The Shield premiered in 2002 and got glowing reviews but I never got around to watching it. Until now. It holds up well after 20+ years. The show was created and written by Shawn Ryan and while I can’t say for sure he penned this bit of dialog, somebody deserves an award for coming up with the line, “I’ve got a yammy full of Georgia joy juice.” And I thought I had every slang term for female genitalia.
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.
DJI Osmo Pocket 3
I purchased this camera back in January but a busted arm and cold weather prevented me from plunging in as I usually do with a new toy. Additionally, I found myself overwhelmed by the number of features and settings. All excellent features, but there are so many of them. I couldn’t find a place to start. So yesterday I turned the camera on and headed into the woods, paying to attention to settings. The video below was shot at 1080/30fps. I’ve reset to 4K/60fps for the next shoot. Watch this space. (PS: A YouTube search will tell you all you might want to know about this little gadget.)
Public relations technology in 2006
In 2006 I was asked to be on a panel discussing new technology tools for public relations professionals in the greater St. Louis area. Blogging was still relatively new at the time and I’d been at it for five or six years, consulting for advertisers on our various radio networks. It was a packed house.
2006 was a busy year for technology (social media?). Twitter officially launched in July; Facebook opened up to everyone over 13 years old, leading to explosive growth from 12 million users at the end of 2006 to 50 million by October 2007; YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in October, cementing its position as the leading online video platform.
I spent most of my working years on the media side of things rather than the PR side, but one (of many, no doubt) go-to tool was the written press release. These went out (fax, USPS, email) to any media outlet that might do a story (Newspapers, magazines, radio, TV) followed up by a phone call “pitching” the story. I don’t recall there being any way to get a release into the hands of the public. The internet –and, later, social media– changed all that. We started seeing and hearing the word “disintermediation.” Communicating directly to a target audience, bypassing traditional media.
By this time many (most?) businesses, organizations and institutions had websites but it took some technical skill to update these, a task made easier by the advent of blogs. And a well-written, frequently updated blog could be followed thanks to a bit of tech called RSS.
As I prepared to write this post I tried to recall what the field of public relations was like in 2006 (18 years ago!). Instead of googling I used a new (for me) tool called Perplexity that describes itself as an “answer engine” rather than a search engine. If you discount the personal touch, the result was much better than what you just read. I’m too new to this tool/tech to write intelligently about it does feel like a very big deal. I’m already starting to go to Perplexity for answers I once searched for on Google. And all we really wanted was the answer, right? Here’s a short (6 min) video overview of Perplexity and I’ll be sharing my experiences here.
Perfect spring day gets perfecter 2024
You So Zany by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ [Artist: http://audionautix.com/ ]