356: Using A.I. in Your Business
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Are you using A.I. in your business? Artificial Intelligence is a growing area of research and development. A.I. can seem overwhelming, but holds many promising tools to give clients more peace of mind. We break down what A.I. is and how it can help your business. We give examples of existing programs and also how we’re currently implementing it in our own business.
Main topics
What is A.I.?
Business implementation
How we’re using it
Is it right for me?
Main takeaway: We’ve just entered into a new wave of possibilities powered by A.I. From photos, operations, and content creation, it’s important to stay in the know about how it can help you and your business.
Links:
Furbo AI: https://shopus.furbo.com/pages/dog-camera-ai-dog-recognition
Google Route Planning: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/google-cloud-optimization-ai-cloud-fleet-routing-api
ChatBot for chat box on your website: https://www.chatbot.com/pricing/
NeuralText for marketing: https://www.neuraltext.com/?via=uniteai#pricing
Google Model: https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform/training/pricing
IBM Watson: https://www.ibm.com/watson
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
ai, generate, dog, pet, data, clients, program, business, alert, walk, cat, questions, pulling, software, understand, google, check, area, blog, big
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:00
Welcome to pet sitter confessional an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter.
Collin 00:05
Thank you to our sponsor pet sitters Associates today and our Patreon members like our newest supporter, Annabelle, thank you so much for supporting the show. And we want to thank the other supporters like Katherine Jack, Ashley, Janey newf, drool, Yvonne, Anna, Liz desert, Erica, and Tanis, and many, many others.
Meghan 00:26
Thank you very much for keeping the show going financially supporting it every week. And we are very, very thankful. And thank you for listening. Today, we are talking all about AI. And I'm sure if you grew up in the 90s, you know what AI is because there was that famous movie. So it's called the artificial intelligence. And it's kind of been a big topic of discussion in the last few months. And if you aren't sure exactly what it is or how it really plays into business, that is okay, because that's what we're going to talk about today. So it's the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans, it can include tasks like understanding natural language, recognizing images, making decisions, and solving problems, those kinds of things. And it can in our businesses, and in life, in general, it can really be implemented in a variety of ways, like machine learning. So it's a method of training a computer to learn from data, and different neural networks, which are types of machine learning models, inspired by the structure of the human brain. And this can all seem very a amorphous, very difficult to get your head around, because it's not just a computer doing these things. It's so much more than that.
Collin 01:46
Yeah, it is not just a computer program. And we'll use these these terms kind of interchangeably throughout our discussion today. But But basically, the AI is taking an existing dataset, existing knowledge. And it's about changing that into an output that's useful to you either something that is novel, it's brand new, it's never been seen before, maybe it's a different interpretation, it's matching a different pattern. So machine learning, that's where you tell the machine you go, look, look, this is an apple, this is an apple, this is an apple, this is an apple, and you train it to know what an apple is. And then that program now then looks out into the rest of world and tries and identifies all the rest of the apples that it can find. That's one version of AI is really great for finding in for finding pattern matching. So they use that a lot. And actually healthcare these days for screening for different cancers, looking at MRIs, looking at blood smears, all those things, can find those patterns. And today, we're talking about how we can now use some of these new modern tools in our business. And it's been a really big discussion. Megan, as you said, it will continue to be a discussion for the foreseeable future, especially when it comes to understanding how we can ethically use AI when it's generating content for us, you know, asking that question, Can Can I use a photo or text that's been generated by an AI, if that AI is using and pulling from artwork or writing that is actually copyright protected? Right. And there are actually several law cases right now going to courts around the country to determine if those kinds of things are possible or illegal and what kind of requirements they have around them. So that's still all to work out at this point.
Meghan 03:28
But wouldn't that be up to this specific program or specific app that you're downloading and using and not necessarily up to the individual end user because the program or whatever app you're using is generating it, and you are just using the generation of it. So you are not ultimately responsible for putting those copyrighted pieces together? That was the the program you're using. So that's
Collin 03:52
what these court cases are trying to decide is to whom does that copyright apply to? Is it the program? Or is it the person trying to use or implement what was generated for their benefit in their game,
Meghan 04:04
but I can't be responsible for knowing all of the information on the back end that it generated that one image of a dog
Collin 04:12
so now there's legislation being proposed for the AI tools have to show and have to display and acknowledge and cite the sources that they pulled from, so that you can be aware from that because right now you have no idea and that leads to a lot of legal implications of you not knowing or if you're an artist, if you're a writer, you might not want your content or if you're a blog writer, you know, your blog that you're putting together and putting all of your effort into doing the research and writing for how to diagnose or understand kidney stones or or or urinary problems for it with pets. Those could potentially be sucked up into an AI and use to generate responses in years to come. Is there any way to stop that? Well, right now it's all opt out. So you have to go to certain programs and say no, don't use my data or don't Use my data or you can request data to be shown to you if it applies to you if it was yours, but it's all opt out instead of opt in. And so they're trying to change some language around that to make it a little bit more user friendly.
Meghan 05:11
So when it comes to using AI for your business, there is a lot of power that it can bring to you. So you may pay for a monthly subscription to get access to the software, just like you do with if you use a booking software and a CRM for your business. Signing up for an AI service will soon be pretty straightforward, as straightforward as booking software online. However, though, the real issue now is that there is just so much development going on. So knowing which AI to try or how to even try it is slightly confusing. And hopefully this will get better in the future as AI becomes more and more integrated into our businesses. But right now, we will really want to highlight some ways, both current and possible future solutions that AI can help our businesses run better.
Collin 06:01
And like you said, Megan, it all sounds really futuristic and kind of sometimes I know, for me going well, it's not really, for me, that's not that's not you know, AI isn't really something that I can use in our business. But again, I think what's important to right now is understand we are right at this introduction, it's also new. So think back to when you first started using booking software for your company. Think back to how instrumental that was to your business and how much it changed your business and its operations, and how much it gave back to you and how much it allowed you to do that. That's what we're talking about here. That kind of revolutionary aspect to our businesses is where we're really looking at and thinking about right now, because it's as it becomes more accessible and more affordable, we'll be able to implement these tools in bigger and better ways for our businesses.
Meghan 06:55
So we'll mention a few products and programs here. But don't think of these as full recommendations, rather just examples of what is currently available with an eye on, you know, future possibilities, AI and technology is constantly changing every day. So this area is still pretty new. But we are going to talk about some of these here. So what are some of the ways AI programs can help us in our business? Well, one
Collin 07:19
big way is actually automating scheduling and appointment booking. I know we all have booking software's but there are some AI programs out there that are still in development, that are looking for ways to not just accept bookings. But now work around a predetermined system that you help train it on. So basically, the it can be used to automatically schedule your dog walks and send reminders to customers around your set schedule without you having to mess or move things around to make adjustments to make it make sense for your day or your schedule, it can actually change the schedule automatically, and make it work for you and your staff members. But like I said, this kind of software is still currently in development. And there are no known actual programs that I'm aware of that currently do this. But I do know that some are being worked on.
Meghan 08:06
Another way that artificial intelligence can help us is by tracking and monitoring. And so a lot of times we want to track dog walks, how far we walk the dogs, especially if you're going on Adventure hikes. And so these AI powered wearables can be used to track the location and activity of dogs and alert the owner if there is any danger, maybe a dog is run off, while the owner can track it in boxia is a company that just announced a wearable AI collar that sends alerts about the dog's health and location. So say you are walking a dog and it has a heart problem that not even the owner is notified of this could help because it's designed to alert when biometric data starts to get concerning. So the AI part of this here is it looks at the data for the trends and it knows when to alert for a possible concern. Yeah, so
Collin 08:56
it's monitoring heart rate, it's monitoring temperature, it's monitoring the dissolved oxygen in the blood. And it's looking at the activity. So that's where that location aspect comes in. And it's not just sucking in all this data. But then the AI model is being applied to that data to see where their concerns where their heart palpitations, maybe this dog is not moving as much as it should be expected. What does that mean? What are some underlying health conditions that we could surface here and alert to not just us but the owners as well.
Meghan 09:26
And so the biometric data here is comparing to a dog of similar age breed.
Collin 09:33
You know, this, this by this AI is able to look at these health charts and go oh, what is this telling me? So if this particular dog's particular dog, it's like you would go in and have it monitored by a vet, and the vet would chart the heart rate and go, Oh, when I see a heart rate that looks like this, that tells me XYZ, this AI model is looking at those kind of figures and data and going when I see this kind of pattern that may be XYZ here's an Alert, go to event and get this checked out by a professional. That's the power of this.
Meghan 10:04
So then this would need to be constantly used, it's not something that you could put on a 16 year old Beagle who you're going out walking for the very first time, right,
Collin 10:12
there would have to be some history there and be using it. But even then, and again, inbox, he has just released this at CES this year. And so there's still a lot to be pulled from this. And these models are going to get much better over time. But yes, you are going to get the most benefit from this, the longer you wear it. So if you have clients who are have concerns about a dog, it may be worth it to encourage them to buy this, it's $145 Plus in like an $8 a month subscription to get access to that AI monitoring and data analysis. But if you have a dog or a breed that you're specifically concerned about, this is another tool that you can give to them, you can then get access to that. And it's useful if you're taking them for hikes or if you're doing adventure hikes, you're doing all this activity with them. So as you can be alerted to see what's going on.
Meghan 10:57
AI can also be used for safety and emergency responses. So we all have clients with cameras. And so these cameras can be used for AI purposes, AI powered cameras and sensors can be used to monitor the safety of pets during visits, and either alert the dog walker, or if you're doing a cat alert the cat sitter for emergency services if needed. So Furbo makes one I think that's the most popular one they make in home cameras to monitor dogs already. And they're adding AI for much better alerts and notification. The AI in a Furbo is fed with the live camera feed and it recognizes faces, shapes, sounds, and even detects certain behaviors and movements that can alert you if something is wrong. Right now the Furbo can do something really simple. It can detect when the dog is looking right at the camera. And it can send a selfie to the owner, which is really adorable, but it's a little bit ridiculous. But you can see how a camera that is analyzing the movements and the sounds of a dog would be eventually able to send alerts for a seizure or choking or other medical anomalies.
Collin 12:07
Yeah, so you if you're watching cats, or if you're watching dogs, and you want to have a better eyes and ears on them, I know there are pet sitters who will go and leave cameras and a home especially if they have particularly skittish pets. But it's a great way to not just get activity alerts. That's one thing cameras can do right now. They can detect motion whenever they see an animal on screen. Now imagine if there was aI analyzing that video. And it could tell you what that motion means. Oh, when I see it again, this pattern matching when I see a cat walking like this, what does that mean, when I see a dog sounding like this? What does that mean? What does that tell us about that dog. And so you get really, again, these powerful insights into the health and the life of that pet, even whenever you are not there.
Meghan 12:50
So we just talked about the trackable being specific to a particular pet. But this would be more general.
Collin 12:56
Yeah, this is least things are going to come step by step, I think one of the first things that they're working on is again, seizure detection, because that has a very particular kind of movement and sounds associated with it that the AI can pick up on easily. But then you could see how the AI could now walk monitor the gait of the dog and met monitor the gait of the cat and see as their hip dysplasia going on, is there some neurological condition that's happening? Or is this just due to old age that's going on right now, as these get more and more nuanced, those are going to take longer to detect by an AI that may be more natural to a vet or a professional in the field. But AI is on its way to getting there as it can be trained and fed that good quality data that there can look at your animal or the pets that you're caring for and pick up on those patterns. That's all that we're talking about here. That's what it's really doing is pattern matching. And then extrapolating from that to say, Okay, well, when I see this movement that is going to tell us XYZ,
Meghan 13:56
I think one of the coolest things about AI in the future is that it's going to be able to do route optimization. And this is going to be crucial. If you have staff in the field or even yourself going from home to home. And And yes, you know where the homes are. But for maybe if you have staff or you I have a remote location like we do, and I don't know where house to house is, and I have to go on to Google Maps all the time, this would really help us out, it can optimize the routes taken by the dog walkers to ensure that they are efficient and safe for both the dogs and the walker. So when I go onto Google Maps, and I say this route to this route is most efficient, but there might be a construction site or there might be some other thing that I don't have knowledge of maybe every day at 12 o'clock. The stoplight is five minutes long when it's should only be one minute long. But I'm not taking that into account. Well and
Collin 14:50
not surprisingly, Google has launched a fleet routing program. But and I know there are there are other programs that are trying to do the same thing right now. The Google one is really aimed To add delivery drivers and big large industries with more like delivery trucks and that kind of thing, but it is becoming more and more again, as it scales up, it's able to be applied to smaller and smaller businesses. So I too am really excited about this. Because basically what you do is you go in, you enter all the locations that you need to visit for that day. And this AI program will analyze and optimizes for that best route giving all sorts of things that you want to account or control for, or maybe input new data for. So it can give you that because it's Google, they have access to Google Maps data, they can route plan, based on real time traffic data, maybe it's based on gas usage, or it's just time sensitivity things where you know, okay, given these these locations, I can now just like we do when we sit down and when think about when you look at your visits for that day, you look at it inherent structure and go, Okay, well, I need to visit that dog first, because that's older, and it's on medication, and then the cat visit, I can flex in between these. And I can do that because of that is going to be able to soon be able to learn to be able to set that priority of visits based on your criteria that you can plug into the model, that's going to give you that power. So you don't have to sit there with pen and paper and kind of outline it and be frustrated.
Meghan 16:18
So this is a fleet program by Google that I can download on the app store, right now
Collin 16:23
you have to go in and go into log into their cloud servers. So you can actually there's a link in the show notes that goes to this, but it's Google fleet, Google fleet routing program, and you have to sign up. And with these big AI packages, you actually pay for the per hour compute time that it takes to run your model. And so the shorter the model, the less you pay for because the less compute time that you're using. And again, right now, this kind of program is really aimed at UPS, it's aimed at local delivery services, and those those those kinds of businesses, it hasn't quite scaled to a lot of our needs at this exact time. And because a lot of these will also add in real time GPS tracking to constantly update the model, as your drivers are out there driving around. So it's not quite accessible to most businesses right now. But Google fleet is one that is is trying to get there.
Meghan 17:22
If you have been on any website in virtually the last five years, you have likely encountered an AI chat bot. So another way that AI can help us is with customer service that can be used to answer customer questions on our website or provide information about the business helping to really improve that customer satisfaction. Even Facebook has this where you can input certain answers for questions that clients may have. So AI, like chatbot are great at this, you give it data, you give it information about your company, and then it will have a conversation with clients about questions that they have.
Collin 17:57
And unlike chatbots of old and Chatbot is an actual company. So we're going to be using that phrase a little interchangeably for both the company and the kind of product here. But unlike the old computer chats that she used to have, it is not as programmatic it is interpreting the language that somebody is giving it to them. It's not it would think of it as the old phone trees of like, if this is your question, press one. If this is not your question, press two. That is how a lot of old 0000 operator. That is how a lot of old programs used to work is that there was very limited input, because there was a very specific and limited output. Now imagine a chatbot that can have actually an organic conversation. And it sounds much more natural on your end as you're having that conversation and asking questions to it. And all you do is you go to the chat bot and with these programs, you can input the data about your business, they'll ask you, what are your business hours? What are your prices for your services? What do you call your services? When can they contact you? What's your service area, all of that information you input into the program, and then it just goes and has a conversation with somebody, it finds out their questions, it will spit back out the answers that you have given it and when it reaches the end of it, then of its knowledge if it asks if somebody asks a weird, obscure question, and that's not in its dataset, it will politely refrain you'll redirect them to the contact form or an email or ask them to call you the next day. Instead of just going I'm sorry, I can't answer that.
Meghan 19:30
And then there's everybody's favorite marketing. So AI can help the business to understand their clients better grin recommend services, it can create personalized marketing campaigns. You know, we always worry about SEO for our websites for Google My Business. So software, something like neural text is making that easier. It analyzes data for your kind of business, and it will then generate the SEO tax for that use on your website, which is pretty cool. Everything from service descriptions to blog titles, they also have a tool called also asks, it's where you type in a keyword and the AI generates all of the associated Google searches for that. It gives you content ideas, is really a phenomenal feature. You know, we searched dog walking, and it came up with four different things. How do I become a dog walker is 15 minutes enough for a dog walk? Do dogs need two walks a day? How much do dog walkers make, you could really turned several of those into blog topics in general and content and social media posts, which would help drive people to your site or to your pages. Canva also has an AI program where you can enter the title of an article and it will generate the text of that article. Keep in mind though, it will not write about anything medical, which makes sense because I guess they don't want to be held liable for that.
Collin 21:00
And that is a really important part of this discussion is understanding that the AI does have its limits. Sometimes its limits are based on its program. Sometimes the limits are based on the data. That's it that has been put into it. Sometime its limits are hard coded into things that will and will not generate for you and your business. Well, and
Meghan 21:21
also you had tried to generate an image a few weeks ago, and have a dog I don't know exactly what you told it to do. But I don't know if you're trying to be funny, but you send it to me as a draft. And I looked at it and something was very off with this image. And it's because the dog had five legs. Yeah,
Collin 21:36
right now honestly, AI does not know how to handle animals. They miss legs, their heads are weirdly shaped their eyes are all googly eyes, five legs, it will generate the most fantastic sci fi art and Moon Landing and all sorts of things in the world. But if you ask it to draw a cat, or you know generate a cat on a couch in a mid century modern couch with at sunset, that cat will look like why is that? There are some ideas of trying to understand of pattern matching for animals that the variety is just too intense. Right now there's so much variety of animals, that the AI programs do not know how to, predictably generate the next thing because that's what they do they go okay, given the data that I have, how do I algorithmically generate the next point in the series? And that's where things go off and get get wrong? Because they don't know K? Is this cat sitting? Is it sideways? Is it standing up? Is it backwards? Is it what angle I'm doing this from? And it's generating, generating all that on the fly. And so you you end up in this position where it just completely miss predicts what that cat is going to look like because it doesn't know where it's going along that path.
Meghan 22:49
Well, and I guess even if you would be excruciatingly specific on what you want it like if you, you know, gave it a 500 word description of a picture that you wanted, it would probably come out looking super goofy, right?
Collin 23:02
No, actually, the more specific that you are for AI the better because that that means it has to do less assuming with what you want, the more stuff that you can start it off with so be as descriptive as possible in the AI programs for generating content as far as images and as far as text love that. That gives them a lot to work with. They can really run with that. And so when you ever you're making this, you actually want to be as specific as possible when you're when you're when you're generating that.
Meghan 23:33
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Collin 25:02
Yeah. And also remember the IBM Watson, which won Jeopardy, it feels like forever ago at this point, that's still around, actually in being used for this exact kind of thing. Basically, you give AI your business operations data, and it will start picking up on trends and show you areas where you can improve. So you can send an annual report of all of your business data and all of when the services were booked, where they were booked, who was booking them how much they paid all of your expenses. And it can start algorithmically putting all of this together for you just like a good data scientist, who would look at your data, good data analysts who would look at your data and go, here's what you need to know about this. Here's what the information that you can pull from this, here's when walks are most in demand. Here's when here's the seasons that you have in your business, here's when you're not as busy. Here's whenever your expenses are high. All of those patterns and questions you can start pulling out of your data that is really overwhelming for us right now. And that's where the business optimization in the data, the big datasets are really scary for a lot of people because we have the data, our programs, our software's are pulling them for us. And we can look at them and go, Well, I don't I don't know what this means. And what do I do with this. And that can be one of the most infuriating parts of running a business is getting data. And Megan, you and I ran into this all the time when we were doing data analysis and reports back in our science days, if you'd get a P value of point 04. And you'd have to go, great. What does that mean? Now? What does that mean? What do I do with that? I know it's
Meghan 26:37
significant, but what what is the implication for it being significant? Yeah, we
Collin 26:41
always ask what is the biological significance of this, given what the questions that we're asking and the the experiment that we put together? Now running a business, you can get a report that says that your expenses were 15%, higher from this month from last year to? Okay, okay, they were higher. Let me think about why they could be higher and start conjecturing and trying to figure that out, well, putting it into these products from Google or IBM Watson. It's not just conjecturing, why it's higher, it's actually pulling hard data out of there, giving your business where you are, how you're operating, and that kind of thing. And I'll also recommend another one here is TensorFlow, if you really want to do your own programming, which I think is nobody, but it's an option.
Meghan 27:29
Obviously, there is a lot of change going on in this space technology is everyday it's changing. So it can be overwhelming trying to see what all is out there. I'm not a very techy person calling you are much more techie than I am. So I appreciate you kind of breaking all this down. For us there is a lot of maturing that the industry has to do, obviously, getting the dog down from five legs to four legs is going to be significant who it's a big one. Yeah. So I mean, both in the actual AI systems and the products power. So these products that are coming on board, they have some kinks to work out as well. So the programs are there. Right now, it's just a matter of various companies, finding uses for the programs and the models for different needs. And that's where there is a lot of development yet to come. So now we wanted to talk about some of the apps and programs of AI that we use in our business. Yeah,
Collin 28:24
so we talked a little bit about this with the five legged dogs and the three legged cats. But mid journey is actually an AI for photo creation and photo generation. So this is where you can go in, and you can ask it and give it a big prompt. And the prompt is basically saying what you want out of this, and it will sit there and spin and turn and generate a photo and it will generate in whatever style you want. That's always fun in a painting and oil painting and ultra realistic, you can have all these addendums to the prompt that you give it basically we are using this as a way of generating content and photos for our business. So a lot of us pay for license fees for photos to use legally. And it's necessary in a lot of our businesses. It's an it's a requirement when we start using these for social media content or on our blogs or on our email newsletters. However, something that I was constantly frustrated with was finding the right photo of what I wanted the exact photo that I wanted to use to display a concept or an idea. And so really, you know, I started to wonder would it be great if you could write something like puppy Border Collie walking on busy street with dog walker using a red leash in the fall. You can write that in there and you will get four or five six different photos that come back to you that now you can use license free because again that photo has never existed before it and will never exist again because it was algorithmically generated by the AI program. And now you can use that for your business and show those concepts show those concepts show those ideas that you're trying to get across for your business.
Meghan 30:04
Even if you're not paying for licensing fees, I know we've talked before about Canva has a wide selection, so does Unsplash. But I think it's again, the point of if you were looking for something super specific, that that's where those type of programs fall down and where AI can pick up exactly one that we are starting to use more and more, and I'm sure you've heard of recently is called Chat GPT. And it's really for writing prompts. And it is being banned in schools left and right these days. But it's where a lot of attention has been paid recently, you know, you give it a prompt, and you get writing back. So we typed in there, right and Instagram posts for pet parents about the benefits of a dog walk include hashtags for our service area, and it gave us this pet parents are you taking advantage of all the beautiful parks and trails our city has to offer? A daily walk with your pup not only provides exercise for them, but it's also a great way for us to bond and enjoy the great outdoors together. Plus studies show that spending time in nature can reduce stress and improve overall well being. So lays up those sneakers and hit the pavement with your furry best friend hashtag dog walks, hashtag pet parenting, hashtag our service area, hashtag nature therapy, hashtag parks and trails. Now, would we use this as is? No, probably not. But we can take this and we can edit it into something that sounds more like us a little more natural, a little more how we would talk and we would change the hashtags to what we actually want. Right? But it's a great starting point.
Collin 31:35
Yeah, it is. And that's where a lot of this benefit comes in. And if you sit down you go, I don't know what I'm going to write about today. I have no idea. Or maybe you don't know much about a topic, you sit down and go man, I get a lot of questions about ticks and fleas and just summer. Yeah, but I don't know where to start with that. Well, you can go to chat gpt.com. And you can sign in for your account. And you can then write a prompt and go, you know, what are the ways you could ask a question that says write a blog post for pet parents about the dangers of ticks and fleas in my area in the summer and and include tips for how to prevent them and it will sit there and for the next three minutes, it will type out and spit out a blog about that with five or six or sometimes seven bullet points for you. It's pretty sparse, but you take that now you can first you always need to double check this because chat GPT is amazing at presenting things like they are fact and they are not because again, it is just predictably going okay, given the words that I have written, what is the most likely next word to come after that, given the knowledge that I have and the data that I have in my database. Sometimes it just gets hilariously wrong. So you have to first check for errors, then go in and fill it out and add in your flavor your voice, how you would present this information to somebody in your area in talking to your clients. But it can help you get over that initial hump of going. I don't even know where to start with this. I'm really burned out I had a really long day. But I'm supposed to post a blog tomorrow or oh my gosh, keeping those questions about this. Or something that could be really fun is something I was playing around with the other day of going write an SOP for a dog walking company to train new hires on how to safely and enthusiastically provide a dog walk include sending updates for pet parents, and it spat out a full SOP for dog walking, basically step by step on how to conduct it. And there were things in there with what I would remove and take out. And we would include a lot more in there. But it's a place to start. Again, if you find yourself copying and pasting this kind of text for your business, people will immediately be able to find out that you can see through this a mile away. It's now what do you do with this? How do you take this and make it your own. But sometimes it's just great to start with these kinds of writing prompts.
Meghan 33:51
I think there's two important points here. The first one is that they're just not pulling it from like a Wikipedia page. Right? So where are they getting all this?
Collin 33:59
Well, it may be pulling it from Wikipedia, it's they're also pulling it from all of the websites. So chat GPT as of right now, January of 2023 is pulling all of its data from a large subset of the internet as of 2021. So two years ago, this data is existing and they're actually about to come up with the next version of chat GBT of data from this year. And it's going to be like, five or six times as massive of a dataset. So this is pulling from all published available data on the internet. So this was people's personal websites. These are blog articles written these are, sometimes they are videos that they fed into this and it transcribed and sucked that data up into creating these and is looking at across all these and looking at all the patterns of all of the words for all of these particular subjects. And going now I can take that and just like we were told to do in high school and in college, I need to summarize this in my own words and spit it back out. And that's what it's doing.
Meghan 34:54
And I think the second important point here is that the exact words that it gives you will never be generated again. And right ever, right? That's crazy.
Collin 35:01
It's pretty, pretty wild. And, again, that's why it's important for us to remember, I now have as a business owner, I have to do my due diligence with whatever I'm being given, whether that's a route that's being optimized for me, whether that's text that's being generated for my blog or for SEO, I have to review that and make sure that it is accurate. That's the work I have to do. The AI can generate it all day long, and it will be hilariously wrong. A lot of the time, again, a lot of time, especially around specific dates, people places, it gets those wrong very easily just because those get muddied in history and are associated with a lot of different topics that doesn't quite know yet how to tease out of that. And that's something that they are working on. But we have to go in and make it our own. And I think that's for me, that's the biggest takeaway of it working with AI is just make it your own, find it go have it generate go to, and we do this right now with all of our software, when clients book, we go in and we make it our own, we ask additional questions, we change titles, and we change information, and we still reach out to them about particular things, we are still involved in that. And that's an extremely important aspect of any technology that we bring into our business, making sure that we are using it the way we want it to be used.
Meghan 36:22
Well, that's an important point. Because with all of this AI, it can seem like this is all very easy. I just give it what I want, and it spits it back out and gives me flowy flowery language that will be great for my social media posts. But it's not a catch all for everything. Yeah, it's
Collin 36:41
not a sit back and go the robots will do it for me. No, no, no, it is very apparent when the robots are doing everything for you. Because it does come across as non edited. It doesn't sound like you. We talk a lot about that when we're marketing when we're trying to connect with our clients. That's where the human aspect comes in the inherent going genuinely only you know, the words to language, the topics that are going to connect with your clients. And if we relegate all of that to a disembodied AI program, we miss the human aspect, we miss the connection, all of the AI generated stuff, looks and sounds. I've heard a lot of people say soulless, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like a human connection. Because there is no human connection to that it's algorithmically generated text and images. That's good. Whenever you are making route planning, right? That's good whenever you're working with schedules and data, not so much whenever you're trying to make a real genuine connection with somebody
Meghan 37:40
when you're trying to help pet parents in their problems and solve it and by telling a story, and positioning them as the hero of the story. And then another program that we use for AI in our businesses is otter.ai, which is used for our podcast transcripts.
37:57
Yes. So if you go to pet store professional.com/episodes, you can see all of our past episodes. And you can read transcripts of the the audio here, they were integrated into they were generated by AI, we upload our audio file and the AI generates the text that flows from that. So it's a speech to text ai ai is really good at this is really great at looking into recognizing speech patterns. And then making text from that. It basically if you're creating videos or audio content for your clients, consider generating text as a way to make it one more accessible to more clients and then to it really helps out your SEO as well for them being able to find you. Something else you may consider is if you're shooting video and making this kind of content, take that recording that you're taught, maybe you're walking through an SOP, and then you can throw it into otter.ai. And it can generate text, which you can then edit down into an SOP that you can train staff on or
Meghan 38:55
even for your clients. If you're needing to walk through your software with your clients or you're needing to walk through how you conduct a meet and greet with them and what they need to have on hand or what they need to tell you at the meet and greet these can be really helpful. Yeah, now
Collin 39:10
is it as accurate as a human generated transcript. Now it's about 90 95% accurate for a lot of words, but it is a lot faster, it's a lot faster, and it's a lot cheaper. It's a huge money saver, so then you can go okay, well, I want it quickly. And I don't want to pay as much, which means I would have to do a little bit more editing on the back end. And if I'm just shooting 510 minute videos, I can edit that really quick and put those into bullet points and send that off to somebody to use.
Meghan 39:39
And so that's another good reminder that none of these systems are 100% accurate or how you would do something. So obviously the robot is not going to sound like you as we've talked about. So you always need to triple check the output and make sure that it's your voice and how you would connect with your clients. Instead of viewing these tools. Well as a replacement for your input and your effort, because your time is your most valuable asset, so instead of viewing them as a replacement for you view them as a way to free up more of your time to do what you want to be doing, you know, chat, GBT can save you an hour of time writing a blog, or if you're kind of slow, like me an hour and a half of writing blog. But it can give you you know, maybe more signs of kidney stones and cats or treatments or how to prevent something like that, you know, more more ideas than you could maybe come up with on your own. But you still again, you need to edit it. For accuracy, you need to make sure that it sounds like how you would write it,
Collin 40:41
I'm really interested to see how this area continues to grow and expand and how we find new and better uses. Not just for understanding the health and language that our pets are communicating to us whenever we're not there, or whether we are with them, but also how it can help us better manage our businesses right now a lot of these things, you have to sign into a computer or download a big program to run on your computer. They're not quite phone sized yet, or on the App Store. But as these become more commoditized, and the programs become better equipped to handle specific niches and target industries, it's really going to be cool to have these tools at our resources. Yeah, I keep coming back to whenever software first hit the scene. And how revolutionising that was I've said that word now twice, but like it really was, it really changed how we were able to run our businesses, the peace of mind that it gave us and how we were better able to serve the clients. And that's where we need to continue to focus. How can I run my business well, and serve my clients better
Meghan 41:39
well, and give them more peace of mind. So you know, we used to do phone calls to check in and say, Hey, your pets doing well. Or we would write a note at the end a physical piece of paper note and say, Hey, that was a great visit. Fluffy is so ready for you to come home, you know, but now we have software that can be more immediate. And so by using this AI in the future, we can do I guess more immediate things.
Collin 42:04
And more relevant things. That's the other thing is that it's not just, again, all of the data, all of the visualizations, all of the things that you see you monitor, you check when you're out a visit, if you could put that into a system that could spit out a report about something. Yeah, who knows what that is right now. But that's that's where we start to seeing a lot of power is now I can take some data and I can put it to use for the benefit of not just me and my business, but for my clients and their pets.
Meghan 42:29
So we would love to know how you use AI in your business or even if you don't, if you're a little weirded out by it. If you're not interested at all. That's okay too. You can let us know and send us an email at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com. Or you can look us up on Instagram and Facebook at Pet Sitter confessional. Thank you very much to pet sitters associates and our wonderful Patreon members for supporting the show today. Thank you also for listening. your most valuable asset is your time and thank you for sharing a little bit with us today. Thanks. We'll talk to you next time.
