Ideas from Mark Stout

  Google's Gemini lets you make a custom story with illustrations for you to share with a little loved one <cross posted from my Substack Newsletter > Once upon a time I wrote a weekly tech column for the local paper called Family Tech. I tried to focus on topics not for geeks, but the practical tech families could use to make life just a bit easier. This topic would have been a natural for the column. With AI, you can make your own children’s story books to read aloud to your child or grandchild, or let them read to themselves. It can even read them aloud to the child while they follow along with the book. Creating them is as easy as going to Google’s Gemini Artificial Intelligence and typing “Help 5 year old Amy to not be frightened of dogs.”. A minute or two later it came up with this . Try it out, its free to look at. Or you can get more detailed in your description : Prompt : Create a story about Batkid, the boy in San Francisco that got to help Batman for a day as his M...

About 3 weeks ago I subscribed to a free month of Google's Gemini Pro .  With it, I could make 3 high quality 8 second videos a day with sound.  Three is not many but it served my needs.  And while eight seconds seems low, the next time you watch TV or a film, notice how often and how fast the shot changes.  According to a Wired Magazine article " The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today" Note :  This blog is aimed at two audiences.  One, those not as enamored of tech as I am and the other, my fellow enthusiasts.  For the first folks, my  Substack  newsletter reproduces the relevant posts.  The more techy posts live only here on the blog, as they have for the last 17 years.  This is one of those posts. My project I worked on was a series of about seven unique shots. In each case they were an employee modeling the proper phrasing when speaking to a custom...

Creating with Artificial Intelligence Click here  for all of my images. And here for my playlist of AI Generated videos.

Two big things. You can now see my Amazon River notebook using NotebookLM right in your own browser.  With it you may listen to the full podcast, ask questions of it, and more.  It is here . And I fixed an error in the video.  It is here .

 A follow-up to my last post about Google's NotebookLM. Google's developer conference started today.  I watched the keynote and there was a great deal said about AI.   What I thought interesting is they have published a NotebookLM with a lot of data about the conference you can query and summarize in NotebookLM. Sources for the notebook includes a YouTube video of the two hour keynote and a host of articles pertinent to what is happening at IO, the convention. You can access this notebook here .

 Artificial Intelligence is all over the news.  I played with ChatGPT when it first appeared, and I was not impressed.  I also played with Google's NotebookLM.  I was intrigued by it. You could then feed in documents from your Google Drive and then ask questions and it would answer based on what it found in your documents. In the eight months I was away from computers, things changed dramatically.  AI got smarter; and it will continue to evolve. NotebookLM can can now pull in sources from places outside your Google Drive.  For this example, I chose a Wikipedia article and a YouTube article about the Amazon River. It took a few minutes and generated an informative summary of the topic. What was truly amazing was it also generated a podcast about the Amazon, with a man and woman speaking.  Apparently two voices having a conversation are more engaging than one voice lecturing. A link to a video I made showing the demo is at the end of this post. Another g...

Last night the AFI gave director Francis Ford Coppola a lifetime achievement award. It reminded me of a Facebook post I made last April I'd like to share to a wider audience. This was at the San Francisco Macys.