The more I learned about AI, the more I wanted to build things with it. There was just one problem—while I have a casual understanding of several programming languages, I don't have a deep computer science background or lots of syntax committed to memory. Generally speaking, I
Getting AI-written prose to sound really human and match a person's individual writing style—or even a company's brand style—remains a serious challenge. In my experience, it takes a lot of time, effort, and careful prompting to coax a mediocre first draft from most large
As I mentioned in the previous post, I experimented with prompting DALL-E to produce minimalist imagery for this blog, and I was largely happy with the results. The black-and-white sketches gave the home page a cohesive look and feel, and generating the images was faster and easier than searching for
Update: Since I wrote this post, I've been thinking through the ethical implications of AI-generated art. I even trained a model with my own digital drawings. Right now, I'm using Tess for artist-friendly AI-generated artwork. I'm not an artist, although I dabble in digital
Perhaps the Holy Grail of generative AI is to produce real, useful content. Not Elizabethan poetry or surrealist artwork, but helpful communications that clearly explain how to perform a task, fix a problem, or finish a project. In my day job, one time-consuming task I'd love to offload
When interacting with chatbots, especially for technical or coding tasks, I generally provide concise instruction like, "Write a Python script to turn a PDF into an audio file." I don't wish the GPT good morning or inquire about its weekend before making a request, as I
As you may recall from several previous posts, I've been working on creating audio recordings of beginner Mandarin lessons for English speakers using text-to-speech (TTS) technology. I used OpenAI's TTS model, which handles both English and Mandarin well, and also tried ElevenLabs, which offers many voice
It was a good morning. The sun was peeking over the horizon. I had a steaming mug of coffee, and my MacOS scripting-and-voiceover app was behaving as expected. I'd even added voices from the ElevenLabs text-to-speech (TTS) model by adapting this Swift package. While it doesn't
My eleven-year-old daughter is hard-core into spelling and has ambitious to qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. So far, she's won multiple school bees and made it to second place in her most recent County bee. To prepare, she's been using Scripps' Word Club
Remember my quest to create Mandarin lessons for beginners and record them with AI? I wanted to use a OpenAI's GPT-4 model to generate the lessons and then record them with AI voices from OpenAI and ElevenLabs. How hard could it be? Spoiler alert: It was actually pretty
I'm still tinkering with my voiceover scripting and recording app. I've made some decent progress, and now I can easily choose from all of OpenAi's six voices when playing audio or saving it an MP3 file. I also took a shortcut by using AI
After some long conversations with my Mandarin for Beginners GPT, I decided that allowing it to improvise lessons and deliver them through voice chat was not the best approach. Users could easily burn through their 40 messages per three hours just with some basic pronunciation and conversation practice. I know
Work in Progress
I love the idea of learning and speaking other languages, but my enthusiasm exceeds my ability. While I can manage small talk in French and Spanish, my attempt to learn Mandarin ended with dropping the class to preserve my GPA. So, of course, I am trying to build an infinitely
Zapier
I know I should send more thank you notes, perhaps even a lot more thank you notes, but I'm not good at warm and engaging prose. I end up staring at the screen, worried that my email missives will seem too cold, awkward, or lame. But ChatGPT is
SwiftUI
I am fairly new to SwiftUI and often make use of packages I find on GitHub. But understanding how these packages work and how best to use them can be rather time-consuming. In fact, the other day I was struggling to integrate a SwiftUI app with an OpenAI Assistant. Fortunately,
Prompt Engineering
Update: Since I wrote this post, I've been thinking about the ethical implications of AI-generated art. Lately, I've trained models on digital art I created myself, incorporating their generations into this blog. Most recently, I've been using Tess to source artist-friendly AI-generated imagery. Is
DALL-E
Update: Since I wrote this post, I've been thinking about the ethical implications of AI-generated art. Lately, I've trained models on digital art I created myself and incorporating their generations into this blog. Most recently, I started using Tess for artist-friendly AI images. Since this blog