Avail rolls out its AI summarization tool to help Hollywood execs keep up with script coverage

Avail is tackling one of the many time-consuming tasks in film and TV development: script coverage.

The new ChatGPT-powered summarization tool is designed to summarize scripts and books within minutes, producing detailed summaries, loglines, synopses, character breakdowns and tonal assessments.

Avail also built a Q&A assistant to help production companies and talent agencies brainstorm ideas and ask content-related questions. For instance, it can recommend a list of actors who could be well-suited for the roles or make comparisons to other movies/TV shows.

Avail launched its open beta earlier this week. The entry-level subscription costs $250 monthly for four reports and includes a 30-day free trial. Enterprise pricing is available upon request and is based on how many credits a company needs.

For many script readers, executives and assistants, reading and taking notes on a script can be a lengthy process, sometimes taking over two hours to complete. On top of managing other tasks, looking at an inbox flooded with 100-page scripts waiting to be opened can get overwhelming.

“As an executive who’s making decisions about how to allocate your company’s resources on content, there’s just so much content out there that’s coming across your desk,” co-founder and CEO Chris Giliberti said during a TechCrunch interview. “It’s really hard to keep up. What’s unfortunate about that is, if you miss something, it could be a multimillion-dollar mistake.”

While it’s not recommended to use Avail (or any AI summarization tool) to do all your work for you, it could be a useful time-saving tool. When testing the product, a 45-page document took Avail less than five minutes to summarize.

“The longer material will take more time… but it always gets the job done,” Giliberti said.

It may seem strange for a company to be selling AI-powered products to Hollywood right now. The writers’ strike only ended three months ago, which was heavily centered around AI concerns. The new agreement between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) states that AI cannot be used to write or rewrite any scripts. The deal also mentions that a writer’s script won’t be used to train AI without their permission.

“There are concerns that have been raised by the WGA and [the Screen Actors Guild] that are totally legitimate and reasonable. We’re not building tools for the industry’s creators. The tools that we’re building are very much productivity tools. They’re not intended to replace anybody’s job at all. They’re just classic workplace productivity tools,” Giliberti said.

Avail was built on top of ChatGPT-4 and has a proprietary processing layer that helps deliver “reliable” coverage on low-quality documents as well as create hallucination-free summaries, Giliberti explained.

To train the AI model, Avail ran public domain work such as “The Count of Monte Cristo.” Giliberti points out that the company is “very conscious of how we handle creative material,” noting the concerns around which source materials are used to train AI models.

There are several lawsuits accusing AI companies of violating copyright law. Writer and comedian Sarah Silverman sued OpenAI and Meta over copyright infringement, claiming the companies used protected work to train AI models without her permission.

Avail writes on its website, “Your data privacy is of the utmost importance to us… We, and our partners, do not train on any of your uploaded content or prompts. That means your content will NOT end up in any AI model.”

Giliberti previously served as founder and head of Gimlet Pictures, the TV and film adaptation arm of Spotify-owned podcasting company Gimlet Media. He also founded Zestworld, a creator-centric platform for comics. Also on Avail’s founding team is John Liu, Zestworld co-founder and former product manager at Google.

To date, Avail has raised $11.8 million, backed by Seven Seven Six, General Catalyst, Advancit Capital and Liontree.

In the future, the company plans to add team collaboration functionality so colleagues can work on documents together. Giliberti also revealed that Avail is working with a production company to build custom models targeted around “production, engineering and planning,” he said. “Which is another huge pain point in Hollywood.”