And then I can generate.
This is absolutely epic. Wow. And then we can say, I love MRC and we can generate again. This is absolutely epic. I love MRC. And then we can type in a different voice. How about the creepy voice guy? That sounds like a good idea. This is super sus. Let’s type that in and generate. This is super sus. Whoa. I love jingles. And then we’ll generate. I love jingles. That’s definitely freaking me out quite a bit. Now, it doesn’t stop with just the voice clones and the voice library. You can actually license legendary voices. Look at some of the people, including Michael Caine. Here, this is amazing. We can scroll through, and license look at this Michael Caine. In the end, it’s not about being the loudest in the room; it’s about knowing when to speak and when to listen. Pretty incredible stuff, right?
So that’s text-to-speech, but what about sound effects? We can go into the sound effects generator and get started creating anything we can imagine. So I’ll start with a car zooming by, and here we get four different takes. I don’t know. Nice. And another one. And another one. And another one. And then we can type in something else, such as a cockerel, in the morning. And then we’ll generate this sound effect. Let’s have a listen. HOO HOO HOO! Nice. Yep. Yep. Those are ear-piercing, but they definitely work. Now, while AI is great, I’m also a huge supporter of human talent. In comparison, this saves me a lot of time on narration, creativity, and generating. Fast Music Radio Creative, my own company, is the world’s largest human voiceover agency.
Check out some of the best-selling voices below. And now let’s move on to tool number four, which is… Now, this is why it’s great for 2026 and beyond. You can create your best content with AI-assisted tools, whether it’s a podcast, video interviews, social media clips, transcriptions, webinars, video marketing, AI show notes, or captions—you can do it all in Riverside. Let’s take a look. Riverside basically gives creators a podcast studio and video editor in the browser with AI-driven cleanup. Up the best parts you know. The voice cloning we’ve just looked at with 11 labs, well, multilingual dubbing is also included right here. I believe 11 labs power it. Look at this. I’ve had a recent webinar I presented at Riverside, fully translated into Chinese. Let’s play it.
That is impressive, and what you’ll notice is that it also syncs my mouth with the spoken Chinese, which is incredible, meaning it’s a… seamless experience for users from around the world who want to consume my content in another language. And the best part is that it lets you edit your content with AI tools. Just look at this. With this, I can use things such as removing filler words. With this enabled and smart, it will automatically remove all my ums and ahs. I can also go through and find fluff. This will recommend parts to cut from my script. So, if I’m not making sense, the AI producer will go through and cut those bits out for me. Also, once we finish that, we can go to the ‘Made for You’ section, where it generates magic clips for you.
These are AI-generated clips of your recording, usually about a minute long, that you can easily click the ‘Share’ button on and send to your favorite social network. Now you can also correct mistakes with voice generation trained on your voice. Let’s listen to this bit. Let’s do it for 10 seconds. Okay, so I said, ‘Let’s do it for 10 seconds.’ But actually, I meant to say 20 seconds. All I need to do is go to this video dub option here, confirm, and then type in the new number. So, 20 seconds generate. As you’ll see, it’s now dubbing my voice to the new number. I can literally correct any part of my script using this feature. Okay, it’s done. Let’s listen to the new dub.
Let’s do it for 20 seconds. Did you hear that? Let’s do it for 20 seconds. Let’s do it for 20 seconds, all dubbed, and my mouth moves to say the word 20. Pretty incredible. Now let’s move on to… Talk number three, that’s Adobe Firefly for AI design and creation. Now, the best thing is that you can choose any image generation model you like—the Firefly models from Adobe or part models such as Flux, Gemini’s Nano Banana, Imogen, GPT Image, Ideogram, and Runway 4. I’m going to stick with Nano Banana Pro, and I want a—a photorealistic image of an epic recording studio. And then we’ll click generate. Okay, that image. Not too bad, but take a look at this. I can actually upload reference images from my device.
I can select up to six images here. I’m going to upload this generation first. image as a reference. Then I’m going to upload something else. Yes, I’m going to upload this scene, then upload something else. And from my device, I’ll upload a picture of myself. And finally, one more image to use— four out of the six slots. I’m going to upload our logo. So now I’ve got a photorealistic image of an epic recording studio with a scene. Like that, so we’ve given it a lot of context. We’ve improved the prompt and attached four reference images: the original creation, an outdoor scene, a picture of me, and the Music Radio Creative logo. Standby.
And look at that. That’s pretty incredible— the way it has taken this picture here and put it outside the window. It’s taken a picture. Me, yes, it’s placed me in that chair, wearing my t-shirt. It’s also taken the MRC logo, put it up on the TV screen, and used my original image. Now it doesn’t stop there because Firefly integrates so tightly with other Adobe products like Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Express. Look at this. I can actually click the Photoshop icon. It will take me straight out to Photoshop on the web. And now here is my image, and I’ve got all kinds of other AI superpowers over here. I’ll use the selection brush to select objects automatically if I like.
I may want to select a few objects, but I’m going to make it smaller and select both of these people in the other room. So one there and one there. And then we’ve got a remove tool. Right down here, I can click it and boom— within seconds, those two people from the control room have completely disappeared. We’ve also got other generative options here. So we can go ahead and do a generative expansion. If we want to make this slightly bigger, we click expand. It’s actually going to use AI to enlarge this image. And look at that. It’s done flawlessly. Now, when we zoom in, we might notice it looks a little grainy.
Well, we can fix this with generative upscale on our image. We can choose 2x or 4x, click upscale, and look at that. We have been upscaled on this image, so much so that I can zoom in and things already look sharper. Next, we’ll return to generative fill. I will select this corner up here. And we can use any AI model. I’m going to use Nano Banana down here. And I’ll say text and then AI tools 2026 in bright, bold, colorful text. And we’ll fill that with the text. Nano Banana will go ahead and generate this via Google’s… Gemini, and we’ll have it inserted into our picture. And stand by.
Look at that. It’s put AI tools in bright, bold, colorful text into my image. So great for thumbnail design. And a lot more. All right, next up, tool number two is VO3 for AI video generation. It’s shaping up to be one of the best AI video generators out there for cinematic, coherent, and creator-friendly content. And remember, Riverside, which I demonstrated earlier, actually uses VO3 for its B-roll AI generation tool. So having that—that one tool — actually gives you access to what you’re about to see here. Now, I’m actually using Google Gemini here. My account: slow-motion, cinematic macro shot of a camera lens rotating, with soft focus. soft neon lighting, soft depth of field, shallow focus, high contrast bokeh, motorized slider. This is going to be pretty incredible. Let’s go to tools, switch to create videos with VO, and send it off. And look, here’s our first generation, even with sound effects included.
Okay, let’s generate another image with VO3, a high-tech creator editing studio in 2026. That’s my prompt up there. Wow. That is wild. Very cool. Finally, with one more generation on my Gemini account, I’ll do a lone person jogging on an empty road at sunrise. And we’ve got a drone following them. This will show you v03’s b-roll capabilities and its ability to generate sound effects that sync with your video. Okay, it’s generating my video. Remember, these can take one or two minutes, but they’re definitely worth the wait. Here we go. We have it. Let’s play it. Music, jogging sound effects, beautiful motion, crisp and clear. This is VO3 in action. And finally, number one, the last tool. On the list is Zapier.
I use this daily, and it’s not just another AI tool—it’s the automation glue that makes other tools 10 times more powerful. Let’s you create auto-pilot systems, such as a content creator. It basically shows you the next evolution of creation, not just making content faster, but actually getting AI to do things for you while you sleep. It’s very visual. Let’s actually take a look at building a couple of quick, easy automations. So for this one, I’ll use my AI content scout, and I won’t even add the triggers or actions. I’ll tell the AI copilot to build it for me. I’m a content creator who would like new daily stories about video editing from Perplexity and put them in a Google Sheet.
That’s all I need to tell the AI copilot. Then be built out for me. There we go. It’s already set up with a daily trigger to run this app, and then it’s going to go to Perplexity to get video editing stories. It’s also… setting up my Google Sheets account for me. And with Perplexity, it’s connected to my account. It’s actually going to fill out the Perplexity prompt right here. And you can see the user message is fine. My three to five interesting stories about video editing. You’re a content research assistant.
To summarize, the schedule will trigger it every day at 4 in the morning. So I’ve got. content ready when I wake up. Perplexity will then go ahead and find three to five interesting stories about video editing for me.
If we actually tend to this step right now. Let’s expand this and look at the response. And you can see it’s reached out to various websites, which is fantastic. And it’s giving me stories and links. Which is really cool, and all of this will be inserted into a Google Sheet for me to read daily. I need to configure my drive and choose the spreadsheet where I want to record the info—really cool stuff. Let’s create another workflow with my AI copilot. And for this prompt, I’ve kept it simple. I want an automated AI assistant that responds to comments on a specific YouTube video. Again, the Zapier AI Copilot will think this through and set it up for me. Look at this immediately. It set up a YouTube trigger.
Every time there’s a new comment on a video, perfect. Now it has added a chat. GPT takes a step actually to generate a response to the comment it finds. And finally, it’s setting up my YouTube channel here. And now you’ll see it’s written a prompt for ChatGPT to take the comment and create a nice response. To summarize the automation built for me in about a minute, it will go out whenever there’s a new comment on a specific YouTube video. Feed it to ChatGPT to generate the response, and then post it to my YouTube channel in response to the comment. That is extremely cool, and it can all be automated in a few clicks. So these are the top AI tools for content creators in 2026 and beyond. Which one’s your favorite? Let me know in the comments down below. And if you need any help, I’m reading the responses, and I’ll do my best to help you out.
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