“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.”

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.

Public relations technology in 2006

In 2006 I was asked to be on a panel discussing new technology tools for public relations professionals in the greater St. Louis area. Blogging was still relatively new at the time and I’d been at it for five or six years, consulting for advertisers on our various radio networks. It was a packed house.

2006 was a busy year for technology (social media?). Twitter officially launched in July; Facebook opened up to everyone over 13 years old, leading to explosive growth from 12 million users at the end of 2006 to 50 million by October 2007; YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in October, cementing its position as the leading online video platform.

I spent most of my working years on the media side of things rather than the PR side, but one (of many, no doubt) go-to tool was the written press release. These went out (fax, USPS, email) to any media outlet that might do a story (Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV) followed up by a phone call “pitching” the story. I don’t recall there being any way to get a release into the hands of the public. The internet –and, later, social media– changed all that. We started seeing and hearing the word “disintermediation.” Communicating directly to a target audience, bypassing traditional media.

By this time many (most?) businesses, organizations and institutions had websites but it took some technical skill to update these, a task made easier by the advent of blogs. And a well-written, frequently updated blog could be followed thanks to a bit of tech called RSS.

As I prepared to write this post I tried to recall what the field of public relations was like in 2006 (18 years ago!). Instead of googling I used a new (for me) tool called Perplexity that describes itself as an “answer engine” rather than a search engine. If you discount the personal touch, the result was much better than what you just read. I’m too new to this tool/tech to write intelligently about it does feel like a very big deal. I’m already starting to go to Perplexity for answers I once searched for on Google. And all we really wanted was the answer, right? Here’s a short (6 min) video overview of Perplexity and I’ll be sharing my experiences here.

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…

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?

Books read in 2023

Following from a Washington Post story (behind paywall so won’t bother to link).

Of 1,500 Americans surveyed, a less-than-ideal 46 percent finished zero books last year and 5 percent read just one. So, if you read more than two books in 2023, congratulations! You’re in the top half of U.S. adults.

Reading five books put you in the top 33 percent, while reading 10 books put you in the top 21 percent. Those of us who read more than 50 books are the true one-percenters: people who read more books than 99 percent of their fellow Americans.

I read 36 books last year (some I’d read previously). Prompted a nice chat with ChatGPT.