Ilan (00:00)
you're not embarrassed by the first seconds of your podcast recording then you waited too long to start recording.

David (00:06)
then you've recorded too late.

everybody. This is Prompt and Circumstance My name is today we're going to be looking at three AI tools that are very practical that you can use today.

Ilan (00:13)
And I'm Ilan

David (00:28)
All right. So the three things that we're to look at today is first, can we use voice dictation in order to get a lot more productive? Second is how can we use something like AI studio, which is free from Google in order to help us out? And third is how might we use deep research

Ilan (00:50)
forward to hearing those tips from you and sharing a couple myself. But before we get to that, David, do we want to talk about a little bit of AI news?

Ilan (01:00)
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David (01:30)
So what's been happening recently is that been poaching

let's say OpenAI and also Apple. So what's been happening is that been grabbing some serious top talent from OpenAI, which is supposedly very mission driven and it's about the mission and not the pay. But apparently if you offer, I don't know, a hundred million dollars, that's enough to circumvent the mission.

Ilan (01:55)
I also would would happily go to Meta for a hundred million dollars. You know Mark if you're right here

David (02:00)
Yeah

I'm sure Zuck is one of our subscribers. you know, one of their recent talent acquisitions the

Ilan (02:06)
haha

David (02:11)
top AI researcher from Apple. They managed to acquire this person for of 200 million dollars. I mean, you got to your bar, Ilan I mean, you got to go for three.

Ilan (02:24)
That's pretty incredible. Also kind of incredible considering Apple is not really considered in the leaders terms of AI research.

brings us to our second

It was leaked last Apple is considering acquiring Perplexity for $14 billion. Which is kind of funny to because it's sort of like Apple saying, well, this was our plan all along. We're so far behind. You thought we were behind in But actually, plan was to...

Just make this acquisition once we figured out who was the front runner. you know, 14 billion, that's pocket change for us. We're a trillion dollar company.

David (03:04)
yeah, exactly. We just found it in the couch. you know, I wonder if that goes through the implications for Apple's relationship with Google, as you might know, Google pays Apple a significant amount of money to be the default search engine on ⁓ iPhone devices and Apple devices. So if suddenly Apple now owns Perplexity and Perplexity is going to be a search engine.

What does that mean for that relationship? must be really big news.

Ilan (03:36)
I agree. I also wonder if this maybe is just a way to drive up the price for Google for next year.

David (03:44)
maybe it's a pump.

Ilan (03:47)
And speaking of up prices, European research is to be raising a billion dollar funding round, which is quite wild. They were previously at $6.2 billion in their previous round in 2023.

David (04:05)
wonder whether that valuation has anything to do with how amusing the name of the product is le chat, which you don't know chat means, ⁓ means cat. And so they have a little cat there. ⁓ so the side of me is very amused by that.

Ilan (04:10)
You

yeah, that's ⁓ a lot of money for a cute little

very curious to see what they're able to do with that. know, Mistral is one of those companies we don't hear a lot about, they have some really interesting capabilities, especially on-prem so models that you can host So OpenAIs and Anthropics of the not forcing you to use an API to access that model's capabilities.

David (04:49)
yeah, you can, you can build your own, ⁓ compute centers and run it on there. Well, why don't we get into it? right. ⁓ for the very first one that I want to talk about is the fact that, ⁓ you know, typing is faster than handwriting, right? I mean, who would go into the office today with a pad of paper ⁓ get productive on, on that only.

Ilan (04:53)
let's do it.

I have a...

I actually have a quill.

David (05:18)
wow, you've upgraded from your stone tablet and chisel. So if we think about the performance gains on that, right, no matter what you do, a spreadsheet on a stone tablet, I would want to see that. your performance gains from the quill and the handwriting to the typing,

Ilan (05:21)
That's right.

David (05:37)
are we going next with that? And I would argue that the next step is using voice dictation.

You know, when people talk, they talk at a pace of about 120 to 150 words per minute. Whereas typing is maybe like 40 to 50 words a minute. And so you're looking at a right there.

this is technology that has existed for a while in previous iterations, but I would say that recently it has got to a critical level where the quality of the transcription is good enough that it can really replace a ⁓ material amount of use cases where you would be typing.

Ilan (06:17)
why don't you take us through one of those use cases and the tool that you might use for it.

David (06:22)
All right, so this is just one example and I'll show you more possible But Aqua Voice is this great tool that you can use to dictate and type anywhere that you would type.

And it has this really cool thing called Deep Context, if you are, a programmer, it would have the context of your window so that you could just speak in code.

and it would know you're referring to if you have some variable name or a function name it would just pop that in accordingly.

it's quite fast. So

just speak into this little text box and let's see how it goes.

to Prompt and Circumstance. My name is David and next to me is Ilan. And today we are going to talk to you about some AI note taking tools.

bad. It even got your name right. Yeah. Now, ⁓ didn't get prompt correct though. ⁓ so maybe that would, that's a, that's a me problem. Now, the interesting thing about this is that it has a dictionary and, so if there's certain, or terms that you use in your regular day-to-day life, it's going to be able to incorporate that. for example,

Ilan (07:14)
Amazing.

David (07:36)
I work at Texada and one of the products that we have is called SalesLink. Another one that we have is called iQuote. And I have both of these words in the dictionary and it's going to be able to transcribe it just right.

There you go. So iQuote it has a lowercase I and it's spelled like this and SalesLink is one word. see the power able to transcribe

Ilan (07:58)
Yeah, that's a really incredible just right there. Also something that I recommend with the teams I work with and I use myself all the

So David, once you're done here in Aqua, do you just copy paste that into whatever tool you're using or can you also dictate straight into a document or another text box? ⁓

David (08:09)
Yeah.

You can

absolutely dictate straight into anywhere that you will be typing. So here I'm dictating into Google Docs and it's going to type straight into here.

And look, it even capitalized Google Docs. just knows the names. So it's quite good. Yeah. Now, Aqua Voice is something that a paid subscription. per month.

Ilan (08:30)
Very nice.

David (08:41)
solutions. Let's explore some of those.

Okay, so Windows actually has a voice dictation tool out of the box. At least Windows 11 does. Right? And so if I pull that up here.

is what it looks like and I'm just going to start talking and dictating and this is Windows, my operating system, transcribing my speech directly into this document right now. It's not bad. It has its limitations, but you know, it's up to our audience, I suppose, to decide whether or not it's worth the trade off for something free where maybe the accuracy at the same level as

Ilan (09:19)
And interestingly, Mac OS also has a similar option. It's actually had that option for a long time to do dictation. But as you mentioned, David, the quality has increased significantly. So that's something that you can turn on just in your system settings and give it and start dictating

David (09:39)
Yeah. And the last option that I want to show you here on my screen is that while I'm in Google docs, there actually is a dictation function right here.

it's going to transcribe everything that I'm going to say. So it's not bad. ⁓ I would say that if you are in Google Docs and you don't want to bother with the onboard OS this is a very viable option.

Ilan (10:06)
A last voice dictation productivity tip that we could share is directly using LLMs.

Let me show you what I do when I'm in ChatGPT and most of the LLM tools that we might use every day also have their own dictate button. And if you're like me, sometimes it takes you a minute to formulate your thoughts and typing can be a little bit slower because you have to do that thinking process first. So why not think out loud with ChatGPT and give it a prompt, something like this.

trying to put together a rundown for a podcast and I'm thinking about different AI tools for voice dictation and how might they be able to help. And I'm not really sure. think I'm also probably going to talk about, um, maybe using these within LLMs. Can you help me to formulate this into a better prompt

for an LLM to help me rundown for my podcast.

And there we go. Now, ChatGPT has gone away. I gave it very unstructured thoughts and it will take that and I've prompted it and now it's gonna start the prompt that I was looking for.

David (11:28)
That's cool. Yeah.

I, uh, I really think that people ought to consider using voice dictation a lot more. Um, I, this is something that recently has changed for me. I found that I had to get over my own ego, with respect to my typing speed. It's like, Oh, why do I need to be all weird and talk at my computer or, or at my phone when I can just type it out? Like I'm a fast no, I mean, you, I,

don't type at 150 words per

Ilan (11:59)
So what's the next tip that you got David?

Ilan (12:00)
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David (12:35)
right, so the next tip is to make use of AI Studio. Now, this is a free studio that anybody can use as long as you have a free Google account, which I'm sure a lot of people might there are so many tools in here.

one of the things that I find to be very useful from a product management perspective is this speech generation capability here. does this matter? Well, this matters because product

videos where you would want to talk through, this is how it does this is how it does that. You've got to click here and walk through that whole process. You can have a pleasant narrator talk through it without any of the ums and ahs that we are having here on this on this podcast

It's this native speech generation.

Here ⁓ you can see that there's two modes. You can have a single speaker mode or a multi speaker mode. going to choose single speaker, it simple. And over here you can choose which model to use. Pro is also free, so that's great. And down here you have a temperature setting. Don't worry about that. That's how variable the output is. Over here you can also choose the voice. So which voice do we feel like today?

Sure, let's choose this voice. I can just simply start typing. And in fact, I can give it style instructions, could include something like, say, an accent.

All right. So here I've told it to speak with a strong Brooklyn accent the text that it's going to say. you can also do is give it emotions. So we can add say here a laugh. don't know why they would laugh after introing us, but let's let's just add that into there can say excited over here.

And let's see how this goes.

Ilan (14:21)
is very exciting, David. I'll admit that this is not a tool that I have made use of, so I'm really glad that you're showing us how to do this.

Amazing.

David (14:41)
The Brooklyn

accent. So ⁓ I think this is wonderful. I love that it's free, of course. And so you can make this multiple which is what I recommend, because each time that you generate the audio, it might end up sounding a little bit different to the speaker. And so my recommendation is get your entire script done, then drop it into here.

with emotions as well if you like or an accent if you like and just hit go and then you can over here download the audio and add it into product

right. So that was just the speech side of things. As I said, there are so many other tools you could use in here. generation. So you come here to generate media. My recommendation is Imagen or Imagen. I think it's called Imagen.

And there's also video generation here with Veo. So a lot to explore here, certainly I think that speech generation has the most

Ilan (15:44)
Very cool, David. Thank you so much for sharing this. Now let's get on to our last tip, which is about using deep research.

David (15:51)
Yeah. So deep research is something that is available in multiple different tools. I'm just going to show you what it looks like here in Gemini, which is also free. but it's also available in Perplexity It's available in, uh, Claude. It's available in GPT. And, uh, so here I'm in Gemini and you notice that down here, I don't have the option for it. I need to come up here, change the model to flash.

and then choose Deep Research. All right, so I can type in the research topic going to really dive into this topic for me. Now, can we use this for? So many things. a product perspective, we can use it for at a market.

So maybe you want to consider the market dynamics. What are the current forces of the market? Is it growing? If so, at what rates? are the competitors and so forth? Maybe you want to look at ⁓ the size of the market. What's the total addressable market? How many people fall into this category? Yada yada. Right? And so is something that is very powerful. You're going to end up with ⁓ a large report at the end of this.

my recommendation is to take that report and put it into Notebook LM. So is something that can take a very lengthy report and then generate a podcast with it. when you throw it in, can over here and click Generate, it's going to generate a great podcast for you.

Ilan (17:17)
It's a really great way to catch up on topics. I use this all the time for ⁓ market research or sizing. Like you said, David, it's really all over the place for me where I really need to deeply understand a topic. But you know, we're all busy people, so it'll generate, you know, maybe a 10, 15 page report for you. And then you drop it in here, you get a 15 minute podcast. You can listen to that while you're

cooking or walking around and then if there's a particular topic that you want to deeper on then you can open up the report and really focus in or hone in on that section.

David (17:55)
That's right. And with NotebookLM they have this discover option. So if you don't want to do deep research, you can even just come up over here and see something like, like recent news about say lovable, vibe coding

And so this is going to just use Google search and it's to find a bunch of different news. You can import that and that can be what drives your podcast, your research, and you can also

Ilan (18:23)
Very, very cool.

David (18:23)
Now, when you

Ilan (18:24)
combination of deep research plus those audio generation capabilities is really an incredible combo.

and such an accelerator for product teams. And on deep research, I think there's a lot more to get into there. So David, what are we going to do with that?

David (18:46)
I think it's time to dive deep on deep research.

Ilan (18:49)
That's right. So that's what you all have to look forward to next week. And in the meantime, you can like and subscribe the podcast, leave us a comment, give us feedback, let us know what we could be doing better. you can also find us on socials @pandcpodcast See you next week.

David (19:06)
See you next time.