Experimenting with Voice First Blogging

I’m trying to do something new this year. Instead of just doing the same old bloggy blog stuff that I’ve been doing, I’m trying to mix it up a little bit. So I want to try doing something called Voice First, which basically means not being so much of a keyboard jockey, but being able to just use natural language. I think that it’s important to develop the skill just to be able to talk about things off the cuff in a natural flowing way, similarly to how I can type. I have this mental block about being able to speak temporarily the same way that I do on my blog period. So I don’t know quite what I’m doing yet, but what I was attempting to do this morning was to use Whisper to transcribe audio period. So usually I have a special laptop that I use that’s separate from my work laptop that I type on. I have a special seat in the house where I sit when I type and do my blogs. And I don’t know why I want to do things differently this time, but I attempted to set up Whisper on my laptop that is freshly wiped Windows 10 Alienware machine that I ran Linux on for years. So what I wanted to do was run a Whisper program that will basically transcribe to a file using the computer’s microphone, but didn’t have Python set up on the machine, didn’t have it set up and just trying to deal with like PowerShell again, I just said no. I’ve been a huge Windows person ever since Windows came out. I’ve had a brief experience with Mac back in the Apple 2e days. Technology programming was pretty much my first introduction to computers and programming, but after getting sucked into being a Windows 95 power user and taking all those Microsoft courses and certifications that I had, anytime I would touch a Mac, it would be pretty much in kind of a revulsion just because everything was so different and I didn’t want to waste, I didn’t want to have to figure it out, basically is what it boiled down to. So I just said no Macs, no Apple, but all that change when the iPhone came out. So it’s been a bit of a change recently, having iPads and all the Apple devices because Windows, Microsoft phone never took off, they never had anything that I even wanted to touch, I didn’t want to take a Zoom, so yeah, I’ve avoided Macs despite being an iPhone user for 10 years now. I really got a hand it to my friend Mike Kane who works with me at Star Atlas, bought me a Macbook Pro, I guess is like a recruitment bonus for getting him a job at Star Atlas. So I appreciate that and I fucking love my Macbook and I still have a gaming PC upstairs that I play all the Steam games stuff on and I’ll do some web surfing and stuff like that, but I just set a limit, I was not going to install Python on there, I wasn’t even going to install any command tool stuff, it was strictly a gaming PC and I was going to leave it at that. And so what happened was that the writing Alienware machine that I reformatted, I was using this weekend for the girls to shoot some video and so I decided to pick it up. Anyways, I’m getting off on a tangent, the point is that we’re moving to voice first, whether that means releasing these, this is a memo on my phone right now, so whether we’re going to release this memo as like an actual podcast, who knows, but I do want to practice with the transcription. So basically what I’m planning on doing is running this through Whisper on the Macbook and then passing it through GPT for editing basically. So you’re hearing my voice one way or the other, speech to text, text to text and then text to blog post I guess, yeah, so what else are we planning on doing this year? So there’s a lot of things that we have planned around GPT and AI systems in general, I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons Adventures with my kids and I think this idea of a GPT DM is coming together quite nicely in my head so far, my main priority right now as far as work for Star Atlas goes is to obviously continue development on the Dow, we’ve got design working on that now, they’re going to go crazy and we’re going to have to bring it back down to Earth which is kind of interesting for me being the one who’s normally has their heads in the cloud, their heads in the cloud. So we’ll be working on that process but in the meantime I’m going to be integrating GPT into my workflow as much as possible, making it interact with other APIs, trying to see how I can, you know, Notion has their API, how can we teach GPT to be able to build its own programs or facilitate me building programs that interact with these various APIs. So like, hey, GPT or as I’ve been calling it Jarvis after the Iron Man machine, Tony Stark’s computer generated AI, whatever you want to call it. So basically, what can we build and what do we need to borrow? I’m going to be playing around with a bunch of tools but basically what my kind of like moonshot thing is right now is basically using GPT to play moderator or facilitator for some sort of adventure game and the goal here is for the adventure game to be like people talking like you would at a regular Dungeons and Dragons session. So what we want to do is we want to provide context for the adventure, whether that’s going to be, you know, some kind of schema in a no Excel database or probably what I’ll do for the demo is just basically do like a flat file thing and just make it as simple as possible just to show like, you know, what a scenario would play out like and then go from there. I think it’s going to be very interesting. I need to put a proposal together for the company to get a little bit of funding and a little bit of just founder, founder synchronization. I’ve been very lucky to just be able to do what I want and I’d like things to continue to be that way. So it’s time to have fun. So that’s pretty much my goal every day when I sit down at my desk is just to have fun. I mean, obviously there’s work to do. But I’m enjoying it and I enjoy the people that I work with and having the opportunity that I do. Hashtag blessed as much as it pains me to say that. But anyways, so yeah, 2023 other thing we’re going to do stay fit. I went mountain biking yesterday over exerted myself on a four and a half. I actually I think it was like six miles. My whoops says I actually did nine and a quarter mile, which is quite a lot. But I think it was the six and a half mile. We’re going to probably do a video in this place. So yeah, so without doxing myself again and saying my name, we do have a LLC that we’re probably going to take advantage of in order to actually do some things with the girls. I think it’s time for them to really get into the business and entrepreneurial spirit. So I think we’re going to crank things up a little bit, start operating as an LLC. Mrs is doing all this stuff with the Southwest companion pass and trying to get like fire for travel and stuff like that. I’m just going to leave the whole Southwest Christmas to do a back hole aside for the moment. I think I still have a blog post to finish writing actually writing about that, but we had a bit of a bit of an issue coming back from Costa Rica and got stuck in Houston for about four days over the break. But I’m not going to get into that right now. Basically I just think having the girls involved like creativity as a family, being able to like take pictures and take video as we go out on these little adventures and just get the girls familiar with like video editing. How do you make videos? How do you edit videos? How do you do production? Like what does production look like? Music production, video production, like all types of media basically. Those are all skills that I think are handy still despite what our AI overlords are doing with stable diffusion and stuff like that. I think integrating all this stuff together is going to be even easier now. Yeah, so staying fit, trying to ramp up some sort of like project work with the kids. I tried to get them to do, actually we tried to get them to put like a little thing together for New Year’s. They found a song, they were doing some dancing to it. We took a couple little bits of video of it, but didn’t have enough time. It was like four days to really put something solid together. So I think we’ll probably have a January project. Our January project will be to maybe go to the park that I went to yesterday and take some video, just run around having fun and maybe do some video stuff. I am thinking about getting a new iPhone just for the camera, GoPro for when I do biking stuff, but trying not to go crazy with the money spending considering how December went and kind of the pay cuts of the company that went across there, so just trying to actually get rid of stuff, clean up some stuff before I go crazy, but probably I’m going to buy a $1,000 iPhone and a hanging board for the garage. The girls have started converting the garage into a fitness center younger, my daughter younger, youngest, I don’t know how to say that out loud. My younger daughter, she got a punching bag. So we’ve got like a hanging board, like a two by four we can hang from, try to pull up, we’ve got a punching bag that’s hanging from the ceiling in the garage and then we’ve got mountain bike scooters galore, the girls have really been skating, roller skating and roller blading. So we went to our first skating rink exercise a couple days ago, I think that was Saturday maybe. So that was fun and I’m going to start wrapping this up I guess so I can actually get to work and do some of this cool stuff that I’m so excited about. We will scratch that. It is definitely a bit easier, I don’t know, like compared to typing, I can definitely talk a lot faster than I type so I’m able to dump that knowledge out or that experience out of my brain, words, things that I’m saying. It comes easier to speak so it is kind of weird actually talking to myself in this empty room with my phone in front of me. It’s definitely more different experience than trying to type a blog post which is a completely different thing altogether. So we will see if I can set up some workflow, my ideal scenario here is just basically a Siri on steroids that I can talk to, give commands to it, have it actually do stuff in a smart way, open this, do this in an email to someone telling them blah, blah, blah. That’s one particular example but some of the scenarios where hey, I’ve got a project idea for the company, here it is, this is what we’re going to do, write this up as a project brief. I think if I can get something that flows quickly from voice to GPT, I think it will be a game changer. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to use GPT-3 chat or just using the API but we’re going to figure something out. The end goal here for this project is again, I say again like I have actually put it into good words but the demo video of the guy talking to the metahuman that receives his voice commands and is able to do some responses based on that. So we’ll see if we can recreate that demo because I think that’s what the future is going to look like and so it’s my turn to bring it into reality.