virtual CAIO

Listen to this AI generated podcast episode about the half-life of apps – the time taken for an app’s usage to drop by 50%. The Podcast was generated by Wondercraft.ai and took me about 2 minutes of my time and about 5 minutes of compute time when I was doing something else.

The input for this this podcast episode was simply this article about app half-life.

Listen here.

The speech is fine, the article comes across much better than I expected although there is small problem in the middle where I suspect the simple solution would be to add a hyphen. I had typed “well over” in the article which made the AI voice separate the words too much. If I had typed “well-over” I think it would have been fine.

I chose the voice called Dominic, intro music called Virtuosity with a 6 second intro and a 2 second outro. I would make both the intro and the outro a little longer. I would also add a logo but this was a quick and free trial.

Even if you don’t intend to have your own podcast, you could always create an episode for each of your blog articles.

Wondercraft.ai’s podcast generator is pretty good and given that I’m writing this on 2nd September 2023 and the rate of improvement in the AI field is accelerating, it’s going to be even better, very fast. Give it a try.

What does NLU mean? I was reviewing VoiceFlow recently and, whilst following an introductory video, I was initially confused by a dropdown option list labelled NLU. There is so much new jargon in the AI field that it’s hard to keep up. What is the meaning of NLU?

NLU stands for Natural Language Understanding and it’s a critical element of AI systems. I regard NLU as having a similar relationship to AI services as browsers do to the internet. Browsers standardised access to websites and ultimately became the standard interface through which people interact with them on both mobiles and desktops. The simplicity, flexibility and standardisation of HTML as a means of displaying and formatting content meant that any human interface could be designed using a set of standard protocols and anyone with a browser could then view the interface without loading and running an obscure bespoke software program.

NLUs allow for something similar with conversational interfaces. They let people ask questions of systems in natural language format which is, afterall, what users are most comfortable and familiar with. AI systems such as LLMs can then parse these questions to work out what the user wants to know in more precise terms so that appropriate answers can be given, or relevant instructions followed.