I have to say for a beginner course I really enjoyed the coursework, especially getting to use Google’s AI studio. AI Studio at first reminded me a lot of AWS Bedrock, an interface to foundational models that allow you to select models and tweak variables.
AI Studio created a React audio player and a text-to-speech “commercial” based on a prompt I gave it. All was not perfect, I had to iterate a few times so it chose the right codecs and models but after a few minutes I had a working solution. I was quite impressed how easily it was to prompt for the addition of sound effects at certain points on the script, like a bass rumble, or ping. I was thrown back to one night when I was working for CCBN.com and a colleague and I spent hours syncing a Investor Relations call recording to Power-point slides in RealPlayer. Now a feature like that is just a button away in MS Teams.
I also really enjoyed that instead of a black box I was able to review all the code the app used, from the .env file to the UseEffect React hook that sent the prompt Request and how it fed the binary response into the browser’s Audio Context API.
I’m looking forward to the more advanced classes and am going to start on my own projects soon.