#29 - AI Companions

AI Companions is a term that we are going to be hearing a lot more of in the months and years to come. Alexa and Siri are already a part of my household - like ghostly family members who participate in discussions, solve arguments and feed us snippets of news. Microsoft has introduced CoPilot to corporates and this will soon migrate down to regular users of Word, Excel & Powerpoint (although it sounds like there might be a charge for the AI features).

Coming down the line are AI's that will have access to all of our personal data, aware of every document on our laptops, Google Drives and Dropbox folders, & all our posts and interactions on our social media accounts. Never forgetting anything, able to connect and re-surface stuff we've forgotten and bring this to whatever we are discussing or working on. And it won't just be when we're sitting typing at our keyboards. These AI's will be in our phones, and probably in smart contact lenses or even embedded in tiny chips under our skin - check out the BBC story below for more...

Terminator is almost here - Augmented Reality visual overlays are already here for high end cars - scaling the tech down to glasses and contacts is just around the corner - there's a video of an early stage device further down, and Oculus and Apple have headsets that will provide amazing experiences - for a rich minority at first but as the tech scales this will fast become standard tech, just like the smartphone has in the 16 years since Steve Jobs unveiled it in his historic keynote speech .

Zoom's AI Companion - turn this ON!

Zoom recently introduced an AI Companion feature that I would recommend everyone turns on - you need to enable it in the Advanced Settings for your account, and then when it is running you see this little star icon slowly fading in and out in the top left hand corner of your meeting window.

During the meeting Zoom creates a transcript of the conversations, and processes it in various ways. If someone joins late, they can click on the AI Companion button at the bottom (see the little 2 stars button below in the middle of the toolbar) and ask "Catch me up" and the AI Companion will provide them with a summary of all the major points covered so far. Or you can ask it to highlight where you've been mentioned so far and it will summarise the points that involved you. Or any other question you can come up with. Very clever stuff!

And also turn on the Meeting Summary button. At the end of the meeting, about 2 minutes later the AI Companion delivers an email summary of your entire meeting to your inbox, neatly separated into short paragraphs with a bold heading for each point. It's not a full transcript, but a condensed and reworded summary that in the examples I've seen so far normally gives a really good synopsis of what was covered. This can be dropped into Word and edited, or forwarded on to others in a few seconds. Meeting note-takers - this may put you out of a job!

It even pulls out any action items and who they were assigned to and highlights these at the end - great for meeting follow-ups.

BBC - The microchip implants that let you pay with your hand

Transcribe Glass - speech to text for anyone

Getting Smart using AI to write...

Mushtaq Bilal, PhD always offers great insights - his latest post outlines a clear set of steps to take when drafting up an article or paper using AI to assist in idea generation, critique and development of themes. Read, then do!!

A useful list of almost 100 of the top AI tools for educators

Jeremie Rostan teamed up with Beth Stark to create LUDIA - the world's first AI focussed on UDL, and his website has a useful set of links to many of the top AI tools for education - check it out here:

Jeremie also posted a good carousel with some new stuff I wasn't aware - check it out here:

My new book!

My new book is now available on Amazon in paperback, hardback and also Kindle versions. It's currently being produced as an audio book that will be available on Audible as well. I was honoured that Lillian Nave wrote the foreword for this - it's a very practical guide that you might find useful as either an educator or a student...

That's it for this time...

Joe Houghton ?is an Assistant Professor at UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business where he directs the MSc programmes in Project Management. After a career in IT in multinationals, Joe switched into a portfolio career of University teaching, management coaching and training.

He has authored 6 books to date including "Innovative teaching with AI: Creative approaches to enhancing learning in education ", and "Project Management made easy...: the ECCSR approach ". His latest book "Applying Artificial Intelligence to Close the Accessibility Gap: A practical handbook for educators & students! " is now available on Amazon! More on this in a future edition...

Contact Joe on email at?[email protected] ?for any requests for training, seminars, workshops or keynote speaking.