Last Updated on January 21, 2025 by Ewen Finser
If you’re responsible for creating any kind of documentation or tutorials for your business, you’ll know exactly what a time-consuming process it can be.
Which is why I want to talk to you about Guidde.
It’s an AI tool that records your actions on the screen and automatically converts them into high-quality video and text/image-based documentation, complete with annotations and voiceovers.
I’ve been using it for months now, and I have to say: while it’s far from perfect (what Al tool is?), it has saved me loads of time and energy. Enough that I’d say it’s worth every penny.
Looking for a faster way to create walk-throughs, onboarding materials, or other documentation? Maybe Guidde can help?
Who Should Use Guidde?
There’s a ton of potential use cases for the Guidde AI tool, but it’s fairly obvious that this is a tool designed with SaaS companies in mind.
Using the handy browser extension, you can capture videos at the click of a button and turn them into usable content for everything from client onboarding to troubleshooting guides, new feature announcements, and knowledge base articles.
Elsewhere, you’re going to get a tremendous amount of value from Guidde if you’re a blogger or any kind of content creator who creates ‘How-to’ style pieces.
Over the years, I’ve created countless ‘How-to’ guides covering everything from WordPress plugins to CRM platforms, and, as passionate as I am about these things, I have to admit that writing out step-by-step instructions is a major chore:
- Take the action
- Screenshot the action
- Annotate the screenshot
- Write down the action.
Sound familiar?
Then you’ll know that this can take AGES.
That’s not the case with Guidde. Hit Capture, and the process is reduced to:
- Take the action
- Let AI do everything else.
In other words, if you create any kind of instructional content and you’re fed up with how long it takes, you should at least take a look at Guidde.
Guidde Pros and Cons
Pros | Cons |
Incredibly easy to use | AI limitations sometimes cause errors |
Documentation is highly customizable | Limited human customer support |
Customizable brand kits | Desktop version limited to Mac only |
What’s Good About Guidde?
Easy to Use
The best thing about Guidde is that it’s a piece of cake to use.
Sign-up, install the extension, and you’re good to know.
Now, anytime you need to create new documentation, all you have to do is:
- Tap the extension icon (I recommend pinning it to the top of your browser for easy access)
- Hit capture
- Work through the flow or action you need to document.
- Hit stop.
Sure, you have to wait a minute or two for the AI to do its thing, but when it’s done, you get an attractive video complete with AI voice-over, along with written instructions and screenshots that have already been annotated for you.
If you’d rather not use a browser extension, or you want to capture your entire screen rather than just the contents of your browser tab, there’s also a desktop application you can use. The only problem with it is that it’s only available for Apple Mac devices.
Customize Everything
Let’s be honest: AI rarely hits a home-run 100% of the time.
Even though Guidde’s AI-generated documentation is super accurate (as I’ll explain below, sometimes it can be too accurate), you still shouldn’t be throwing it up on your website without some human editing.
At the very least, you’ll want to take a look at the text to make sure it’s clear, easy to understand, and in keeping with your brand’s tone of voice.
If it’s not, editing is as simple as clicking on any step in the process and editing the text as you see fit.
Alternatively, you can make your changes in the video editor interface which, although it feels a little too crowded for my liking, still lets you get the job done quickly.
Elsewhere, you can:
Choose from a ton of different AI voiceover options in multiple languages.
Change the color of your annotations, backgrounds,and text.
Enhance your videos with music, images, and other elements.
Brand Kits
OK, so you’re reading all this and thinking:
“That’s great, but with the amount of time it would take me to tweak voice-overs, design, and content elements for each video, it doesn’t sound all that efficient.”
You may be right, but here’s the thing:
You don’t have to do that.
Instead, you can set up a brand kit with your logo, colors, preferred voice-over, and all the other key elements that transform a generic video into a valuable brand asset. Set this up once, and your brand preferences will automatically be applied to each new video.
What’s Not So Good About Guidde?
AI Limitations
By far the biggest problem with Guidde isn’t so much with the app itself, but rather with the limitations of AI itself.
Sure, that’s by no means a problem exclusive to Guidde. Pretty much every AI tool I’ve ever used has some imperfections, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
To be fair, I’ve used this tool a bunch and never seen it outright hallucinate the way some tools do, and that can only be a good thing. Still, it has a bad habit of over-simplifying things to the point that they actually become more complicated.
Let me explain what I mean:
My very first time out, I created what I thought would be a super-simple tutorial showing people how to export their data from a website.
The resulting documentation included 13 steps, 10 of which were just about how to log in.
Now, maybe that’s on me for expecting too much or not realizing that Guidde would literally produce a step for every single action I take, even those actions were as simple as entering a user-name and password, but it was still disappointing to have to do so much editing in order to simplify things.
The final step in the same tutorial was to simply click a link in a navigation menu.
Guide explained that step by listing every single menu item that came before the one my users were supposed to click. As you can see in the screenshot above, that’s messy and confusing.
Again, this may be less about Guidde itself and more about the nature of AI, but I’d love to see the developers train their AI models even further to work out these kinks.
Or, perhaps better yet, give users some kind of granular control over the level of detail captured so that simple hiccups can be avoided.
Limited Human Customer Support
Guidde is an AI company, so it’s not surprising that they take an AI-first approach to customer service. Credit where it’s due, the AI chatbots are helpful and accurate, and there’s a pretty substantial knowledgebase of tutorials (produced by the app, of course) to guide you through most problems.
Sometimes, however, you just really need to speak with a human being, and that’s where Guidde’s customer support falls short.
Requesting a response from a human is as easy as clicking a button in the text chat, but then you have to wait at least several hours for a response. That’s not too bad if what you’re working on isn’t that urgent, but if you’re up against a deadline and the only thing getting in your way of meeting it is that you need help troubleshooting a problem, you might find it annoying.
Guidde Plans and Pricing
So, now the big question – how much does all this cost?
If you want to try it out before deciding whether to make a financial commitment, there is a limited — and I mean -LIMITED- free plan available. You’re restricted to just 25 videos which come with the Guidde watermark and can’t be downloaded or embedded on your website.
Instead, your best bet is to take advantage of a 14-day free trial of one of their paid plans.
These range from $16 p/m to $35 p/m (both billed annually), and allow you to create, edit, and export an unlimited number of videos.
Full disclosure, this review is based on my experience with the $35 p/m business plan, which handily includes text-to-voice generation so that you can input a pre-written script and have Guidde generate a video from it.
Guidde AI Documentation Creator: Final Thoughts
Here’s the thing about Guidde:
It may not always generate 100% flawless content 100% of the time, but you could say that about practically any AI tool out there and, at the end of the day, it’s still an absolute game-changer in terms of productivity.
Even with the amount of editing involved, I can still produce three or four walk-throughs with Guidde in the time that it would take me to create a single piece of documentation without it.
What’s more, thanks to the numerous editing tools and customizable controls, the final output is of excellent quality in terms of both core content and on-brand aesthetic appeal.
Use the 14-day trial to try Guidde for free and let me know what you think in the comments below.
Was your experience different from mine? Are there other AI tools out there that I should consider as an alternative to Guidde? Let me know, I’d love to hear from you!