Building an Event Bot - Episode 13 - Beyond Electric Sheep Podcast on AI

In this 11-minute episode, Brick Thompson and Ed Daniels discuss a project Ed is working on to prepare for an AI workshop he is facilitating. He and the event host decided to build an “Event Bot” using an LLM that has knowledge of the upcoming event and can converse with and answer questions from the event attendees. 

To build the Bot, Ed used the https://youai.ai/ platform selecting the Claude 3 Opus LLM https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-family. Ed also built a separate Bot using the D-ID platform https://www.d-id.com/agents/ to create a speaking animated avatar named Noel to provide additional information on the meeting topic. These tools gave the meeting participants hands-on experience with state-of-the-art AI and additional information on the upcoming event. 

This approach could be used by others to prepare for their events and give prospective attendees a fun and interesting exposure to the meeting agenda and the subject matter to be presented. 

The name of this podcast, Beyond Electric Sheep, is a reference to the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick. That novel is the source for the movies Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). It explores the themes of artificial intelligence, empathy, and reality in a dystopian future where humans and androids coexist. The novel raises the question of whether androids can dream or feel anything at all, and whether they are different from humans in any meaningful way. 

In our Beyond Electric Sheep podcast we go beyond the novel and the movies and discuss the broader implications and applications of artificial intelligence in our personal lives and in our businesses. We explore the pragmatic as well as the ethical and philosophical issues that arise from creating and interacting with intelligent machines.

Beyond Electric Sheep is also available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYg2J0jET_BPCKSnsxz8mleEmYogYJZhn