August 7, 2025
By: Stephen Toback
Frequent contributor to the AI conversation at Duke, Joseph Sorrenson, messaged me on Teams about 10 minutes ago about Google Vids - which consumed a lion's share of his evening last night. Within literally 5 minutes after speaking with him,...
Read the full post »
July 11, 2025
By: Stephen Toback
I'm getting deep into Eleven Labs work so I thought I'd share my musings. If you remember a while back, I wrote a script to automate sending a column of text to Eleven Labs and have it generate audio files...
Read the full post »
July 10, 2025
By: Stephen Toback
I knew it was too good to be true... Seriously though, big advancements, but far from perfect. Our client liked the structure and format of the original animation (which was done in Keynote): The one I generated was more abstract,...
Read the full post »
July 7, 2025
By: Stephen Toback
We're working on a large project with Duke's Student Information Systems & Systems group. Each module will need a separate title. Since this is a training series, the titles need to be clear but not necessarily stylized. Since I've worked...
Read the full post »
July 3, 2025
By: Stephen Toback
We had a problem uploading our first test of Elevenlabs new engine, version 3. There was clicking in the sample. I tried, but failed to contact Elevenlabs support (which has been an ongoing issue that I need to resolve. I...
Read the full post »
By: Stephen Toback
Key Take Aways: Exhausitive detail is critical in video creation Using a form (my idea) helps organize thoughts and generate consistent results Video generation is stateless - need to do each prompt from scratch (form helps having a static part...
Read the full post »
June 25, 2025
By: Stephen Toback
Rather than asking the video engine to come up with the concept from scratch, I used Gemini to first create an image which I would then ask Veo to animate. The first image was pretty good, but it was square:...
Read the full post »
June 2, 2025
By: Stephen Toback
In my evaluation of various AI avatar generation tools, they all are striving for "photo-realistic" or "hyper-realistic" avatars - synthetic or cloned. I'm finding that all of them have moved firmly into the "uncanny valley" and I don't have hope...
Read the full post »
May 23, 2025
By: Stephen Toback
I've heard a lot about the new video engine from Google (Veo3). The samples I've seen we're impressive, but my test has always been, can I make video that we could actually use. For the first time in the 3...
Read the full post »
January 23, 2025
By: Todd Stabley
I’ve been doing a few updates at home, and as part of that ordered three pendant lights to replace the existing ones in the kitchen. When they arrived, I was disappointed to find that the part that attaches to the...
Read the full post »
