How AI Vision Helped My Neighbor's Dog IRL

Welcome to the Prompt. I'm Jim Carter. This show guarantees tech news and updates that shape your life and future. Since it's essential now to stay on top of AI, we'll figure it out together so you don't fall behind. I'm here to explain it, offer some deep insights, and spark a little curiosity along the way. If you're a techie like me or just AI curious, hit that follow button for the advantage you deserve. Let's dive in. Hey, glad you're here. I'm Jim Carter, and welcome back to the Prompt. Today I want to tell you a story about how I used AI to find my neighbor's lost dog and return it home. But more importantly, I want to talk about how this scenario could have been avoided if there was more use of AI and explore the possibility of creating a business out of an everyday life situation. Okay, picture this. Every morning I take my dog, Mocha, for a walk around the neighborhood. I've got coffee in one hand and her leash in the other. And of course, I'm listening to one of my AI podcasts or a podcast that I love subscribing to, just like I'm sure you do. And hey, maybe your favorite podcast is this one. Anyway, our walk is typically about a mile or a mile and a half, and since right now I'm really not in my going to the gym era, I'm counting walking and drinking coffee as my exercise. Judge me if you want, but right now it works for me. So Mocha and I set out for our walk, and just as we round a corner close to my house, this little fluffy gray dog comes bolting up to us, causing immediate chaos. I'm trying to determine if this dog wants to bite my dog's face off, all while attempting to pause my podcast and not spill my coffee. You've likely been in a similar situation, and even if you haven't, I'm sure you can visualize me fumbling around in the chaos. I realize that this dog is just showing fearful aggression because it's gotten loose. It's about 7am in the morning, and where I live in the burbs, it's very quiet. There's only a few passing cars, and at this time of the morning, nobody's out of their house yet. As I look around to try to place the dogs home, I realize that my morning is now awash. Because as much as I would happily take this little guy with no leash and put him in my backyard for the day, I've got a full agenda and it's going to be about 95 degrees here in Southern California. So the first thing I do is get a gauge of friendliness. This guy is docile. I can pet him. He's panting and smiling. It looks like he just ran out of his house and he's looking for some love and companionship. So I pick him up under my arm, walk back to our house, put my dog in the backyard and swap the leash for this guy. As I went on a hunt around my neighborhood to try to find where he lives, it reminded me of the times in my life when I've started down a path and had absolutely no direction, navigation or idea what to do. Honestly, it's happened more times than I can count and I'm sure many of you can relate to. I don't necessarily believe in shortcuts in life, but I do believe in the power of guides, like having a map. And I don't know about you, but the way my mind works is if I'm trying to walk towards the water and I'm currently walking towards the mountains, I absolutely want to use any tool at my disposal. It doesn't have to be some big thing, just a compass, map or guide to tell me to turn around and walk the right way. That's how I think we can use AI in our daily lives. Something for when we're lost, stuck, or or just need a little bit of an edge. In this case, that's where I was and all I had to do was ask myself, can a robot help me with this? I grabbed my phone just to check if there were any local notifications for lost dogs, and when I saw there weren't, I realized the only thing that could support me at the moment was to actually understand what kind of dog this was. Now, as much as I love dogs, I'm not a dog expert. So I turned to an AI tool that I've actually been developing myself, which uses the power of AI vision to explain things to me. It's currently in beta and I haven't shown or released it to anyone outside of a few people in my private Slack community. But this situation was perfect to test it out, which also, generally speaking, is available in something as simple as chat GPT if you know how to use it the right way. I took a picture of this little fluffy guy and I asked AI to explain what breed of dog he was. In about 10 seconds I got a full overview of his breed and other breeds he was mixed with, as well as an estimate of about how old he was based off of his size. Guess who just got pointed in the right direction toward the ocean? Me. So now, rather than walking around aimlessly asking is this your dog? And do you know whose dog this is? I could ask people, hey, are any of your neighbors owners of this mixed breed mini Schnauzer that's about 2 1/2 years old? That's a level up with AI with the Schnauzer's info in hand, I went to the house that he ran from. She pointed me to another location. As cars started to pass in the neighborhood, I did the same thing, asked if they could help me find the humans to this two year old mixed schnauzer. After playing ping pong between houses over a couple blocks, one of my neighbors pointed to a house down the street and told me she remembers a couple of years ago that the family got a dog like the one I found. I walked up to that eighth house, rang the doorbell, told them I was one of their neighbors and and asked if they had a little gray mixed breed schnauzer. Immediately the owner who answered using her ring camera while she was at work gasped and said that her side gate must have opened. Mission accomplished. Now, as great as it was and I was able to get this guy home. Of course I know I probably would have found it eventually, but my point of this story is that because of AI, I was armed with more information, had a stronger strategy and I was able to shortcut A again. Even though I don't always believe in shortcuts to get the dog home, that extra information I was able to give to my neighbor helped point me in the right direction much faster. Would I have found the house eventually? Of course. Did I have other tools available like posting on Nextdoor, the Ring app or Facebook about it? Yes, of course. But all in this was probably a 45 minute process because I used the tools that I had readily available to me to tie this together and zoom out a little bit. I mentioned in the beginning how this experience could influence a business model. As I was walking Moka for another evening walk once it cooled off for the day and I rounded the corner, the same corner that this little guy ran up to me from, I asked myself one simple could I solve this in one shot? Immediately the idea came to me. While AI can understand mixed breed dog, cat and pretty much every other animal type, the one thing it doesn't have right now is a correlation of where these little guys and girls call home. So what if there was a website or app or service that lets you take a picture of your pet and Register it to your home, and if your pet's ever lost, all the finder needs to do is snap a photo and AI will simply do a photo match to tell you the exact location. I quickly searched app stores and websites, and while there are pet finder apps and directories, they're all kind of archaic and boring and still require the finder to look up all of the available pets in the area, scroll through photos, and hopefully match up the right one. There's such a huge opportunity there because AI has the power to do this for us. So there's a free AI idea for you. If you're a pet lover, build the next AI startup that immediately matches lost pets with their humans. I'm all about giving free game where I've got it. But more importantly, find yourself in the story. When in your everyday life do you feel lost or stuck? That AI could act as a simple guide. That's the first step to finding where AI can add value to your literal daily life. And number two, if you're looking for the next great business idea that doesn't include status quo thinking and centers around a new way of making things convenient and automatic for your users at a fraction of the price of what it would have taken just two years ago, ask yourself, how could you solve it if it was a service? Oh, and if you're wondering about that new AI tool that I mentioned, you know what? There's no better time than now to just show you. If you want to check it out for yourself, I've made it available to you before I promote it to the world. It's totally free to check out. So let me tell you more about it. It's this brainchild idea that I had that I haven't yet seen done anywhere else. At least not in the way that I've built this. All you need to do is text message a photo to a phone number and AI will explain it back to you. Then you can have a conversation with that photo or with that content. I know, super cool, right? It's very easy and doesn't require you to register or sign up for a big service. It's just mixing the power of AI with the global accessibility of text messaging. I'd love for you to try it and then let me know how it works. It's as easy as this. While you're listening to the show, grab your phone right now and all you need to do is open up your messaging app. Doesn't matter if it's iOS, Android, or any other version that supports sending a text message. It works over standard SMS using the MMS technology, which is something like 40 years old. So every person listening to this should have immediate availability. To do it, open up a new text message and type in 866-733-2202. I'll say that number again just to make sure you got it right. 866-733-2202. And then for the first thing you send in that message, I want you to just type explain this, separated by a space. That's it. You send those two words, explain this to 866-733-2202 and it'll respond to you in a few seconds. Then all you have to do is text a photo and my AI will go to work for you. Okay, that's it for today, you guys. I appreciate and love you. Thank you for being here, thank you for listening, and thank you for dreaming big with me. You're the reason that I show up, teach, and continually try new experiments to stretch the positive impact of AI in our daily lives. Catch you next time.