I’m sure that you’ve heard the saying that “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Alternative phrases are “putting lipstick on a pig” or “polishing a turd.”
In other words, if something is crappy, you can’t completely transform it into something worthwhile.
Yet we persist on starting with crappy stuff anyway…such as surrendering our writing to generative AI and then trying to fix the resulting crap later.
Which is why I’ve said that a human should ALWAYS write the first draft.
The questionable job description
Mike Harris found a job post asking for a human copyeditor to rework AI-generated content. See the details here.
I’m sure that the unnamed company thought it was a great idea to have AI generate the content…until they saw what AI generated.
Rather than fix the source of the problem, the company has apparently elected to hire someone to rework the stuff.
A human should always write the first draft
Why not have a human write the stuff in the first place..as I recommended last June? Let me borrow what I said before…
I’m going to stick with the old fashioned method of writing the first draft myself. And I suggest that you do the same. Doing this lets me:
Satisfy my inflated ego. I’ve been writing for years and take pride in my ability to outline and compose a piece of text. I’ve created thousands upon thousands of pieces of content over my lifetime, so I feel I know what I’m doing.
Iterate on my work to make it better. Yes, your favorite generative AI tool can crank out a block of text in a minute. But when I’m using my own hands on a keyboard to write something, I can zoom up and down throughout the text, tweaking things, adding stuff, removing stuff, and sometimes copying everything to a brand new draft and hacking half of it away. It takes a lot longer, but in my view all of this iterative activity makes the first draft much better, which makes the final version even better still.
Control the tone of my writing. One current drawback of generative AI is that, unless properly prompted, it often delivers bland, boring text. Creating and iterating the text myself lets me dictate the tone of voice. Do I want to present the content as coming from a knowledgeable Sage? Does the text need the tone of a Revolutionary? I want to get that into the first draft, rather than having to rewrite the whole thing later to change it.
I made a couple of other points in that original LinkedIn article, but I’m…um…iterating. I predict that there’s a time when I WON’T be able to sleep on my text any more, and these days the “generated text” flag has been replaced by HUMAN detection of stuff that was obviously written by a bot.
And that’s more dangerous than any flag.
But if you insist on going the cheap route and outsourcing your writing to a bot…you get what you pay for.
If you’re a 17x Certified Resume Writer with generic failing pitches, Bredemarket can’t fix your issues, but maybe someone else can.
The five reasons
Reason One: You don’t say WHY you exist
Let’s face it. 99% of the 17X Certified Resume Writer pitches read “You have an #OpenToWork banner, and I write resumes, so you should buy my services.”
This tells me NOTHING about you, or why you do what you do.
Was there a childhood experience that propelled you into the resume writing field?
Or did a simple tweak to your own resume propel you forward?
Or are you just doing this because it beats delivery driving?
Reason Two: You don’t say HOW you’ll make me a lot of money
Remember that I don’t care about your service. I care about how I’m going to get a company to hire me and pay me billions of dollars every year. (More or less.)
So, how will you do this? Do you have a process that results in stellar resumes? Or do you just type stuff at random and hope it comes out OK?
For example, here’s Bredemarket’s process. Did you see that my first two reasons in this particular post were “Why” and “How”? Now you know where I got those terms. And guess what comes next.
Reason Three: You don’t say WHAT you will emphasize in my resume…because you never read my profile
Be honest. When I see these pitches, I draw one of two conclusions:
You saw my #OpenToWork banner and immediately fired off a generic pitch without looking at my LinkedIn profile, in which case I have no reason to work with you.
You DID read my LinkedIn profile, but you’re such a poor communicator that you didn’t bother to say what you saw in my LinkedIn profile, in which case I have no reason to work with you.
Reason Four: You’re a “me too” resume writer
You may not realize this, but you are not the only 17X Certified Resume Writer out there. At the same time that you are sending your “You have an #OpenToWork banner, and I write resumes, so you should buy my services” pitch, other people are sending THEIR “You have an #OpenToWork banner, and I write resumes, so you should buy my services” pitch.
Your pitch doesn’t say why I should pick YOU. Or why you are great and why everyone else sucks. You all look the same to me.
As I said earlier: “If the 17x certified resume writers are unable to convey THEIR OWN unique value, why should I believe that they can convey MINE?”
Reason Five: You say nothing about product marketing, identity, biometrics, or technology
I end up shaking my head at the pitches that use the following introductory question to send me through their sequence:
I’m curious about which specific role you intend to apply for?
(I had to edit that pitch quote because the original version I received had a space between “for” and the question mark. I am in the United States. Punctuate accordingly.)
If you had actually read my profile (see reason 3 above), you’d know that I self-describe (at least this week, pending future edits) as a “Senior Product Marketing Manager experienced in identity and technology.” You’d also know that I talk about #identity, #biometrics, #facialrecognition, and #productmarketingmanager. You’d also know that my advertised top skills are Product Marketing, Content Marketing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Competitive Intelligence.
That’s a wealth of information right there, even without looking at my work history, my skills, or my posts.
Too bad you didn’t use it in your pitch.
Time to fix it
I’ll grant that an introductory pitch doesn’t have a lot of real estate, but you should be able to rework your pitch to accommodate all five gaps in your current marketing.
Leftover pizza is the best pizza. Preparation credit: Pizza N Such, Claremont, California. Can I earn free pizza as a powerful influencer? Probably not, but I’ll disclose on the 0.00001% chance that I do.
Now that it’s time to write the “separate post,” I really don’t want to get into the mechanics of how posts that attract prospects (hungry people, target audience) increase awareness and help you convert prospects for your products and services.
So forget that. I’m going to tell a story instead about two executives at a fictional company that has a real problem. The executives’ names are Jones and Smith.
The story
Jones was troubled. Sales weren’t increasing, prospects weren’t appearing, and if this malaise continued the company would have to conduct a second round of layoffs. Jones knew that “rightsizing” would be disastrous, so the company needed another solution.
So Jones videoconferenced Smith and asked, “How can we make 2024 better than 2023?”
Smith replied, “Increasing sales calls could help, and ads could help, but there’s another way to increase our awareness with our prospects. We could create content on our website and on our social channels that spreads knowledge of our products and services.”
Jones exclaimed, “That’s great! We could get generative AI to create content for us!”
“No, not that!” Smith replied. “Generative AI text sounds like a bot wrote it, and makes us sound boring, just like everyone else using generative AI text. Do we want to sound like that and put our prospects to sleep?”
“So we need a human writer,” Jones realized, “one who can describe all of the features of our products.”
“Absolutely not,” Smith emphasized. “Customers don’t care about our features. They care about the benefits we can provide to them. If we just list a bunch of features, they’ll say, ‘So what?'”
“OK, we’ll go with benefits,” said Jones. “But why is content so important?”
“Take blogging,” replied Smith. “The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors. B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those who do not. Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI. And 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.”
“Wow.” Jones was silent for a moment. “How do you know all of this stuff, Smith?”
“Because of the content that I’ve read online from a marketing and writing services company called Bredemarket. The company creates content to urge others to create content. Bredemarket eats its own wildebeest food.”
I’ve been using the word “wildebeest” more often lately. In the Bredemarket blog, on Bredemarket’s LinkedIn pages, on my own LinkedIn page, and even in a job application cover letter.
For those who don’t know why I’m so hot on wildebeest, let me explain.
It all started with the dogs
When I started Bredemarket as a marketing and writing service firm, it stood to reason that I would have to market and write about Bredemarket itself.
There’s a common phrase for this practice: “eating your own dog food.”
It’s important to differentiate yourself from the competition. Trust me on this.
So I stopped talking about eating my own dog food, and when I set my initial goals for 2021 in December 2020, one of my goals was “eat my own iguana food.”
You’ve heard the saying about eating your own dog food. That statement bored me, so I started talking about eating your own iguana food. Eventually I tired of iguanas and pivoted to wildebeests.
And for over 2 1/2 years I’ve continued to focus on the majestic wildebeest, both singly and in confusion (the correct term for a group of wildebeest). Let’s face it: how many other marketing and writing experts are talking about wildebeest? It’s my own little distinctive thingie.
The problem with wildebeest
But now I’m asking myself whether this is a GOOD distinction. After all, the common definition of “confusion” is NOT a positive one. Unless you’re a New Order fan.
So perhaps I’ll retire the wildebeest for something new that more closely reflects Bredemarket’s differentiators:
I help firms win by explaining why the firm serves its customers, focusing on customer needs, and highlighting benefits.
Yes, those are the same differentiators that I currently include in my personal LinkedIn profile. But after all, Bredemarket is a one-person operation.
This coming year will be the fourth year of Bredemarket’s existence. I started in August 2020, but it took a few weeks for the city business license and other paperwork to complete.
Now while the City of Ontario (California, not Canada) business license renewal entitles me to conduct business in the city as Bredemarket (when coupled with the Fictitious Business Name statement I filed with San Bernardino County), it is not an official endorsement of my activity by the city, and is definitely NOT an endorsement of the call to action at the end of this post.
More importantly, the City of Ontario has imposed four significant restrictions on the way that Bredemarket conducts business. Do they affect how I do business with you? We’ll see.
First: I must post the business license in a conspicuous place
Done.
City of Ontario business license, posted in a conspicuous place in an undisclosed location. And no, I don’t wear my glasses all the time.
Although as we will see when we get to the third restriction, the whole meaning of “conspicuous place” is irrelevant to Bredemarket’s business.
Second: I can’t conduct just ANY business
The business license is issued “for consulting services, including marketing and writing services.” The license does NOT allow me to bake pies, perform auto maintenance, launch rockets into space, or perform heart surgery.
You won’t see the Bredemarket 33410 Aortic Valve Surgery Service any time soon. The city won’t let me offer it. (33410, by the way, is the medical code for Under Surgical Procedures on the Aortic Valve.)
Dang guvmint.
Third: No visitation from clients
Remember how the city requires that I post my license in a conspicuous place? Well, the city also prohibits me from having clients visit me at my work location. This makes sense, since residential neighborhoods aren’t really built to have a bunch of cars park outside a house where business is conducted.
No, Bredemarket clients cannot park their cars in front of my house. And no, this is not my house. (And they’re not your cars either.) Fair use. The Verge, “Multimillion-dollar Ferraris, Jaguars, Astons, and a fine cup of tea.” The cast of cars and characters from the first Goodwood press day in 1993. Lord Charles March is by the front door of the house with his light blue AC 16/80 designed by his grandfather.
This means that when I do have a person-to-person meeting (rather than a videoconference) to conduct business, the meeting has to be offsite. For example, a couple of years ago I met with an advisor at Brandon’s Diner in Upland. (And the lunch was tax deductible!)
Fourth: No signage permitted
Again, because my work location is in a residential neighborhood, I can’t put a huge neon sign in my front yard with the Bredemarket logo.
Imagine this in my front yard.
And no, I can’t put a small neon sign in my front yard.
Or any neon sign.
I wonder if the city will let me put signage on my mailbox? Actually, the UPS Store probably won’t allow that either.
Bredemarket’s mailing address is 1030 N Mountain Ave #259, Ontario CA 91762-2114. If you read my previous post, you know that “MBE” stands for Mailboxes Etc.
So what?
The reason that these city restrictions don’t matter to you is because (since we still have the Internet) Bredemarket is perfectly capable of conducting its business online.
You don’t have to look for my business sign, or a parking place in front of the place where I conduct business. Why not? Because I can meet with you via Google Meet or another videoconferencing service, or we can talk on the phone, or even exchange emails with each other.
I’ve worked from home since March 2020—first for IDEMIA, then for Bredemarket, then for Incode Technologies, then for Bredemarket again. During that time I’ve been able to meet all of the needs of Bredemarket clients remotely, despite no public parking and no signage.
Well, almost all the needs. I haven’t been able to perform aortic valve surgery for my clients.
Dang guvmint.
The city does not endorse this call to action
Do you want to use the marketing and writing services of a government-licensed consulting firm?
Inland Empire companies are asking the same question that other companies are asking: “Should my business use ChatGPT (or another generative AI tool) to quickly generate content?”
Bear in mind that I have a vested interest in the answer to this question, because Bredemarket’s business is content generation for other businesses. So I don’t have a natural inclination to tell you not to buy my services and use ChatGPT or Bard or whatever instead.
Nevertheless, I’ll outline the advantages and drawbacks of using automation (in this case generative AI tools) to create written content. Then I’ll look at the three options for your business’ content generation needs. (Surprise! One of those options is to contract with Bredemarket. You’ve been warned that a call to action is coming.)
An “exchange” of questions
As I mentioned in my post about creating and populating Facebook business pages, yesterday afternoon was the first time in years that I had attended a monthly Ontario IDEA Exchange meeting. For those who aren’t familiar with these meetings, they allow small business owners from the Ontario, California area to meet and…um…exchange ideas.
One of the attendees asked me what I thought of ChatGPT.
If you’ve read the Bredemarket blog or the Bredemarket LinkedIn page, you know that I have some thoughts on this. (If you haven’t seen my thoughts, I’ll share them later in this post.)
It turns out that the attendee had a reason for asking the question that went well beyond generative artificial intelligence (generative AI), and touched on automation in general.
Should we use ChatGPT, Bard, or another generative AI tool to generate text content, or should we contact a content marketing expert?
Similarly, should we use a generative AI tool to generate image content, or should we contact a graphic design expert?
Going beyond generative AI, should we use tax preparation software, or should we contact a tax preparation expert?
You can ask this same question about a variety of business services. Should you opt for the (sometimes) cheaper automated solution, or should you get a real person to perform the service?
This can be a loaded question. After all, I can’t tell you that you should always use a person for these tasks when I personally use Freepik and a well-known tax preparation software package.
So, returning to content, let’s take a (probably non-objective) look at the pros and cons of using generative AI tools for content creation. After all, some of my best friends use generative AI…and they’re still my friends (and obviously not my customers).
Generative AI content advantages
While generative AI isn’t as trendy a topic as it was a few months ago, people are still talking about using generative AI to create text content. And there are clearly some advantages to it.
It’s very fast. No, you won’t create your text in a minute. But with properly written prompts (commands to the generative AI tool) and by using a few iterations, you can probably get generative AI text content in five minutes. You won’t get text content of any length from Bredemarket in five minutes.
It’s (usually) free. In most cases, you can obtain your text at no cost to you. Again, Bredemarket doesn’t work for free.
It’s easy. You don’t need to know how to write. Sure, you need to know how to write the prompt, but you don’t need to worry about the mechanics of writing the text itself, and when to use “its” or “it’s”. You don’t want to sound like a looser, after all. (That was wrong.)
It’s “good enough.” Under most circumstances, the text created by a generative AI tool gets the job done, and is obviously better than no text at all.
Generative AI content drawbacks
Perhaps I’m biased, but I think that we can all agree on the drawbacks that I’ve listed below.
Potential accuracy issues. Generative AI content is sourced from the Internet, and you know how accurate the Internet can be at times. For example, when I was working for my former employer, I asked one popular generative AI tool to tell me the weaknesses of my employer’s product. The tool returned two responses, one of which was plain wrong.
More potential accuracy issues. The way generative AI tools work, most of them provide their answers as if they were most certainly true, with no attempt to provide the probability that the response is correct or incorrect. In essence, Mr. Gen AI is an automated know-it-all with complete certainty in its answers, even when they are obviously wrong.
Potential relevancy issues. Depending upon your generative AI tool, you may not have access to the latest data and may instead rely on older data that was available when the generative AI tool was trained. At one point, several of the popular generative AI tools were trained on data from 2021 or earlier, which meant that they knew nothing about events that happened last week.
Potential privacy issues. When you feed prompts to a generative AI tool, the prompts are stored by the tool. What if you’re using a public tool, and you’re feeding confidential data from your company to the tool? What’s going to happen to your company’s private data? (This is especially critical when the data crosses international borders, something that gave Samsung serious concern.)
Potential tone of voice issues. If your company feeds a prompt to a generative AI tool, and your competitor feeds the same prompt to the same tool, you will get similar or identical responses. If both companies use these responses, then the companies will sound like bland “me-too” providers, with no differentiation.
I’ve touched on a number of these issues in more detail in pieces that I’ve written on the Bredemarket blog (and in one case on LinkedIn). These explain when I use generative AI, and when I do not.
Depending upon your business needs, your budget, and your marketing direction, you have three choices.
(UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
Use a generative AI tool to write your content. It’s fast, it’s free, it’s easy. It may be good enough.
Use a low-cost writer to write your content. If you want to spend a little money, you can find writers who will work for pennies per word. That’s more than a generative AI tool, but you have a better chance of getting the content you want.
Use Bredemarket. I cost more than pennies per word (the cost for my standard 400-600 word writing package is in the brochure on my Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service page), but Bredemarket’s collaborative kickoff process, including the opening six questions that I ask you, helps to ensure that your firm will get the content that you need.
Authorize Bredemarket, Ontario California’s content marketing expert, to help your firm produce words that return results.
Bonus: here’s what Google Bard says on the topic (written by Google, not by me)
Sure, here are three advantages and three drawbacks of using generative AI to create written content:
Advantages:
Speed: Generative AI can create content much faster than humans. This can be a major advantage for businesses that need to produce a lot of content quickly, such as content marketing agencies or news organizations.
Cost-effectiveness: Generative AI can be a more cost-effective way to create content than hiring human writers. This is especially true for tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming, such as writing product descriptions or blog posts.
Accuracy: Generative AI can be very accurate in generating content that is factually correct. This is because it is trained on large datasets of text and code.
Drawbacks:
Creativity: Generative AI is not as creative as humans. It can only generate content that is based on the data it has been trained on. This means that it may not be able to come up with new ideas or insights.
Bias: Generative AI can be biased, depending on the data it is trained on. This is a concern because it could lead to the creation of content that is inaccurate or harmful.
Plagiarism: Generative AI can sometimes plagiarize content from other sources. This is because it is trained on a variety of text data, including some that may not be properly cited.
Overall, generative AI can be a valuable tool for creating written content. However, it is important to be aware of its limitations and to use it responsibly.
Here are some additional things to keep in mind when using generative AI to create written content:
Always fact-check the content before publishing it. Generative AI can sometimes make mistakes, so it is important to double-check the information.
Be clear about the purpose of the content. Are you trying to inform, persuade, or entertain? The purpose of the content will help you determine the tone and style of the writing.
Be aware of the audience. Who are you writing for? What are their interests and needs? Tailor the content to your audience.
Use generative AI as a tool, not a replacement for human creativity. Generative AI can be a great way to get started with a writing project, but it is important to put your own unique spin on the content.
I mentioned something in passing in Bredemarket’s recent go-to-market post that I think needs a little more highlighting. So here is a deeper dive into the 22 types of content that product marketers create. (Well, at least 22. I’m probably missing some.)
And by the way, I have created all 22 of these types of content, from blog posts and battlecards to smartphone application content and scientific book chapters. And I can create it for you.
Why is it that so many business-to-business (B2B) marketers confuse product marketing with content marketing?
Because it requires a lot of discipline. That’s why.
B2B marketers who get it right understand the difference between these two fundamentally different types of marketing, what their purposes are and how to use them correctly.
Some firms (especially startups) don’t have the luxury to enforce such definitions. They don’t have separate teams to create awareness content, consideration content, and conversion content. They have one team (or perhaps one person) to create all that content PLUS other stuff that I’ll discuss later.
For example, during my most recent stint as a product marketing employee at a startup, the firm had no official content marketers, so the product marketers had to create a lot of non-product related content. So we product marketers were the de facto content marketers for the company too. (Sadly, we didn’t get two salaries for filling two roles.)
Why did the product marketers end up as content marketers? It turns out that it makes sense—after all, people who write about your product in the lower funnel stages can also write about your product in the upper funnel stages, and also can certainly write about OTHER things, such as company descriptions, speaker submissions, and speaker biographies.
As a result, I’ve written a ton of stuff over my last 29 years in identity/biometrics. It didn’t take a great leap for me to self-identify as the identity content marketing expert and the biometric content marketing expert (and other expert definitions; I’m an expert in creating expert titles).
I’ve compiled a summary of the types of content that I’ve created over the years, not only for Bredemarket’s clients, but also for my employers at Incode Technologies, IDEMIA, MorphoTrak, Motorola, and Printrak.
Not all of these were created when I was in a formal product marketing role, but depending upon your product or service, you may need any of these content types to support the marketing of your product/service.
It’s helpful to divide the list into two parts: the external (customer-facing) content, and the internal (company-only) content.
10 types of external content I have created
External content is what most people think of when they talk about product marketing or content marketing. After all, this is the visible stuff that the prospects see, and which can move them toward a purchase (conversion). The numbers after some content types indicate the quantities of pieces of collateral that I have created.
Articles
Blog Posts (500+, including this one)
Briefs/Data/Literature Sheets
Case Studies (12+)
Proposals (100+)
Scientific Book Chapters
Smartphone Application Content
Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, Twitter)
Web Page Content
White Papers and E-Books
Here’s an video showing some of the external content that I have created for Bredemarket.
While external content is sexy, internal content is extremely important, since it’s what equips the people inside a firm to promote your product or service. The numbers after some content types indicate the quantities of pieces of collateral that I have created.
Battlecards (80+)
Competitive Analyses
Event/Conference/Trade Show Demonstration Scripts
Plans
Playbooks
Proposal Templates
Quality Improvement Documents
Requirements
Strategic Analyses
And here are 3 more types
Some content can either be external or internal. Again, numbers indicate the quantities of pieces of collateral I have created.
Email Newsletters (200+)
FAQs
Presentations
Content I can create for you
Does your firm need help creating one of these types of content?
Maybe two?
Maybe 22?
I can create content full-time for you
If your firm needs to create a lot of content types for your products, then consider hiring me as your full-time Senior Product Marketing Manager. My LinkedIn profile is here, documenting my 29 years of experience in identity/biometric technology as a product marketer, a strategist, and in other roles.
Some writers won’t read a word of any novel while they’re writing their own. Not one word….Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he’s writing and he’ll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. It’s a matter of temperament. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra — they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but in the world of non-fiction, writers MUST hear at least some members of the orchestra. To comment on the world around us, we need to know what is happening in the world around us. We can’t make up our own Narnia and write to it, because our audience lives in the real world.
The first step in learning how to maximize your personality’s pros and minimize its cons is to figure out your basic personality type. One simple approach is that of the “four temperaments” approach (popularized by Tim LaHaye, among others), in which human personalities are narrowed down into four basic categories: choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic.
And by the most amazing coincidence, I know a content marketing firm that exhibits all of these “temperamental” capabilities.
My own firm, Bredemarket, that serves identity/biometric, technology, and local (California’s Inland Empire) firms that need blog posts, white papers, and other types of written content.
Authorize Bredemarket, Ontario California’s content marketing expert, to help your firm produce words that return results.
Illogical marketing slogans like “coldest beer in town” are fascinating.
If you take a moment to think about it, every mini mart and liquor store in town has to chill beer to the exact same temperature before it freezes, so no store will have colder beer than any other store. (For the specifics, including the effect of ABV on alcohol freezing temperature, see Oxbow Tavern’s blog post.)
But liquor store marketers know that we DON’T take a moment to think about it. When it’s hot and we want beer, we want the “coldest beer in town.”
Well, while it was hot this morning, and while the HK Food Store was open (unlike the C & M Classy Mart a couple of miles northwest), I opted NOT to get the coldest beer in town. I wasn’t carrying a beer bottle opener, and I didn’t feel like breaking the law by walking down Grove Avenue with a beer bottle hidden in a paper bag.
Yes, I’m stealing the Biometric Update practice of combining multiple items into a single post, but this lets me take a brief break from identity (mostly) and examine three general technology stories:
Advances in speech neuroprosthesis (the Pat Bennett / Stanford University story).
The benefits of Dynamic Media for Adobe Enterprise Manager users, as described by KBWEB Consult.
The benefits of graph databases for Identity and Access Management (IAM) implementations, as described by IndyKite.
Neuroprosthetics “is a discipline related to neuroscience and biomedical engineering concerned with developing neural prostheses, artificial devices to replace or improve the function of an impaired nervous system.
Various news sources highlighted the story of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patient Pat Bennett and her somewhat-enhanced ability to formulate words, resulting from research at Stanford University.
Because I was curious, I sought the Nature article that discussed the research in detail, “A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis.” The article describes a proof of concept of a speech brain-computer interface (BCI).
Here we demonstrate a speech-to-text BCI that records spiking activity from intracortical microelectrode arrays. Enabled by these high-resolution recordings, our study participant—who can no longer speak intelligibly owing to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—achieved a 9.1% word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary (2.7 times fewer errors than the previous state-of-the-art speech BCI2) and a 23.8% word error rate on a 125,000-word vocabulary (the first successful demonstration, to our knowledge, of large-vocabulary decoding). Our participant’s attempted speech was decoded at 62 words per minute, which is 3.4 times as fast as the previous record8 and begins to approach the speed of natural conversation (160 words per minute9).
For Bennett, the (ALS) deterioration began not in her spinal cord, as is typical, but in her brain stem. She can still move around, dress herself and use her fingers to type, albeit with increasing difficulty. But she can no longer use the muscles of her lips, tongue, larynx and jaws to enunciate clearly the phonemes — or units of sound, such as sh — that are the building blocks of speech….
After four months, Bennett’s attempted utterances were being converted into words on a computer screen at 62 words per minute — more than three times as fast as the previous record for BCI-assisted communication.
Now let’s shift to companies that need to produce marketing collateral. Bredemarket produces collateral, but not to the scale that big companies need to produce. A single company may have to produce millions of pieces of collateral, each of which is specific to a particular product, in a particular region, for a particular audience/persona. Even Bredemarket could potentially produce all sorts of content, if it weren’t so difficult to do so:
An Instagram carousel post about the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, targeted to voice sales executives in the identity industry.
A TikTok reel about the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, targeted to marketing executives in the AI industry.
All of this specialized content, using all of these different image and video formats? I’m not gonna create all that.
But as KBWEB Consult (a boutique technology consulting firm specializing in the implementation and delivery of Adobe Enterprise Cloud technologies) points out in its article “Implementing Rapid Omnichannel Messaging with AEM Dynamic Media,” Adobe Experience Manager has tools to speed up this process and create correctly-messaged content in ALL the formats for ALL the audiences.
One of those tools is Dynamic Media.
AEM Dynamic Media accelerates omnichannel personalization, ensuring your business messages are presented quickly and in the proper formats. Starting with a master file, Dynamic Media quickly adjusts images and videos to satisfy varying asset specifications, contributing to increased content velocity.
A graph database, also referred to as a semantic database, is a software application designed to store, query and modify network graphs. A network graph is a visual construct that consists of nodes and edges. Each node represents an entity (such as a person) and each edge represents a connection or relationship between two nodes.
Graph databases have been around in some variation for along time. For example, a family tree is a very simple graph database….
Graph databases are well-suited for analyzing interconnections…
To see how this applies to identity and access management (IAM), I’ll turn to IndyKite, whose Lasse Andersen recently presented on graph database use in IAM (in a webinar sponsored by Strativ Group). IndyKite describes its solution as follows (in part):
A knowledge graph that holistically captures the identities of customers and IoT devices along with the rich relationships between them
A dynamic and real-time data model that unifies disconnected identity data and business metadata into one contextualized layer
Yes, I know that every identity company (with one exception) uses the word “trust,” and they all use the word “seamless.”
But this particular technology benefits banking customers (at least the honest ones) by using the available interconnections to provide all the essential information about the customer and the customer’s devices, in a way that does not inconvenience the customer. IndyKite claims “greater privacy and security,” along with flexibility for future expansion.
In other words, it increases velocity.
What is your technology story?
I hope you provided this quick overview of these three technology advances.
But do you have a technology story that YOU want to tell?
Perhaps Bredemarket, the technology content marketing expert, can help you select the words to tell your story. If you’re interested in talking, let me know.
Bredemarket 