AI for Everyday

If you haven’t found our YouTube channel yet, we invite you to visit it: https://www.youtube.com/@companionapps

We’re doing three things there:

  1. Videos from Sheila and me about the company and the apps we’re developing.
  2. Tutorials that use an iPad to walk through the features of the app.
  3. AI for Everyday: using AI to get the most out of it, and maybe make your life simpler.

This post is about number three.

We started all of this by learning about AI. There are many misconceptions about it, and there are also many good things. Separating the two, and using this new tool to improve your daily life, is what this part of the channel is about.

Here are three things I’ve learned so far.

AI can help protect you. While developing the app, I received an email that looked very official, and I believed it was from the patent and trademark office. It was a scam. I used AI to help me work out the right questions to ask, and when I asked them, the person on the other end hung up on me. If something official-looking asks for money or personal information, slow down, and don’t be afraid to ask AI for help checking it out.

AI will be nice to you, and that’s not always what you need. It tends to agree with you. If you want the best out of it, ask it to be critical of your decision, or to give you other points of view, so you aren’t blindsided later.

AI can be wrong. It isn’t trying to sabotage you, but it has limits, and sometimes it makes up an answer that sounds right. This is called a hallucination. Spotting one, and knowing how to recover, is essential. Ask it where it got that information, and check anything important with a second source. For questions about your health or money, check with a professional.

We’re also trying things like AI avatars in some videos, and we’ll record others ourselves. I’ll talk about the avatars in a separate post. I’ll be honest: I’ve found the video editing software and the other tools needed for all this very time-consuming, while other people seem to pick it up instinctively.

So join us on the journey. We’re certainly not the experts, but we both believe AI can enhance our everyday lives, and help us especially as we get older.

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