1.2 Foundations AI in Daily Life

Hi and welcome back. We are going to talk now about AI in your daily life. How do you use AI every day? Now there's lots of different ways to use AI. I think one of the challenges that we all run into is how do we not get overwhelmed by the number of tools and capabilities that are available to us. So I'm going to talk about how I use AI every day, the different things that I care about and have learned over the last decade or so, and talk to you about how I not only use it in my personal or my professional life, but also in my personal life at home. So let's go ahead and get started. The first thing I want to do is talk about kind of how I position AI in my life. Now, I do tend to look to create a symbiotic relationship with artificial intelligence, meaning I want it to be a kind of a partner, a thought partner, in most of the work that I do. I always have ChatGPT on my phone. I have it on my desktop. I'm able to kind of interact with it pretty easily all the time. So that's one thing I would create an opportunity for you to do that. Let me give you a couple examples that you can just think about using an AI kind of partner. Some people call them Virtual assistants, not to be confused with humans that we work with, um, that are not present physically in our office but are virtual. But these virtual assistants, uh, or, um, the ability for us to leverage an AI assistant— maybe that's an important, like, virtual AI assistant. Um, but these AI assistants, there's lots of them, and so I'll share with you the ones that I personally use every single day. The first one, which may not surprise you, is Amazon Alexa. I use Amazon Alexa every day, and the reason that I do is because, well, of course, I was one of the early developers on Alexa. I built over 100 applications for Alexa in its earliest years. I love it. I also have a couple of people in my life, my son and my dad, that have very specific needs that make it hard for them to use technology like a phone or a laptop or a desktop or an iPad. IPad even. And so being able to empower them to navigate their life through their voice was an incredibly important part of kind of my journey, as certainly 10 years ago into the world of AI, natural language became a very important part. So Alexa is huge, like being able to figure out how to use Alexa. I'll give you an example. Just recently Alexa launched. I went to Orlando, I was I was speaking at a conference on a Disney property, and so I go into my hotel room and they have a Disney, you know, looking Alexa device. And I was like, this is cool. I ended up using that device immediately because it was like a trusted friend. I've already been using Alexa all over my house. We ended up buying a bunch of new Alexa devices for our home and adding the Hey Disney functionality to it. So having a virtual assistant, one you can talk to, of course, is extremely useful. It's one of the reasons why OpenAI ended up launching as part of its Omni model the ability to create a conversational assistant with it because it works and people would rather just talk to their tech than having to type it in, right? I certainly do. And so another opportunity or another type of virtual assistant could be the GPT-4 Omni model, ChatGPT, sorry. So you could use ChatGPT. There's, uh, if you are using the GPT Plus version, you have the opportunity to click the little— it's like, I think it's headphones or something like that— and you click on it and allows you to have a conversation, um, with the device as well. And of course there are other assistants. I personally also have a Moxie device, and I'll maybe talk to you about that later and show you a demonstration of it. But there are lots of different virtual assistants. The benefit of this Of course, there is Copilot from Microsoft, right, where it's embedded, or Gemini from Google, right? So all these assistants are kind of built in. Now, right now Copilot and Gemini are both text-based, right? So you're texting messages and having conversations, but both All of these provide you the ability to have a general, generalized assistant. So in addition to having assistants, you also want to think about the areas that you might want to use AI tools. Now, I have two different areas that I think about the most. One is my personal life. How do I use it to help me kind of in my day and working with my family in executive function type activities? Like, how do I get my kids to plan things out and do chores and all of that? But then I also, of course, have my business that I run. I run a, a 7-figure business on my own. I am constantly very, very busy. Of course, I travel all the time, so I need to leverage tools and technologies to help me with that. So there are some AI-powered tools that I use every day. And as a matter of fact, in our free I Heart AI community, every week I ask people like, what's your favorite tool right now? And it changes all the time, and it's super fun to kind of keep up with everybody and what they're using. But these are some of my favorite tools, and of course Alexa is one of them. I also love leveraging artificial intelligence in ways that maybe you aren't thinking about. So I am an Amazon shopper. So Amazon provides Prime members the ability to do all sorts of things, but one of the things that I see inside of my application is the ability to use computer vision. Now computer vision is the ability for a machine to look at an image and understand what it sees. Inside the Amazon application, I can literally, if I'm looking for something, rather than type in what I'm looking for, especially because I have a lot of kids and sometimes they break things. They break a lamp and I have a matching set, so I wanna match the lamp as closely as possible. So I could just take a picture of the lamp inside the Amazon application and it would automatically search for lamps that look exactly like the picture. Another thing we use is our Fire TVs. Now, the reason I like Fire TV is because if and when we watch television and there's something that's inside of a show that I'm interested in, an outfit, shoes, um, a device, I can actually use this concept called X-Ray that allows me to find out what it is. Or again, I could take a picture of it and give it to Amazon and it'll go search for it. But X-Ray in a Fire TV will actually let me go find out what it is right inside the tool. It does it for dresses. One of my favorite ways for a company to leverage Fire TV is if they put an You know, product placement. Perfume is a great example. Let's say there's a product placement in a sitcom and a woman's putting on perfume. At the bottom of the screen, it'll say, hey, if you want this perfume, we can send you a sample. Amazon already knows your address, already has your one-click credit cards, and so it can very easily just send you whatever you see, whatever you want, whatever samples are available. So it's pretty cool to think about from a retail perspective. Um, so I use, uh, Amazon's Computer Vision. Also, when you are thinking about putting a piece of furniture in your house, not only Amazon but other retail sites as well, they end up providing you the ability to see how well a piece of furniture fits in your house. So it usually says like, see it in your home, and you can go and again, using Computer Vision, it takes the image and overlays it augmented reality right inside your kitchen or your office or your bedroom to see, does the piece of furniture, does the chair, does the bookcase fit where you think it'll fit? Home Depot has a similar capability to allow you to do automatic measuring. Again, computer vision is a really cool tool that I use every day to make my life a little bit easier. Now, other tools, AI-powered tools that I leverage that you may use every day and just not know that you have these capabilities inside of it One of them is PowerPoint. Inside PowerPoint, there are a couple AI capabilities inside of there. One of them is called Designer. This allows you to leverage AI, and the reason that it's cool is that it's not just generating random images. It allows you to start a PowerPoint slide, and it will use Designer to automatically say, oh, well, the millions of people who've built slides that start this way. Here are some designs to help you do it a bit better and much more, much more quickly. And so Designer is really cool from that perspective. There also inside of it is, I think it's called Speaker Coach, something like this. So Speaker Coach allows you to actually turn on rehearsal of a PowerPoint presentation. You can present your talk to your PowerPoint presentation. It'll give you coaching feedback like, wow, you say, um, all the time, or you say right 17 times, or you have no pauses whatsoever in between your sentences. Like, it'll give you this really rich feedback. It'll present it to you in this wonderful report. Know though that when you do use the Speaker Coach inside of PowerPoint, it presents you this report and that's the only time you see it. So make sure you save it because I've many times closed that report and wanted to go back to it and realize there's no way for it to save. Maybe it's on the feature roadmap. Another thing I do love about Microsoft's AI capabilities is that it has the ability to look at your PowerPoint deck and examine it for accessibility. And when it examines it for accessibility, it provides you a report, and it leverages AI to actually help you implement those changes. So it will add automatic captions or alt text to all of your images for you, for example. So it's easier than ever to make your content, your presentation, your material accessible to more people. And just so we know, when you make your content accessible to more people, you have more customers, you serve more people in a much more, uh, responsible way. Why wouldn't you do that, right? Why wouldn't you use AI to help you do those things? Now, another area, uh, in addition to PowerPoint, of course, is in Word. So if you use Microsoft Word, there is a really great feature inside of Microsoft Word called the Editor. And the Editor will provide you the ability to get insight into your content, find out how well, of course, you're using grammar and spelling, but it'll also give you ideas about how to actually format the information. Copilot is also built into Microsoft, so you can ask it to summarize something. You can ask it to take a paragraph and turn it into bullets. There's lots of really cool capabilities there as well. Now we also have Adobe. Now Adobe recently launched the AI Assistant, and the AI Assistant is very cool because most of the time I'm dealing in PowerPoints, uh, but sometimes I also deal with a lot of PDF files. And when I'm dealing with these PDFs, they often are full of text. So being able to use an AI assistant to synthesize information inside PDF files, to be able to give me summaries, tell me points. And one of my favorite use cases for leveraging this is that I get, I get sent a lot of academic papers and I don't have time to read academic papers that are 20, 40, 150 pages long. So instead, I can bring them into Adobe and ask Adobe to synthesize it for me. Before, I used to have to build my own model to do that. I used to have to create a model, feed it, change the context window, you know, modify the inputs. Like it was a big, a bit of a mess. But now tools like Adobe, Microsoft Office, like all these capabilities are being built into the tools that we use every day. So those are just a couple things to get started with. Obviously, use the apps at your disposal. I use the Amazon app for shopping. I leverage text-to-speech. I speak to it all the time, which is powered by Amazon Alexa. Fire TV to actually do— use computer vision to detect what's on the screen and buy that dress that girl is wearing that you really like. Or tux or whatever. PowerPoint, right? Be— go into PowerPoint, leverage the coach, find out how well you're present— presenting the information provided on the screen. You can also use Designer to make it a little bit more beautiful. Word and Adobe as well. Now here are a couple non-traditional applications, meaning that they aren't in like these big brands, though I do like using Microsoft applications, Adobe applications, because I understand and they're much more transparent in the responsible practices they used to develop their software, and I know it very well. There are other tools that I use that I don't have as much insight into how responsible they are. It doesn't mean that they aren't, it just means I haven't done that research. But I do have these on my, uh, machine. So one is called Beautiful.ai. This is for presentations. So if you want to build presentations, I do like these presentations because I can type in the context of my presentation and have it generate the story arc for me in slides, which is very, very nice. Another tool I use is called— I think, I think it's called Bookle. I'll have to relook it up and correct myself in the notes if that's the case, but bookle.ai allows you to author Books. And I, though I haven't used it to author any books, I do use it to kind of synthesize a lot of academic papers together, and it serves the same purpose. So I could just copy and paste them in, and it creates a single document that summarizes all the information from a bunch of papers that I'm looking at, reading, or researching. Um, some— one other one that I wanted to mention to you, of course, maybe— I haven't done any in this area yet, but Canva. And of course, Adobe has its own version of this in Adobe Express and Firefly. But Canva I use every single day and I use tools like Background Remover, which of course is leveraging AI. I also use what's called Magic Expand. So if I accidentally cut my arm off in a picture, I can use Magic Expand to put it back. It's pretty good. It also allows— oh my gosh, my— probably my favorite is Magic Eraser, eraser, which means if I take a picture and it has a logo in it that I don't want to like necessarily promote, or I take a picture and there just happens to be one person standing in front of something, I could just magically erase them and the picture stays intact. The magic part is that computer vision fills in the pixels behind it So it looks as though that person was never actually in the photograph. So it's pretty cool. If you have an iPhone or Google device, there are many AI capabilities— I'll call it a pixel— built into these tools. Apple just released their changes that are coming up for the next year, and there are tons. We have a separate dedicated session on kind of AI updates that you'll see the Apple updates in. But, but just so you know, like, your, your device that you use, the iPad or the phone that you use, also has a lot of built-in AI technology that we'll talk about throughout the course. So, so this is just some of the ways that I use AI every day. Hopefully you find it useful and helpful. I think, you know, the most important thing you can do is just start using it. Like, use it you know, maybe every day in the morning, use it to help you think about a journal prompt, or use it to help you plan out your day. Oftentimes I will just talk to my Alexa or to my ChatGPT, um, O model, and I will just say, hey— and it's kind of like chain of thought, right? Like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing. Here's all the stuff I think I have to do. Here's the stuff on my calendar. Can you help me think through how I might prioritize things against my OKRs or against my key results or my objectives or goals that I have. And it helps me do that. Now, I just said that, but I do want to maybe tell you a little bit about more about this ChatGPT capability. Inside the new version that I use, which is the— I have the Teams version. But in the Teams version and even in the non-Teams version that's paid, You have the ability now to manage memories. And when you manage memories, what that means is that you can tell the model what to remember so it can use it in other contexts, or you could tell it what to forget. And so it's really powerful because it allows you, for example, I might tell it, uh, which I did tell it a long time ago, I gave it my bio, I told it who I am, what I do, what I measure success by, my metrics for success. The book that I'm writing, the topics I talk about. So I do all that and I store those as memories in the model so that as it starts answering questions, it uses all of that contextually to provide me with a very Noelle-specific answer. And I think that's really important because if I don't have that, it ends up generalizing it. And when I get the content back, I have to go and take the answer it provided me and turn it into something that sounds like me. Now when I'm able to train it on who I am, what I do, how I think, those answers get much, much more accurate. So something to think about when you're using these models, any opportunity you have to train the model to behave more in the context of you, your experiences, your data, that is the way to go. We're not gonna talk too much about privacy and data choices here. We'll do that in a future session. But I hope you enjoyed kind of this day in the life of Noelle and what I use every day. And I hope you'll share in the comments or in the community some tools that are working for you. I'll see you in the next video.