ChatGPT can now detect emotion

“Among other things, ChatGPT can now detect emotion in both the user’s voice as well as from their facial expression, just like a human can. It also makes unprompted jokes, the way a human would who’s trying to keep a conversation light, and it also lets you interrupt a response — so that you no longer have to confine yourself to the stilted my turn-your turn dynamic of a conversation with a chatbot.”

“If you had your eyes closed, you’d think this is a real lady fawning over a cute puppy, when in fact it’s an AI model that’s learned how to express relevant and appropriate emotion — in addition to making the same observations we would when we meet a cute dog for the first time.”

Two kinds of radio station

Last week the owner of Moberly, Missouri radio stations KWIX and KRES —Alpha Media— laid off all of their on-air staff. (Bob Priddy mourns)

The following is from a post and interview I did in 2007 with Dave Shepherd, the son of the man who put KWIX/KRES on the air.

Fifty years ago, Jerrell Shepherd mastered a form of broadcasting alchemy that turned small town radio lead into gold. It wasn’t much of a secret, however, since he readily shared it with countless radio station owners and managers who made the pilgrimage to Moberly, Missouri, in hopes of bringing some of Shepherd’s sales and programming magic back to their stations.

While most small market broadcasters were content to get “their fair share” of local advertising budgets (the bulk went to the local newspaper), Shepherd’s sales reps were trained to ask for it all and believed in their hearts they deserved it.

Mr. Shepherd’s approach to programming his stations was deceptively simple: report anything and everything that happened in each of the communities covered by his stations’ signals. The KWIX and KRES “Red Rovers” showed up just about every high school football game, junior high choral concert and chamber of commerce ribbon-cutting. And the Shepherd stations put it all on the air. Always with local sponsors. Lots of local sponsors.

The new owner, Alpha Media, owns a lot of radio stations including KBFF Live 95.5 FM in Portland, OR. Last June the station introduced the first AI-powered DJ, “AI Ashley.”

“Alpha Media’s EVP of content Phil Becker assured listeners that Elzinga’s job is safe and she’ll be receiving the same pay, telling TechCrunch that AI Ashley is a tool that will allow DJs to multitask like never before.”

I’d love to know what sort of prompt could result in an AI making a call and interacting with a listener as we heard in the clip above. As the program director of a small town radio station back in the 1970’s I was responsible for hiring and training weekend talent. I might have jumped at the chance to put an AI voice on the air.

Will the KWIX/KRES on-air staff be replaced with AI voices? If so, how will the station’s listeners and advertisers respond?

Perplexity says (using British accent) she has no voice

As good as I’ve found ChatGPT to be, it appears Perplexity (another AI tool) might be even better. One of my favorite features of ChatGPT is ability to “converse” with one of several human-like voices. I posted an example of this a few months back. Others nitpick but I find the voice amazingly human-like. Now that I have a Perplexity account I wondered if it has the same feature.

Does not have a voice feature? Sooo, what are we listening to here. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for this and I’ll update this post if and when. Perhaps it’s just a new feature (that it doesn’t know about?!)

What I was curious about –before this distraction– was why the ChatGPT voice is so natural sounding and the Perplexity voice is canned computer-speak.

Old man and Golden Retriever in the woods at sunset

“DALL·E 2 is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.”Will this technology make verbal skills, a command of the language, more important than artistic skills?

PROMPT: Create a photo of a middle-aged man, wearing a T-shirt sitting in an aluminum lawn chair and make the image look like a Polaroid photograph.
Make the man much older… mid 70s.

Can you make the man look much less attractive and handsome?
One more tweak…