I built a voice assistant that I call by phone
I’m training a voice assistant (conversational Ai) to do a variety of tasks for me, including looking up contacts, scheduling meetings, summarizing email inbox, sending text messages.
Kind of like Siri was supposed to be but never quite made it.
Fabiola, the persona I’ve given her, is quite competent and very well-connected (to my online tools, that is!) So far, she can search my contacts and report back specific details I ask for, like a phone number, which she could call and connect me to. She can also check my calendar to see when I’m available and book a meeting with one of my contacts, all by voice.
The neat thing about this is I can connect the voice assistant to virtually any online platform, so she could be trained to perform very specific tasks that trigger complex workflows. An example could be I meet someone and get their business card. I could tell Fabiola their email address and she sends a request to Apollo.io to “enrich” the contact information and then tell me about their work experience and information about the company they work for, like annual revenue, competing businesses, and area of operation.
So the sky is really the limit, it’s pretty cool. Let me know if you’d like to give it a try and I’ll show you how.
We “put in” a kids pool
Over the weekend my wife said to me, Hey let’s set up that kids pool your mom got for the kids, and beat the heat! Thinking it was ankle deep, we whimsically opened it up to quite a surprise. This thing was a massive rectangular inflatable, 2 feet deep! Not at all what we were thinking and our lungs weren’t about to fill it up.
After 10 full minutes on the air compressor, we had a rather spectacular sight to see in our yard. The boys were in heaven and I’ll admit sitting in it is pretty nice under the summer sun. I have no plan for maintenance or draining it. Open to all suggestions.
Singing Proud Mary with my boy
My older boy is already developing into quite the musician. His latest love is Credence Clearwater Revival, specifically Proud Mary. “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river.” And he’s got the rhythm with foot taps and shreddin’ that air guitar. Little rockstar in the making.
My kid loves CCR. It’s amazing.
Best language learning app (choose your own material)
My friend Seizo has been developing an app on the siade
Having influential people in your life is vital and inspiring. Seizo Mazer is one of those people for me. And his language learning app was recently approved in the Apple Store. (See the announcement post.)
I met Seizo at a German-speaking group and he wanted to practice his German speaking skills, which he taught himself exclusively with his app, Linguix.
I was floored.
I know the challenges in learning German as an adult and he was speaking impressively well for having not lived in-country. Having used his app I can speak to its usefulness as a language learning resource. More like a homebase.
I like it especially because I can choose the topics and subjects I want to learn about.
So if you’re a Star Wars fan, you can populate your practice material with Star Wars-themed example sentences (or mech engineering, or internal medicine, or downhill skiing…)
There’s a lot more to it and I recommend you dive in and try it. (Available for iPhone only right now)
What it’s NOT: a gamified platform to keep you coming back without real metrics of linguistic progress.
Linguix is an app for effectively learning to speak a foreign language. And I can attest – it works.
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