I have been spending a fair amount of time on AI related matters and working with my colleagues on various information security issues. Given the need to make sure that our community uses AI tools responsibly and given that the paid versions of AI tools that provide this are too costly, we have been following alternatives. We have found something that is ideal for our use – Amplify GenAI from Vanderbilt. It basically acts as front end to several popular AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others. It then uses APIs to pass on the questions and get the answers back. In the process, the authors also have added certain features to make the tool work very nicely.

The advantage is that you pay for access by your users for the API tokens, which so far, is significantly cheaper than licensing the tool for each user at about $20 a month! Amplify is an open source software, however, installing it properly is no easy task. So we have banded together with a few other interested institutions from Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC) to explore services offered by FortyAU who specialize on installing Amplify and supporting it.

Now, to the topic at hand… I was playing around with Google’s Notebook LM and created a few notebooks and learned about its ability to create podcasts from sources you feed. Since holidays are times when there is increased activities from hackers, I thought it it would be great to create a podcast from an earlier blog post from me (which applies even now) and a post from FTC (Federal Trade Commission) titled “Protect Your Personal Information From Hackers and Scammers“. I am attaching the podcast that was created literally within a few minutes. I did make a few tweaks to get it to be what I wanted, but they were minor. I was pretty impressed with the result!

I put the word “My” in quotes because it is really not mine, but I helped create it. Whats next? Use other tools to manipulate the voices and one day make the podcast produced by Note LM to be in my voice (no!, I will not read and record!!!).