Have a Blast with Advanced Voice ChatGPT; Learn to Shop Smart
43.7 percent of statistics are made up on the spot.?—Steven Wright?
NOVEMBER 14 | 3:00PM | ZOOM?
Little Shoppers of Horrors
?We’ve got an excess of riches at this month’s Virtual Events Group meetup. Jennifer Jolly , USA Today and Today Show contributor, talks about the best gifts for techies and managing your e-commerce-plagued life wisely. Brandy Alexander talks about the new world of omnichannel shopping and Alfred Poor gives you his picks for gifts for the folks in your life who spend way too much time video-conferencing. Not to be missed.??
Talking to Myself Again
When we got our first headsets to use with our mobile phones, it destroyed my NYC theory that you could always spot the crazy ones because they muttered to themselves. Fast forward. Everyone mutters to themselves. But at least they were human mutterers.?
Now you can chat all day with ChatGPT using its Advanced Voice Mode feature. For the moment it’s widely available to all users on their mobile devices, less so on ChatGPT web devices. The idea is that you talk to your ChatGPT in your normal speaking voice, and it will answer you in one of the nine voices that you select.? Plus you can train the voices to answer in a personalized style, for example, PigLatin, or with a Southern drawl.
And according to this NY Times interview with Celia Quillian , an artificial intelligence expert, the new audio mode can recognize and predict how to answer “from the words you are using, as well as the inflections in your tone, but also informed by the context of the words that you’re leveraging, to respond in a way that best makes sense.” Wowza!?
Keep in mind that since ChatGPT is a predictive model, it’s just predicting what the most likely response should be based on the input you give it, only now it’s conversational. It works so well that ChatGPT’s notes point out how you might “feel an emotional connection or feel as though the AI understands you.”?
Meanwhile the gang over at TikTok has wasted no time showcasing the powers of voice and ChatGPT, be it talking in your favorite foreign accent, having a conversation that involves heavy breathing, ethnic and regional dialects, and making it laugh out loud at your jokes.?
But wait, there’s more. Beyond AI’s ability to chat with you, AI now can become your agent, someday maybe even doing your taxes for you, and always becoming better at searching your own computer or ferreting out the information you need to complete everything from an RFP to a no-code computer program. Casey Newton writes about these agents in his Platformer newsletter .?
领英推荐
?In-person Events are Moving Fast
While in-person events are back to normal attendance, new events are surfacing, and in-person event companies are doing some fancy shape-shifting. GES, a large events and logistics company with 2,600 employees, was sold this week to private equity firm Truelink Capital for $535 million. Viad , GES’s current owner (about to change its name to Pursuit, a significant step up), is going to focus on being a pure hospitality/destination company. I haven’t seen too many happy endings when private investment firms buy a chunk of a business that doesn’t fit into the new way forward. GES had a nice repertoire of trade shows and events they managed, but it will be harder to leverage the company’s strengths on its own. Bottom line: We expect more consolidation in the events logistics biz until some new entrepreneurs come up with a leap-frogged solution.?
Just a few weeks ago Informa acquired the Money 20/20 event from Ascential as well as Canne Lions and Vidcon. And Events.com was just listed on the NYSE. And most recently, Clarion Events , another live events company that’s looking for new revenue streams, announced the formation of Connects , a new way of letting for-profit show organizers work directly with not-for-profit associations, helping both remain competitive in a quickly moving market. (We’ll talk more about Clarion Connect and its interesting value proposition.)
A GenAI Smorgasbord
The boom of Generative AI apps has given us a huge assortment of powerful tools that can help make our jobs easier. We’ve curated a bunch that are of particular interest for meeting planners in the free VEG GenAI online directory , but you still are faced with the daunting task of figuring out which ones to try and how to access them.
That’s where Easy-Peasy.AI comes in. When you sign up, you get access to many GenAI tools from a single dashboard. You can choose to chat with an AI engine, convert text to speech, generate images including headshots, upscale images, create interior designs, generate headlines, and a lot more. And you have choices within those categories. For example, you can chat with different versions of ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, Llama, and Gemini. Create images with DALL·E, Ideogram, FLUX AI, Midjourney, or versions of Stable Diffusion. Easy-Peasy.AI keeps adding new tools all the time. And you will find videos that will help you learn to make the most of these and the other tools.
Best of all, you can start with a free account. You get a limited number of words and image credits each month. Paid plans increase the word limits and image credits, plus you can access additional tools. Paid plans start at less than $100 per year.
Scuttlebutt
Always Look on the Bright Side of AI The SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) is a set of 17 goals set by the UN in 2016. It has always looked a little like some do-gooder's unachievable bright shiny object. (Remember Miss Congeniality’s monologue espousing World Peace ?)?
Throw some AI in the game and those lofty goals might seem a little more attainable. The AI for Good Impact Report applies AI to each of the SDGs. For example, AI can use satellite images to monitor deforestation (SDG 15) and predict extreme weather events to prepare communities better (SDG 13). AI can also help us stay on a sustainable course by optimizing resource management across various sectors, contributing to goals such as SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 6 (Clean Water). In agriculture, AI-driven precision farming reduces the use of fertilizers and pesticides, enhancing crop yields sustainably. Just a few examples from the report on good reasons to vote for the AI good guys.?
Have You Given Up Your Browser Yet When the Internet was born I had a hard time re-training myself not to turn to the hardcover World Book Encyclopedia that weighed down our bookshelves. Ultimately I learned to substitute the search bar for volumes A–Z. Many younger folks who were raised on the search bar will have the same trouble transitioning from the search bar to the chat prompt What’s your status? Are you using an AI search more than the old bar? Let me know at [email protected] .
VEG UPDATE
We’re only human: For the next few months, we’re hunkered down on special projects so we’re going to make the newsletter every second week. If you like this format better, just give us a holler. Meanwhile, you can look for us at CES , Silicon Valley Video Summit , The NAB Show 2025 and Toy Fair 2025 .