AI versus Marshy #44: Playing with voice, ANZAC blunder, and an easy way to chatbot (fixed broken images)

Hello and welcome to another edition of AI versus Marshy.​(Note: the original edition had broken images - this should now be fixed).

This is the newsletter that makes AI practical so you can think about it intelligently and free of hype.

Nice to meet you new readers - be sure to reply to my email to say “hi” and improve its deliverability - I love hearing from our readers.

ChatGPT cartoonist’s representation of me talking to all of my readers

This week looks at:

• Play AI - a very convincing voice agent
• ANZAC hack - just because you can - doesn’t mean you should
• Non-techie ways to build a chatbot for for a website to automatically answer questions

I’m pretty excited to share more with you so let’s make like a toddler opening a birthday present and rip into it.

-Marshy 💪

(Our twin boys turned 1 this week so that analogy was definitely top-of-mind)

Playing with AI voice

h/t Ben’s Bites.

One of the really cool things about the tidal wave of AI software coming out is that a lot of smart companies are making it super-easy to jump in and test things out first.

​Play.ai is one such tool.

It was originally a TTS (text to speech) model that lets you convert text into an array of interesting and thoughtful voices. It’s now released agent functionality - meaning you can interact back and forth with it and get it do things.

Like a lot of the tools I get excited about - it’s integration-friendly - meaning you can connect it into other tools you’re using as a no-coder/designer/developer to help produce a component of the thing you want built.

I encourage you to play with it in the URL I just sent you - but if you want to see a video of me interacting with it instead (why?! haha) then here you go:

Havin’ a chat with a computer

Excuse the washing in the background ;)

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - ANZAC blunder

h/t Cameron Wilson @ Crikey.

Just because you can build something - doesn’t mean you should.

And when it comes to paying your respect to war veterans… perhaps building a “Virtual Veteran” chatbot with AI isn’t such a great idea.

Well that’s what the Queensland Government did in Australia and naturally hackers got involved and bypassed what it was supposed to do.

Just don’t!

Not everything needs to be a chatbot.

It reminds me of this silly business from Woolworths 9 years ago - just leave a war memorial day to be what it is, brands and governments - thanks 🙏

Non-techie ways to get your website to answer questions about a website

Via Angelique @ Sydney Startups FB group.

I had another question about using AI after putting the callout -

Ask and ye shall receive!

And so here’s some quick ways to go about this for a non-techie.

1. Pay for ChatGPT Premium and create a GPT for a website e.g. I picked a site about agriculture equipment in Australia - https://ezmachinery.com.au/​
2. Follow the prompts and test the answers.

Nothin’ to see here - just chattin’ topsoil 👩🏻‍🌾

You can then use Chipp to publish it for you.

It’s quite straightforward and gets rid of the need for someone to have ChatGPT Premium to interact with your GPT.

And how!

I spotted this out in the wilderness while visiting the Generalist.World website - it’s got some great stuff in there including this Notion guide they built with a Chipp GPT questionnaire.

It was a pretty cool guide!

There are many other ways - Zapier now lets you build chatbots without coding and could be plugged into a Wordpress website as well.

But it gets a lil bit techie with integrations whereas the above solution is easier.

I hope that helps!

–

That’s all the time we’ve got this week.

Lots going on in my world with projects and I’m exploring some longer-term moves/options as Georgie and I move towards buying a house.

As always feel free to chime in with feedback, questions, observations - and you’ll hear from me again next week!

And if you like watching this newsletter instead, you can tune in on a Friday on my LinkedIn account - or jump over to YouTube to see a weekly wrap-up video too.

Take care and remember we’ve got this!

-Marshy 💪

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p.s. I did something on the backend for image uploading that should make publishing this newsletter (and future website content) easier for myself. I’m making a note about it here just in case everything breaks outside of preview mode 😅