Wix Text-to-Website Showcases How Copilots Streamline Complex Tasks and Can Shape Expectations
The era of copilots is taking a step up.
In February, Wix took tentative steps toward generative AI adoption with GPT-3-based features that helped website creators with headlines and page text. Today’s announcement is anything but tentative.
You will soon be able to enter a prompt into a chat assistant, and Wix will create an entire website. Want to change the layout to a different style and color? Just enter a prompt detailing what you would like to see changed. If it works even remotely as well as the sizzle reel would lead you to believe, it is a big step forward.
What’s Available Today
The text-to-website, or AI site generator, is listed as coming soon. However, Wix lists a number of AI features that are available today, including:
Web Creation:
AI Text Creator combines Wix's deep knowledge of site creation with ChatGPT to give users the ability to generate high-quality, personalized content for particular sections of a website including tailored titles, taglines and paragraphs.
AI Template Text Creator creates all the text for a new website. After choosing a ready-made template and inputting a brief description of the site, the tool generates unique textual content for the entire site, including the homepage and the inner pages.
AI Domain Generator helps users choose the perfect name for their brand from different options of unique, catchy, and relevant domain names.
Design:
Alternative Layouts tool helps users redesign layouts within their website in a single click.
AI Image Creator enables users to simply describe the image they want and a unique image is generated.
Auto Background Removal and the Auto Enhance tools refine photos and upgrade their quality to match the look and feel sought for a website.
Auto-Generated Trailer tool quickly transforms video files into professional-looking trailers.
eCommerce:
Product Descriptions make it simple to describe eCommerce products almost instantly.
Product Recommendations is used to present customers with relevant products they might be interested in purchasing to improve sales.
These are all practical features that can help website owners more efficiently design and update their sites. The emergence of an AI text-to-image generator was unsurprising, except the company never announced it. It just appeared as a line item in the text-to-website announcement with a video posted to YouTube late last week.
I assume this is a Stable Diffusion implementation based on the images. At the time of Wix’s text generation announcement and GPT-3 integration, I postulated that image-generation tools could not be far off. Images and visual design updates are often more cumbersome barriers to website publication than text blocks. However, I had not anticipated an AI copilot for full site creation this quickly.
What’s Coming
The future AI features are even more interesting. Beyond the AI Site Generator, "there is an “AI Assistant Tool for managing your business.” It is unclear whether this is just a recommendation engine or an assistant you can use to ask questions about your website. According to the announcement:
AI Site Generator is a groundbreaking tool that enables Wix users to describe their intent and it instantly generates a professional and unique website. The tailor-made website is complete with a homepage and all inner pages with text, images, and any business solution including Stores, Bookings, Restaurants, Events and more. Users can continue to customize the site and edit based on their needs with integrated AI tools.
AI Assistant Tool for Managing your Business will suggest improvements for businesses and create individualized strategies based on analytics and site trends. It streamlines day-to-day tasks to help elevate business management to the next level.
AI Page and Section Creator will enable users to quickly add a new page or section to a website by describing their needs, and AI will generate the layout, design and text.
Object Eraser enables users to seamlessly extract subjects from images and manipulate them.
What Matters Here
Wix hosts over eight million websites for companies and creators. BuiltWith data suggests it has a 45% market share among no-code website builder solutions. W3Tech Monitors data says 2.3% of all active websites use Wix.
We have seen a series of software companies with large user bases adopt AI writing and image generation features. That is expanding the exposure of professionals to generative AI tools and will surely begin to shape expectations. The text-to-website concept is a significant step up in functionality and value. This could also shape expectations and put pressure on companies such as WordPress and Squarespace.
In addition, don’t overlook the AI assistant tool. If this provides a lot of value, it will not only change expectations. It will also create significant stickiness for the Wix solution.
