Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence
“Best community sports site”
RepublicTigerSports.com is the brainchild of David Brazeal, a long time friend and former co-worker. You won’t find a better community sports site. It features “live game broadcasts, highlights and audio interviews, photos, stats, scores and summaries.”
David gets some help with photos when he’s doing live play-by-play but he does all the content and sells all the advertising. It is a very successful website but a huge undertaking for one person.
David and I recently had a text conversation during which he shared how he was using ChatGPT to help manage content on the site. He recently did a post called “Shout Outs for Seniors”:
“I collected nominations in a form. Fed the exported form data to ChatGPT, spent about 15 minutes and it created the HTML bookmarks at the top of the page linking to each nominee, the H4 headline tags, etc. Rather than having to do all that by hand.
I’ve got the writing prompts honed in on Claude (rather than ChatGPT) so it writes pretty close to my style. For baseball games I have started just looking at my box score and recording a voice memo recapping what happens. I upload the audio to Dropbox, ChatGPT watches that folder and transcribes it. I feed the transcription to Claude and get a rough draft of my game recap. If I have quotes, I feed it my quotes and tell it to use them verbatim. Make a few tweaks when I’m finished and it’s ready.
The voice cloning really creeped me out when you first mentioned it, but I am paying for an ElevenLabs account. I’m not using my voice yet, because it’s not good enough. But I have tinkered with the API and will probably be adding a “listen to this” audio player to every article at some point in the future. I’ve got it working, but haven’t put it in place and haven’t calculated what it would cost.
Ideally I would be able to append each story with 2 seconds of text in the API: This audio version sponsored by Central Bank.Followed by the article.
The bottom line is AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are making it possible to accomplish tasks that once required hours David doesn’t have as a one-man operation. And the athletes and their families are the big winners.
RadioGPT
I first read about –and started plays with– this technology in February of 2023. I wondered at the time how long it would be before radio station owners took notice. No time at all, it seams.
Futuri Launches RadioGPT, The World’s First AI-Driven Localized Radio Content
Cleveland, Ohio, February 23, 2023 — Futuri is revolutionizing the audio industry with the launch of RadioGPT™ — the world’s first AI-driven localized radio content solution. RadioGPT™ combines the power of GPT-3 technology with Futuri’s AI-driven targeted story discovery and social content system, TopicPulse, as well as AI voice tech to provide an unmatched localized radio experience for any market, any format.
RadioGPT™ uses TopicPulse technology, which scans Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and 250k+ other sources of news and information, to identify which topics are trending in a local market. Then, using GPT-3 technology, RadioGPT™ creates a script for on-air use, and AI voices turn that script into compelling audio.
Stations can select from a variety of AI voices for single-, duo-, or trio-hosted shows, or train the AI with their existing personalities’ voices. Programming is available for individual dayparts, or Futuri’s RadioGPT™ can power the entire station. RadioGPT™ is available for all formats in a white-labeled fashion.
RadioGPT™ also generates social posts, blogs, and other content for digital platforms related to the content on the air in real-time. A TopicPulse Instant Video add-on creates AI-driven short videos on hot topics for social use. By adding on Futuri’s POST AI-enabled podcasting system, stations can take broadcast audio and immediately publish it on-demand with POST’s auto-publishing feature.
ChatGPT can now detect emotion
“Among other things, ChatGPT can now detect emotion in both the user’s voice as well as from their facial expression, just like a human can. It also makes unprompted jokes, the way a human would who’s trying to keep a conversation light, and it also lets you interrupt a response — so that you no longer have to confine yourself to the stilted my turn-your turn dynamic of a conversation with a chatbot.”
“If you had your eyes closed, you’d think this is a real lady fawning over a cute puppy, when in fact it’s an AI model that’s learned how to express relevant and appropriate emotion — in addition to making the same observations we would when we meet a cute dog for the first time.”
Two kinds of radio station
Last week the owner of Moberly, Missouri radio stations KWIX and KRES —Alpha Media— laid off all of their on-air staff. (Bob Priddy mourns)
The following is from a post and interview I did in 2007 with Dave Shepherd, the son of the man who put KWIX/KRES on the air.
Fifty years ago, Jerrell Shepherd mastered a form of broadcasting alchemy that turned small town radio lead into gold. It wasn’t much of a secret, however, since he readily shared it with countless radio station owners and managers who made the pilgrimage to Moberly, Missouri, in hopes of bringing some of Shepherd’s sales and programming magic back to their stations.
While most small market broadcasters were content to get “their fair share” of local advertising budgets (the bulk went to the local newspaper), Shepherd’s sales reps were trained to ask for it all and believed in their hearts they deserved it.
Mr. Shepherd’s approach to programming his stations was deceptively simple: report anything and everything that happened in each of the communities covered by his stations’ signals. The KWIX and KRES “Red Rovers” showed up just about every high school football game, junior high choral concert and chamber of commerce ribbon-cutting. And the Shepherd stations put it all on the air. Always with local sponsors. Lots of local sponsors.
The new owner, Alpha Media, owns a lot of radio stations including KBFF Live 95.5 FM in Portland, OR. Last June the station introduced the first AI-powered DJ, “AI Ashley.”
“Alpha Media’s EVP of content Phil Becker assured listeners that Elzinga’s job is safe and she’ll be receiving the same pay, telling TechCrunch that AI Ashley is a tool that will allow DJs to multitask like never before.”
I’d love to know what sort of prompt could result in an AI making a call and interacting with a listener as we heard in the clip above. As the program director of a small town radio station back in the 1970’s I was responsible for hiring and training weekend talent. I might have jumped at the chance to put an AI voice on the air.
Will the KWIX/KRES on-air staff be replaced with AI voices? If so, how will the station’s listeners and advertisers respond?
Perplexity says (using British accent) she has no voice
As good as I’ve found ChatGPT to be, it appears Perplexity (another AI tool) might be even better. One of my favorite features of ChatGPT is ability to “converse” with one of several human-like voices. I posted an example of this a few months back. Others nitpick but I find the voice amazingly human-like. Now that I have a Perplexity account I wondered if it has the same feature.
Does not have a voice feature? Sooo, what are we listening to here. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for this and I’ll update this post if and when. Perhaps it’s just a new feature (that it doesn’t know about?!)
What I was curious about –before this distraction– was why the ChatGPT voice is so natural sounding and the Perplexity voice is canned computer-speak.
Is Perplexity a “Google search killer?”
They call it an “answer engine” rather than a “search engine.” Can it/will it replace Google search? Hard to imagine but I have it on my laptop and my phone and will post thoughts and updates here.
I keep pinning this post because I keep finding better reviews of Perplexity.
Old man and Golden Retriever in the woods at sunset
“DALL·E 2 is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.”Will this technology make verbal skills, a command of the language, more important than artistic skills?
PROMPT: Create a photo of a middle-aged man, wearing a T-shirt sitting in an aluminum lawn chair and make the image look like a Polaroid photograph.
Make the man much older… mid 70s.
Can you make the man look much less attractive and handsome?
One more tweak…
How do pharmaceutical companies come up with names for new drugs?
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In 2022, the top three most advertised drugs on US TV were: Rinvoq, Dupixent and Skyrizi. Which got me thinking about how pharmaceutical companies come up with names for new drugs, so I asked ChatGPT. Continue reading
ChatGPT answers MAGA questions
How, I wondered, would ChatGPT respond if prompted to write an essay on why Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 presidential election and that Joe Biden is not the president of the United States. And if the MAGA-ite insisted the sources ChatGPT cited were “deep fakes?” I was also curious if ChatGPT has the ability to examine a news story and determine if it is accurate. (6 min)
Is a team of data scientists slaving away in a sub-basement of The Federalist Society, training an AI to give Trump-friendly answers to life’s hard questions?