Google’s NotebookLM allows you to upload a variety of content and will compile it all into an AI generated podcast with a male and female co-host. They are calling these “podcasts” but they are really shareable audio files. In this video, I will show you how to take this audio content to produce a real RSS podcast to submit to iTunes or other RSS distribution channels
On Sunday, December 8th, the show 60 Minutes featured a story about how AI was being used in the classroom to help teachers and students learn with the help of AI tutors (via Open AI). The AI is used with the curriculum to help students move through a series of question-and-answer interactions that help them use critical thinking to solve math and science problems. The system developed by Sal Khan, and Open AI, provides a dashboard for the teachers to use to follow the flow of conversations with the student and their AI tutor. The teacher can focus on students’ identified trouble areas vs. trying to spread their attention and feedback with less data to tailor their feedback for more immediate impact and retention. 
This parallels with Dr. Benjamin Bloom’s 2 Sigma theory on the best way to teach a student a new skill/knowledge and retain it longer.
Similar to the AI Tutor in the classroom, Benjamin Bloom analyzed teacher-to-many, peer-to-peer, and tutor-to-student methods of learning. The results of the tutor-to-student had the highest results. At the time his study was done, there was no scalable and cost-effective way to provide this in the classroom.
AI has allowed these tutors to be deployed across a large population base and respond at lightning speed.
Our ACES simulator does the same thing. We use AI to play the role of the built-in tutor or coach. Managers have access to very detailed analytics, just like the teachers have, to focus on the tasks an employee may be struggling with in the simulator as a roadmap to use as a way to provide the most relevant coaching and feedback. This allows the manager or trainer to be more Proactive than Reactive.
The report on 60 Minutes also addresses the risks or negatives of using generative AI in the classroom. As with a lot of these systems, there needs to be some form of guardrails in place.
For this reason, our ACES platform uses a combination of rules-based AI and NLP. When using our simulator in a call center, you want to design the simulations based on best practices for any given interaction in that call center. When using generative tools to help you “build” the learning activity, this runs the risk of not having consistent learning for each agent that challenges them to perform the proper tasks following your best practices. Call centers know what type of calls they have and the types of situations employees will be tasked with. Simply pulling examples from the hours of recorded calls can be used to create the scenarios that agents will need to learn how to respond to.
We all know these new generative tools are very attractive and can reduce our workloads tremendously. We still need to be mindful of when we use them and how. I believe we still have a ways to go before we can blindly deploy LLM (large language models) at scale but there is no doubt they are a technology disrupter.
Didn’t Elon Musk say that AI will take away the need for humans to work? I just saw the Pixar movie Wall-E for the first time (I know it was made 16 years ago) and was fascinated by the man-made environment the humans were living in due to the environmental damage done to earth. 
The Wall-E movie is an example of what we would be living like if AI replaced all our jobs. They didn’t even need to walk they just floated around with robots feeding them and entertaining them. There were no humans interacting with each other, only “screens” and everyone wore the same clothing.
If current humans lived the same way what would be the impact? Here is a list I made – feel free to add to this in the comments.
| Pro- Wall-E Lifestyle | Con- Wall-E Lifestyle |
| Sleep in late | Weight gain and health risks due to lack of exercise |
| Stay up late | Lack of human interaction and emotional connections |
| No need to buy groceries or clothes | Boredom – lack of variety |
| No commuting time (or Zooms) | Reduced travel |
| No wars or intercontinental conflicts | No intellectual stimulation |
| Unlimited free time | Lack of diversity |
| Reduce competition reduces innovation | |
| Removal of social activities and entertainment |
Extensive Practice Needed to Reach Proficiency
According to Dr. Stephanie Boyer, Professor of Marketing at Bryant University, “It takes our students 15-minute AI-driven role-plays before they have a significant step-change vs. practicing on your customers. Get your teams to practice as much as you can.”
It’s a well-known fact that many call centers are challenged with getting agents up to speed as quickly as possible with a high degree of proficiency. The chart below shows the average time it takes for agents to become proficient. But we want to encourage you to start using simulations – like our ACES simulator
When we work with our customer’s call centers the #1 reason they use us is to get their agents up to speed faster.
Click here to see some examples
It seems that AI (artificial intelligence) is getting more bad press than good these days. But my spin is that the good still outways the bad when it comes to the benefits of using AI-based applications and products.
For example, we are using AI to help accelerate the rate at which you can learn a new skill. I’ve seen this approach to using AI in education only at the K-12 level vs. the enterprise level as we are using it. Most other training companies using AI to curate content to help cross-train employees on skills they need for their job. I would say this is one of the easier ways to apply AI technology.
Here is a list of some other “good” ways AI is being used to learn a new skill
- Using AI to learn how to speak in ASL (American Sign Language)
- Carnegie Learning is using to help teach math in a new way for K-12 students
- ACES (our own platform) for ensuring call center employees can demonstrate the appropriate level of English proficiency
One tail of caution though, we really want to ensure that we try to reduce the amount of bias that inherently may be embedded with these systems. I was recently asked by one of our clients if we could prove our AI did not contain any bias. I applaud them for asking this question as — again, this would suggest some sort of “evil” intent is being used.
We were fortunate to find a third-party study that showed our AI back-end (Microsoft’s NLP engine) scored the lowest word error rate. So as Spider Man’s uncle says “With great power comes great responsibility”
I began my college career as a computer science major. Keep in mind this was a looong time ago when the code
consisted of zeros and ones. After one semester of this, I knew my brain wasn’t cut out for this type of schooling.
Flash forward 30 years, and now a run a successful software company. We are following a trend I see more and more companies following — providing “no-code” software solutions. In a recent article by Ventur Beat, they state that 8-% of software in 2024 will be built with similar no-code tools.
Let me list some of my favorite no-code software tools that I’m using to either support our customers or build other software solutions from.
- WordPress – website
- Amazon Alexa Skills –
- Google Dialogue Flow
- Hipcast for creating RSS feed for podcasting
- Zoho for building dynamic BI reports
Our no-code solution, ACES (Accelerated Cognitive Engagement System), allows our customers to build immersive and highly interactive simulations used primarily for customer service, sales, coaching, and onboarding to reduce the amount of time it takes to learn a new skill.
To see an example of our simulations you can visit this page on our website.
Carefully choosing the focus and vision of your artificial intelligence initiatives can make all the difference in guaranteeing ROI for your enterprise. Read this article to learn about five major #AI trends that are expected to influence this technology in the years to come.
