Back in 1994, Kyle was a successful entrepreneur in the nascent online space. He knew that the Internet would fundamentally change the way we communicate and the way that businesses engage on a global scale over time.

So, in 2013, when the advent and popularity of social media tools sparked a new era of storytelling, he had a revelatory moment. Out of all the storytelling mediums, video consistently provides the best-performing content for brands, but it is the most difficult to produce at scale. While professional video is high quality, it can be very expensive and complicated. User-generated video, on the other hand, is incredibly authentic, but it is completely out of the brand’s control.

Kyle saw the potential in filling this gap. He wanted to create a platform that would allow anyone, anywhere to create compelling, professionally produced video content.

In 2014, he connected with Monique who knew how to turn his idea into a business, and the two founded Storyvine. The Storyvine platform was conceived to be a guided video system with an easy-to-use app that lets anyone create polished, edited, and branded videos within minutes. With customizable templates that serve as story frameworks, users are guided through the video creation process, and the app “automagically” creates a finished video. The end result is video content that the brand manages, controls, and curates in order to share authentic stories with its audience.

With their MVP, Kyle and Monique set out to validate the market demand, and initial users came from large companies like IBM, Biogen, Janssen, etc. Once the demand was validated, Kyle and Monique approached OAK’S LAB to continue to upgrade and further build out their solution. In 2023, they began integrating AI technology to enhance content creation and management, marking a new phase for Storyvine.

To build out Storyvine’s existing solution while delivering a more user-friendly experience and updating the tech with the ultimate goal of scaling the product and its offerings.

When we were first brought on as Storyvine’s software development partner, we needed to build and support the enterprise web application in use by a number of Fortune 500 healthcare companies. Over time, we needed to automate various parts of the service and build out a customizable self-service model that would target smaller businesses and different markets. As AI emerged, it became clear that it could be a game-changer for automating key aspects of video creation, such as transcription, content generation, and modular content repurposing. The latest challenge was how to revamp the whole platform, focusing on building multiple offerings within the existing product, while incorporating AI to enhance efficiency.

Overall, we needed to redesign and update the tech on the entire platform. The web app would require an easy-to-use interface and a more user-friendly experience, while still replicating the user journey to satisfy existing corporate clients. The mobile app needed to be updated to a different tech stack. And ultimately, we needed to expand the solution to allow for a larger scale of users. Introducing AI-driven automation added a new layer of complexity, as it required reengineering the backend to support transcription, video segmentation, and content repurposing.

We redesigned the platform to be user-friendly and migrated it to a modern tech stack for a delightful user experience. We simplified the mobile development process and rolled out interface designs and features to all aspects of the platform. We also created a blueprint for implementation within larger organizations.

We began working with Storyvine in 2016 on a project-to-project basis, and then in 2020, Monique and Kyle hired a full-time OAK’S LAB team including two engineers, one designer, and one product manager.

To redesign and modernize the entire platform, we first focused on expanding the Storyvine branding. Our primary goal was to make the app friendly and not intimidating for users who are new to video production, and we wanted to keep a “human element” in the visual approach to reflect Storyvine’s core values– “Human - Magic - Enablers.” We focused on simplifying some of the existing brand elements while updating and modernizing the general look and feel of the platform to accomplish this.

With the developments of generative AI at the end of 2022, we saw an opportunity to enhance the user experience by using AI to automatically create subtitles for videos filmed using the Storyvine technology. We built an additional feature to the Storyvine platform that uses Whisper, an OpenAI automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, to allow Storyvine users to easily add subtitles to any video that they create. The Whisper AI model is trained on 680,000 hours of data, making the open-source library the ideal speech-to-text AI solution to run on our infrastructure.

In 2023, we introduced AI to Storyvine’s platform to automate key content creation tasks. AI-driven transcription was implemented to convert spoken words into text, which was then repurposed into various formats such as blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories. Additionally, the AI was able to segment videos into smaller, digestible parts that could be reused across different platforms.

From the UI/UX perspective, the goal was to create an easily understandable product that stores all the necessary functionality for professional video production management. We also needed to make the product stand out from the competition and industry standards. We focused on fitting a variety of professional video management functionality into the tool so that it required little to no training. Most users have no previous experience using video production tools, so the challenge was to make every action seem straightforward and easy to complete. While designing the main flows, we conducted extensive user testing in order to overcome any challenges within the app.

We leveraged Whisper, an OpenAI automatic speech recognition system, to handle transcription tasks. This enabled Storyvine users to quickly generate subtitles for videos, saving time and ensuring consistency in video content. 

From the technical side, we focused on adapting newly introduced technologies and solutions to the existing monolith codebase and addressed features with high complexity rather than taking an MVP-like approach. We also needed to address the extremely high-security, regulatory data protection and privacy demands that came with the nature of clients in the healthcare industry. To support the mission of Storyvine, we selected a tech stack that included React, NodeJS, Apollo Client, Nexus, PostgreSQL, AntDesign, Firebase Authentication, Sendgrid, Stripe, and YouTube API. For the mobile app, we did an entire rewrite and unified the code base with ReactNative. For the AI features, we implemented anonymization and rehydration techniques using Presidio, an SDK by Microsoft, to ensure all personal and sensitive data was protected when interacting with large language models like GPT.

In the first years of our collaboration, we additionally worked with Storyvine to build out a self-service feature to expand Storyvine’s offering to small businesses and different markets. The beta included existing Storyvine features and a payment functionality for self-service. We shifted our focus, however, in 2021 when Novartis approached Storyvine seeking a tech implementation to enable their sales team in a post-Covid healthcare environment. With this new partnership, we wanted to expand Storyvine’s existing solution, allowing for a larger volume of users and tailored implementation in larger organizations with complex business processes.

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Storyvine continues to work with OAK’S LAB to expand the Storyvine solution as we build out the rest of the interface, improve mobile features, and prepare for large-scale implementations.

Storyvine’s automated, Guided Video platform gives companies in the healthcare industry the ability to create personalized videos that are compliant, professional, scalable, and effective. Sales teams can now create professional-level videos in 5-10 minutes that stay safely within required guidelines for the industry, They can produce them at a large scale and use them to communicate personally with Health Care Providers in an innovative manner that translates directly into sales.

With the introduction of AI-driven transcription and content repurposing, Storyvine has greatly reduced the manual workload for its users. Now, with a few clicks, users can generate various forms of content from a single video, from blog posts to social media snippets. In the first six months of the Novartis partnership, 5,000 videos were created by sales reps, and the Novartis teams have seen increased engagement across the board. Because of the Storyvine platform, personal and professional video creation has transformed the way that sales teams operate in an innovative way, which we look forward to exploring more in the future.