The Fabulous Learning Nerds

Scott (00:01.171)
Hey, everybody, get ready for another fabulous episode of your Fabulous Learning Nerds. said fabulous twice. I'm going to start all over. I've screwed up already. Here we go. Three, two, one. I'm not running with none of that. We'll put that at the end.

Daniel (00:11.76)
No, run with it. Do it.

Sam (00:16.619)
I deem it so.

Scott (00:18.334)
I'll be quiet.

Daniel (00:18.408)
Ha ha ha ha.

Steve (00:18.896)
Ooh, it's been deemed.

Scott (00:21.097)
Hey everybody, get ready for another fantastic and exciting episode of your Fabulous Learning Nerds. I'm Scott Schuette and with me, looking good, Dan Coonrod, everybody. crap, let's do that again.

Scott (00:37.853)
Dan!

Daniel (00:39.4)
Scott! What's up man, how you doing?

Scott (00:42.313)
You're doing okay. I'm doing great. How are you my friend?

Daniel (00:45.692)
Fair to Midland.

Daniel (00:50.044)
feel like it's been a while. I didn't want it to like go away forever.

Scott (00:51.881)
All right. OK, cool. So I did it this week. did it. You want to know what I did?

Daniel (00:59.821)
Actually, part of me wants to keep the mystery alive, I, no, I do, I do. What'd do, what'd do?

Scott (01:04.159)
I picked it up. got it. I picked it up. I got it. It's in my garage. I have no idea how I got it home, but I am now the proud owner of a 12 foot floating Reaper from Home Depot. Yes.

Daniel (01:13.692)
Real quick, is this something you should admit on radio? Okay, okay, good, good.

Scott (01:18.311)
Yes, it's okay. did, yeah. wait, you didn't hear what I had to say? Okay. I

Daniel (01:24.016)
No! No, I was stopping in case it was something you shouldn't admit to, like, everybody.

Scott (01:28.415)
No, I'll admit this. I am now the proud owner of a 12 -foot floating reaper from the Home Depot.

Daniel (01:36.352)
my god!

Scott (01:43.103)
That's right. Now I almost destroyed the backseat of my car getting it in because I don't drive a truck or I don't have an SUV and that thing was bigger than I thought it would be. But some nice gentleman at Home Depot helped me and I got it home and my wife said, what the hell is that? And I said, honey, we are now the proud owners of a 12 foot floating Reaper from Home Depot. And they are, as we speak, out of stock. So there you go. So I'm super excited about

Daniel (02:09.478)
That is awesome. Real quick, don't you drive like a smallish sports sedan?

Scott (02:14.777)
I traded it in for a larger sports sedan. I have an Acura TLX Type S, which is nice and fast. Yes. you know what? We should, we should. have another story to tell about my car, but I want to wait quick. What have you been working on?

Daniel (02:17.744)
Okay, that's right. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Daniel (02:32.336)
Man, you know, I tell you what, this has been a pretty busy week. We're working with just a few clients on building some stuff and setting up for the back third of the year. man, man, man, man, man, man, I tell you what, you know, there are times where you feel the crunch in your life. And I think last night I was sitting back and just kind of like sitting on the couch at like a quarter to midnight.

just like, man, wow, I did a lot. It felt good, it was nice. It was a proud moment that I had gotten a lot accomplished and I felt good about it. But man, man man, it's a lot, it's a lot, but it good.

Scott (03:17.065)
Hey, you know what, I'd rather be busy than slow. Nothing worse than being slow, in my humble opinion. Absolutely nothing worse than like, hey, do got anything for me to do? No, seriously, you got something for me to do? Okay, yeah, nothing worse. Absolutely nothing worse. Speaking of someone who has a lot to do, you'll ever, the Duchess of Design is with us today. Zayda's in the house.

Daniel (03:20.69)
That's true!

Daniel (03:29.288)
Nothing worse.

Scott (03:47.305)
Say it on my friend.

Zeta (03:48.919)
Hello my friend.

Scott (03:50.963)
How are you today?

Zeta (03:52.467)
I am having such a good day today. Such a good day. I got to go.

I got to... Yes, it was very excellent. Today I got to get something I haven't gotten in forever. I don't know if you can see that, Scott. Yes! Yes! I went to the comic store! I was surprised. Yeah, yeah, they actually do. They do. And so I got my hot little hands on that today. So yeah, today's been a very excellent day.

Scott (03:59.923)
Okay.

Scott (04:06.623)
Mad Magazine? my gosh, they still make Mad Magazine?

my gosh, really?

Scott (04:22.311)
okay describe the cover for audience like what's going on in the mad magazine world i can't imagine anybody would not

Zeta (04:29.219)
Okay, well it says mad of course on the top and it's kind of like a cartoon description or depiction of all the aliens from the 80s. You've got ET, you've got the main guy, the mad guy as the alien and it says in space, no one can hear you worry.

So yeah, yeah, me worry? Why worry? Yeah. So good. So good.

Scott (04:49.839)
yeah, because why worry is their deal. Yeah. man. we're going to go down a rabbit hole, but I want to get our special guest in here before we do that. Yeah, we're going to need to. We're going to need to. Did you guys see Romulus? Have you seen Romulus?

Zeta (05:00.843)
Understood.

Zeta (05:06.295)
I have not. I have not.

Daniel (05:07.811)
No.

Scott (05:08.114)
Okay, our guest is nodding yes, he has. So we're going to have to talk about that. Folks, we got a very I'm so excited. I guess if you can't tell I'm super excited because we have a very, very special guest with us. And we're going to learn all about him in a little segment that we call What's Your Deal?

Zeta (05:12.779)
Woo!

Scott (05:30.78)
Steve!

Steve (05:35.568)
Hey, hey, hey, folks. I am having so I see it. Can I just be a passenger? I would just want to be a passenger to every episode that you you run. This is the most fun I've had. And it's only been like 10 minutes of being a passenger. It's incredible. I don't even want to talk to you about who I am. Tell me more about you wonderful people. This is incredible.

Scott (05:37.137)
What's your deal, my friend?

Daniel (05:51.166)
that's so awesome.

Scott (05:55.741)
Well, we're gonna get to that for sure. We got a couple hundred episodes where you can get to learn all about us, but tell the audience a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what makes you live, thrive, and survive, my friend.

Steve (06:07.386)
sure will allow me to change my accent just slightly. So I'll be like, get a legends. It's Steve here. You're a fair dinkum Aussie from down under. No, it's I'm Steve. I'm Steve. I have a Batman mask on my LinkedIn profile, which people, people seem to seem to dig. It's been a fantastic client filter because all the serious clients don't want to work with me because they won't get it through procurement. But I've been a learning designer, learning strategist, learning wizard, insert, whatever cool title.

We call ourselves these days now for 17 years. It's the only thing I've ever done. I'm self -taught. I don't have any letters after my name. And I run an agency called learn awesome. And we specialize in making things editable and teaching our clients how to fish wherever possible, because I'm sick and tired of smart people like our industry building complex interactions and complex, wonderful custom bespoke things that just go into a graveyard when they need to be edited or the CEO changes and they have to.

charge two grand to get a logo or a name changed because we've built it in such a mythical way that it can't be that it can't be done. So yeah, that's what that's what we do. And I love I love this industry so much. And see what you see, see this crew doing what they're doing. It's amazing.

Scott (07:23.475)
Yeah, it's fun. Being with your tribe is a great thing. a lot of us, if you're in learning development, you understand what we're talking about. A lot of times I'm like, where's my tribe? Right? And so the opportunity, one of the best things about getting together on a regular basis with people in my tribe is really is refreshing. And you, my friend, have been incredibly refreshing. And I appreciate that. Before we move forward into groovy stuff, we're going to talk about tonight.

Daniel (07:23.931)
Love that.

Scott (07:51.347)
I gotta get your take on Romulus, my friend.

Steve (07:53.85)
Dude, well, if you're if you're an alien fan, I mean, I was cool. I was cool with like Prometheus and the whole prequel sort of stuff. That was that was okay. But I'm an original Sigourney like let's go. Come on, Alien one. And then you know, obviously, obviously, is it built? Is it Bill Pullman in Alien two? Or it's like game over, man. We're screwed. We're gonna die. you know, he was cool as well. Yeah, that's it. Game over,

Scott (08:06.022)
Absolutely.

Zeta (08:06.612)
Amen.

Zeta (08:15.427)
Phil Paxton, yeah. Will you put her in charge?

Scott (08:16.041)
Game over! Game over, man!

Steve (08:21.264)
So what I loved about it, and it's not going to spoil anything, but imagine Alien One style cinematography with 2024 CGI capability. So you're not going to see the spaceship attached to a string in space. Like you've got a little bit stuff there, but it's still shot to, you know, respect how Alien One was originally done. So yeah, if you're into that, I highly recommend. And yeah, you won't be like, again, if you're an Alien fan, you're an Alien fan, you'll go see it. Just like when Matrix 4 came out, you'll go see Matrix 4 just because you love.

Daniel (08:21.532)
you

Steve (08:50.864)
You love the trilogy, you love the whatever else. So yeah, 10 out of 10.

Scott (10:36.509)
Hey, so once again, we just thought we would talk about cool and groovy learning tech. Because you know what? Here's what I am learning this year is that what I think I know about learning tech changes hourly. It's like changing all the time. And if you're not on top of it, you're going to fall behind. So stand on top of it is really important. Steve, we were talking before the show and it was like.

hey, I'm working on this and this and this, you're really passionate about it, so we're just gonna wing it without any kind of planning or whatever, and really just talk about some cool stuff that we're working on, the implications and why you should be checking it out. So, Steve, we'll start with you. What are some cool things you're working on with learning tech?

Steve (11:22.21)
Yeah, I mean, it's always tricky because you've got to you've got to remember that while we have the privilege of being able to dive down any rabbit hole that we want, I mean, we were talking about like local language models a second ago, and then it's like how we can set up like cool automated audio using using other tech. It's also really important to remember that most of our clients or most of the people that consume this who had got jobs in L &D in corporate

they've got jobs to do, they've got BAU, they've got workloads, they don't have time to dive down the rabbit hole. So it's so cool that we can do it for them. And then we're like the Robin Hoods, right? We rob from the real world and we give it back to the people that need it. So the coolest thing I'm working on at the moment is I think there's a big need for, obviously, the buzzwords in L &D, inclusivity, accessibility, blah, blah, blah, right? So eeny, meeny, miny, multilingual workforce. That's a cool one, right? So

Daniel (12:00.828)
Ha ha!

Steve (12:16.846)
We have we have a lot of clients who have English as second language for a lot of their staff. And so how can we make learning more accessible, but not have to pay thousands of dollars for different videos like human translators, all that sort of stuff. And so we've been playing with some some cool tech, the one that if you with permission, I'll name it so that people can go and check it out. It's called verbalate, verbalate .ai. So it's a it's a tech startup, what it does is it does

Scott (12:40.2)
Name it, baby.

Steve (12:46.032)
AI translation, but it also uses humans. And so human translators to get 99 .9 % accuracy in terms of the translation from say English, or your source language into whatever language you want. But then what it does really well, and what it's going to be known for very, very soon, is the lip movement gets dubbed by AI into the source language. So

Daniel (13:09.362)
that's awesome.

Steve (13:10.926)
Yeah, and it's and it's dope. Like, it's not like the captions app. It's not like some of these cute little Instagram influencers sort of apps. This is legit, like heavy hitting, really accurate sort of stuff. So even if you just like wanted to check it out, you go onto their website, verbalate .ai, their homepage video has the has one of the I think it's the Chinese Prime Minister talking and giving an address in Mandarin or Chinese, whatever language they're speaking, but the lips are moving in English, and there's an English voice.

that mimics the tone of his Chinese, Chinese tone. And I can read it, I could actually listen to it with the subtitles on and the audio off. Because the lip movements there, I'm getting a bit of engagement. So you know, that that for us is is huge. And it's super easy for our clients to shoot a video in English, send it to verbalate .ai they charge like $1 .50 a minute. And away you go like they've got as many languages as they want infinite investable universe.

Daniel (14:09.862)
That's a dollar fifty a minute. That's amazing, like.

Steve (14:12.783)
Yeah.

Zeta (14:14.467)
Now this is verbally like V -R -B -A -L -Y .A -I.

Steve (14:18.672)
yeah, verb a verb, a verb late, V, E, R, B, A, L, A, T, Verbalate. dude, there's probably like 16. There's probably like 16. That's the challenge, right? Is that once you find one, you find 10. And it's like, that's cool. But for our world and to keep the to keep the rabbit holes away for some of our users, it's like, yeah, just pick one and go go go diving.

Zeta (14:25.514)
I came across a different one. Sorry, verbal eight. Okay.

Daniel (14:28.668)
Hahaha

Scott (14:45.351)
You bring up a really interesting point, if I can piggyback off of that. Like just a couple of weeks ago, I was giving a presentation on how to improve engagement with virtual training. And I was actually supporting Kahoot, right? And by the way, there's a bunch of different platforms. They all do really good stuff. And Kahoot used to just be this quiz platform, but now it does so much more, right? And I can actually, you know, create, take a PowerPoint, add quizzes, and then create something that anybody can take and I can get user identification. I can get retention data. get all the

cool stuff. They don't tell stories. And so I had a team that's like, we want to up our game and get stories. I'm like, well, hey, I'm working with this. What do you think? when we went through it, and I'm a nerd, right? I'm like, whoo. Yeah, baby. It was great. What do you think, right?

And they're like, I don't know. Well, if you don't like that one, we've got aha slides, or we've got Mentimeter, or we've got this other thing. I don't care. I don't care what the platform is. I care of solving your problem. if there's whatever you need, and if this isn't solving your problem, so let's start again and make sure we're solving your problem. Like, what is the real problem? I thought,

Steve (15:45.69)
Yep, Slido.

Steve (16:02.394)
That's it.

Scott (16:02.471)
You wanted this and so I'm showing you this and I'm super nerded out about it. I'm excited and I'm not. It used to be that you would get so emotionally attached to your solution because it was the only one, right? It was the only solution to today. You're right. I've got like six or seven different solutions. I I love what you're talking about. I think it's great. My question on that program, does it also do titling as well? So I'm going to go ahead and do the verbal stuff, but.

Steve (16:13.392)
Of course. Yeah, yeah.

Steve (16:28.196)
Yeah, so it'll do. Yeah, it'll it'll provide it'll provide subtype like transcripts. So they'll give you the transcript. And then obviously, depending on I love what you said there, Scott, in terms of light for us, it's a privilege to have. I'm like, I love comics, right. So the green arrow in DC land is like one of my things. So I just imagine me being Oliver Queen with my quiver. And I've just got all these different magic arrows that I can pull out that do different things, which when my clients need it.

it's super important for us to stay across as much stuff as possible so that when you get those use cases, it's like, look, you could use Mentimeter here, because it's good for ABC, but Slido is actually going to do this, but Kahoot is actually going to be the OG for this, this, this and this. And all of a sudden, you're like, you're like the Messiah. You're the Messiah of the L &D world. They're like, the chosen one is here. They know everything, but you don't, you just know enough about all the little things. But how exciting is it to keep your finger on the pulse?

just YouTube and Instagram and rabbit holes.

Daniel (17:22.204)
Dude, bring up such, yeah, you bring up such a good point that like, just like, you're right, like having the privilege to be able to like take time, go learn these things, dive down these rabbit holes. I can't tell you how many times I've been talking to a client or talking to somebody and they're like, man, I wish we could do this and be like, yeah, no, we can do that. Yeah, you just use this. And like, what's that? And you know, I'm just like that, that surprise, that delight moment, that excitement. And you're just like, yeah, we can do this. And it'll look like this.

And we'll pull that right over. And let me ask you, how much time would you say, I mean, you said that like, you're right, people have day jobs. can't always be like diving in and consuming tech. Rough guesstimate from the hip. How long do you, how much time a week do you think you're spending just to stay like connected on this kind of stuff?

Steve (18:13.648)
Yeah, the short answer would probably be like, maybe half a day, like four hours. But in honesty, and I think this is the challenge, this is the challenge when you love what you do. And a lot of the stuff that's happening in the tech world, it blurs the line between work and life because the tech stuff that's happening is also a hobby and an interest. So I could sit down and dive into a YouTube rabbit hole like I did last night, which was how can I use like 11 labs and we'll talk about 11 labs in a second, I reckon, to do all sorts of other audio stuff.

Daniel (18:19.974)
Okay.

Steve (18:43.544)
I was there for like three hours. I didn't even blink. I come up for air. It's like, it's 2am better go to bed. Got to get up and hang out with my, my favorite American tech nerds. Like let's rock and roll. So yeah, I mean, it's part of the course, right? But I'd say I'd say at least four hours of dedicated time I'm spending a week, like keeping abreast of it. Because like you said, tomorrow, there's going to be three new things that pop up or there's going to be new releases where you know,

Daniel (18:48.933)
Hahaha!

Daniel (18:54.266)
I

Steve (19:09.38)
you've just got to be you've just got to be there. But I think you don't need to know everything that's that's super important. You need to know enough because we're smart. And because we I think respectfully, all of us grew up before the internet was a really big thing, which means we know how to research effectively, unlike Gen Z and the millennials who just take whatever gets served up first in the search results. So we're we're the we're the ones that are going to take over the world because we've got the processing power, plus the muscle memory from when the internet didn't exist.

we can do a lot, which is why we're so cool, right?

Daniel (19:39.73)
Yeah. I'm all right.

Scott (19:40.677)
Absolutely. One quick comment, then I do.

Zeta (19:41.665)
Yeah, so that's also another question. go for it, go for it.

Scott (19:46.067)
I was getting one quick comment. Like so many of our peers all struggle with one of the same things, which is like, I want to seat at the table. I want people to respect me for what I know. I'm telling you folks, the more you know about this kind of stuff, the opportunities to just be able to provide a possible solution that people don't understand will help you.

you know, bring value in that space, right? To create value in that space. And the way that I like to approach it, I love the half a day, and I try to do that. had people at work me like, how do you know all this stuff? Well, I attend webinars, they're free. Just go to a webinar. But if you, especially today, if you have a problem and you're used to solving it one way, think about it for a minute and just challenge yourself. I wonder if there's a better way of doing it.

Steve (20:22.724)
Thank

Scott (20:37.619)
I guarantee you just a quick Google search for whatever you use in Bing, Copilot, whatever, you're going to find something, find a tool, play around with the tool, you're going to find new stuff. And then those moments, they're going to come. Gee, we want to do this. So I'm thinking about that. Well, just like Dan said, well, have you tried this? But none of that will happen if you don't challenge yourself to be creative and be innovative within the space and kind of dive in and own that. Zeta.

Zeta (21:02.357)
about to say when it comes into trying to figure out where these like where you can find what's new what's relevant sometimes you do have to go through the jump into a rabbit hole search something out look at videos go wait what's this and then check that out is there any other sources other than a quick google search maybe you can like find a little bit more of the information that be might be helpful for our LND folks out there

Steve (21:29.377)
Yeah, you know, really great question. And it's tricky, because you've got to you've got to like, you got to kiss a few frogs before you find some from princes, right? If you go back to like fairy tale, fairy tale mythology, but and that's okay. Like, that's the that's the that's the cost of glory that I write off, right? That's written off as like, I wasted it. Did I waste an hour? No, because now I know what I'm looking for for later. So the one thing that I really like, and it's dangerous, because it's addictive is TikTok and Instagram and looking at these young kids.

who are absolute weapons from a cognitive perspective and their ability to just like multitask and process things at such speed. Pair them with us and they're like, now we've got like the perfect human, right? But the young kids that are doing like, hey, how I automated my life in six seconds using these three tools. I love those. So I follow a lot of young Instagram influencers just to keep a pulse on what's going on. Cause I miss the whole TikTok thing. I don't even know how it works.

And that was the first time where I'm like, holy shit, I'm getting old. Like I'm, I've, I've missed the boat. I'm becoming my parents. Right. So, you know, luckily I just hang out with young people and they teach me. that's, that's probably where I would go to like first, first thing to see of the new stuff that's coming out. And then, yeah, everything else is just through the normal channels of like, Hey, YouTube, my YouTube algorithm recommends enough stuff to me. And then I just dive in and, know, mind map. So, you know, I want to do like voice generation or.

Daniel (22:30.278)
Ha ha ha!

Steve (22:54.756)
translation and then I just so that's my that's my problem multilingual workforce, then I just branch out and ask a whole bunch of different questions off that. Yeah.

Zeta (23:03.459)
That's excellent. Excellent. Thank you.

Scott (23:07.487)
OK, you mentioned 11 labs. Shall we go there? Let's go there. Let's talk about 11 labs.

Steve (23:09.008)
baby. Yeah, let's dive there. Isn't it incredible?

Scott (23:17.919)
So what's your journey been like with 11 Labs? I have one. I think we all have one. What's your journey been like?

Steve (23:25.936)
Yeah, look, as an as an Aussie, and this is this is just purely purely based on the sound that our voice or accent has voice generation or voice dubbing. Ain't too kind to the Aussie accent just because of the just like the tones, the pitch, the intonation, it always manages to create a Steve Americanized version or an American twang just because of the way that it's built. So we've then experiment that then caused me to go out of the 11 labs universe and go find some other ones and

That's cool, because there's heaps of them around. But what I love is I'm like, again, in my spirit of making it editable, and empowering our clients teaching them how to fish. It happened yesterday, right? We had this, we had a client. And again, I'm paying, I'm a paying subscriber of every tool that I mentioned. So we had a client from a government agency, they were using storyline, and they were getting beaten like rabid dogs into storyline psychosis, because variables were just breaking

ghosts and gremlins were getting into the system. And it was just costing them I spent 90 minutes trying to solve this problem. That if I had have just put them on chameleon creator as a like a rise storyline had a baby chameleon creator out of New Zealand is by far the superior rapid authoring tool in the in the world. Now, what we found out is that it's like this lady this lady Lisa is doing every slide of storyline and these are compliance programs like 6070 slides, she's doing manual voiceover. And I just as a passing comment.

Scott (24:49.652)
God.

Steve (24:50.64)
passing comment, I said, least, you know, you know, there's tools that you can, like, you know, put a voice in our now our, our learners have complained about the AI robo voices. I'm like, that's interesting. No worries. And I recorded the zoom and then what I did without a permission, which is unethical, but she loved it. I took the voice sample, I put it into 11 labs, tweaked it a little bit. And then I sent her and I sent her and I sent her a voice a voice note in her voice. And she's like, What the what the hell's going on there?

Daniel (25:11.305)
no!

Zeta (25:13.431)
Hahaha!

Steve (25:19.664)
And then the penny dropped, she signed up to 11 Labs for five US dollars a month. And she just did her whole year's worth of voiceover in 45 minutes, text to speech. She sent me and called me and is like, thank you so much. You've given me like so much time back. I don't know what to do now. So that's my journey with 11 Labs is the pure empowerment of people. It's there.

Daniel (25:43.848)
I literally just this week recorded maybe 90 minutes of voiceover. I think I got Zeta to help me with another 90 minutes. So there's three hours of voiceover work just recorded this week. Met with the client. Client said, this is great. Hey, can you send us the scripts so we can pop them over to 11 Labs? There's some voices there we really like and want to use them. And man, like I was excited because I'm a nerd. I'm like, yeah, 11 Labs. But then also I was like,

Zeta (25:54.765)
Yep.

Steve (26:15.376)
All this work

Scott (26:16.159)
That does beg the question. Like Dan, you bring up a really good point. For years, if you were cheap about it, and trust me, I was cheap about it, right? So you got a couple people on your staff who do VO. Unless you want to hire out Fiber, you could get decent VO, right? Or if you have people in SAG, if you got the money, you go to SAG and do VO and it's fantastic, right? But everything sounded...

like scott like i would do the elect this is scott he's our video person and that's how it works even if i try to do it on the accent i'm scott doing a very terrible aussie accent day and mate you know it's just terrible right i'm sorry c sorry but you know how it is and now now i can go ahead i can go ahead in to get all the deals i bought all you don't like the sound of this one about this one or how about that one

Daniel (27:00.392)
You

Steve (27:01.432)
Go, let it run.

Scott (27:13.823)
Or you don't like the inflection here? Hold on a second. Let me regenerate that. Or I have to do a pickup. And I can't tell you as a producer how many times I've had to get somebody back into studio, back in the day, before 11 Labs, and do a pickup, and that would cost me hours of work, editing, and sound mixing? Forget it. Forget it. You're never gonna get the same room tone ever. And now you've got the solution. Dan, I hope that you have learned your lesson and you'll never do a voiceover again, ever.

Steve (27:26.117)
There it is.

Steve (27:31.148)
huh.

Scott (27:44.435)
Just dump it into whatever you want to use. I like doing VO. I totally do it for our show. I do.

Daniel (27:44.584)
Meh. I feel like, I feel like as...

Steve (27:45.69)
It's still fun, if you like it, do it. If you enjoy it.

Daniel (27:51.622)
I feel like as folks who are right now making a podcast, might not say I'll never do VO again. But listen, I have an 11Labs account. I paid for it because it's amazing because I've worked with other clients that are just like, they're like, yeah, we just use the built -in storyline voice. And I'm like, no, stop. Stop. Why would you do that? Do you not love your learners? Do you hate them? Did they hurt you?

Scott (27:59.423)
Well, that's true.

Steve (28:03.887)
Yeah.

Steve (28:12.92)
No, stop it. Stop. Yeah. Please no, no more. Yeah.

Zeta (28:14.509)
Please no.

Scott (28:15.518)
No.

Daniel (28:21.158)
Yeah, it's so bad.

Scott (28:21.919)
But I also like, if you want to get the inflection, we'll take your example, Dan. So you did all this VO work. You've got the audio files. You could go speech to speech and change it up. If you like how that read went, that's how I want this to sound. This is perfect in my own little world. Great. Dump it in there and have, know, I leave on whiplash, go ahead and do it or whatever.

Steve (28:35.408)
Totally.

Daniel (28:49.34)
I'm excited for Snidely Von Whiplash.

Scott (28:50.367)
The thing that I love, right, I think so. But what I love in my journey is that 11 Labs did start out pretty basic. then every time I go into it, there's something new. And every time I go into it, it's better. Steve, I'm glad you didn't get in trouble cloning someone's voice. I had the opposite thing happen to me, right? I cloned somebody's voice and I said, here, check this out. I did a pickup so you don't have to go to the studio. And they're like,

Steve (29:07.79)
No, there's ethical considerations.

Daniel (29:07.974)
ZUHUHUHUHU

Steve (29:15.758)
you

Scott (29:17.757)
That's really wicked scary. Could we please delete this? I'm like, yeah, not a problem. I'm sorry. I should have asked you.

Steve (29:20.932)
Yeah, sure. Sure. And I think like it opens up it opens up now that you've got audio taken care of because the the precursor to like the prequel to that situation with the government storyline lady was we got held hostage by VO. So same sort of deal, right retake. And then they came back and they tripled their rates. And so this poor clients like we didn't do anything wrong. Like we just weren't happy with the output. So where is the middle person we go in and negotiate, we bring the talent together.

Daniel (29:43.075)
Ooh!

Steve (29:50.48)
And so I'm like, Hey, we never have to be held hostage again. And that's, that's really empowering. And that challenges the VO industry to level up and find a way to then probably learn these 11 labs tech and tools and not be scared of them and not be saying, this is shit. Like it's going to kill the industry. It's like, no, this is a part of it. And if you want this, this is product A. If you want the real polished, you know, BBC documentary narrator, you can have that, but you got to pay for it because AI is not there yet. But

man, that the time the time saving and the the amount of the amount of friction that it reduces, but then you can pet combine it with with beyond, right? So so now it's like the CEO is not available to do a welcome to this organization, or we've got clients who aren't camera savvy or wanting to be face to camera. So it's like, hey, let's use 11 labs to give us the audio and we'll do it in your voice or a version of your voice that you're happy with, then we'll go beyond because you can edit that will teach you how to use that.

And so we just do lip sync and audio and you've got a cartoon version of their avatar because you take a photo and create your avatar based on that in done. Like we've got, we've got a really slick solution that was previously unavailable and was custom built by us five years ago.

Daniel (31:05.404)
That's awesome. Super nerdy, super nerdy. Like, have you seen the tech that's that like you can like take a picture of somebody and animate it and then like use the VO over top? Like I've seen all kinds of great clips and it's good when it's when it's done short. I've seen so many clips where it's like it's a picture and I know it's a picture and I know that's probably that's an AI voice, but like it matches up well enough that my brain

Steve (31:07.168)
Yeah! Right! Come on!

Daniel (31:33.64)
If you had asked me five years ago before AI became the end all be all conversation point, I'd been like, no, it seems weird, but it's good. Like, I'm not 100 % certain what's going on, but it would still pass the sniff test. And I feel like we're getting to the point more and more where it's like, there's more room for mistakes because of technology. You bring up a great point. You're like, hey, we got to do a pickup. And you're right. I can't tell you how many times like...

Steve (31:45.902)
Yes. Yeah.

Steve (31:56.303)
Yeah.

Daniel (32:01.116)
Somebody in my team would be like, I built this course. did all the VO here we go. We'd launch it. It'd be great. Three months later, somebody would take a look at it. Some somebody up top would be like, Hey, you know, I just don't like the way they pronounce that word. Can we get them to redo the VO? And it's like, well, I can either sit down, have them say the word and like, we will like splice it in audio and like do a bunch of audio work, or I can just get them to like rerecord like the places where they say that. And

Steve (32:16.1)
Yeah.

Steve (32:27.588)
Yes. Yeah.

Daniel (32:28.452)
Neither of those were enchanting options. And now it's just like, yeah, cool. That'll boop, boop, boop, done. Love it, love it, love it, love it.

Steve (32:34.746)
Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.

Scott (32:37.983)
Can I pick up, you mentioned Storyline and Riot's having a baby into this new, what is that, what is that called again? I'm sorry, I've never heard of it.

Steve (32:44.023)
yeah.

They're from New Zealand. they're just across the there's a the Tasman the Tasman Sea is the is the body of water that connects Australia to New Zealand. And we call that the ditch. So Australians will say ditch Kiwis or New Zealanders will say Dutch. So they have a different version of our English English language, which is which is cool. So they're a New Zealand company, Chameleon creator. And we are obsessed with them because everything that

like the number of updates that they've pushed out this year rivals the number of updates articulate has pushed out in the last decade. So it's, it's, it's amazing. And so it's so imagine. Go. No, no, no, no, no, was just saying like, rise and storyline had a baby. You get this so you get the benefits of rapid authoring. But instead of you know how you when you load a rise course and then like we use rise, it's cool, but like

Scott (33:24.569)
Is it? Finish your thought. Finish your thought. Imagine. Imagine what?

Steve (33:40.162)
If you if you give me a rise output, and we look at a lot of work over the over the years, in point two of a second of it loading, I can tell you what it's built on. Like I pride myself on being able to pick the tool and rise, you can't put enough lipstick on that, that thing, it's still a pig, you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig. So what chameleon allows you to do is you could build five different chameleon programs, and you wouldn't know that it's built on all five are built on chameleon, because it doesn't have the locked table of contents on the left.

It allows you to have a hamburger navigation menu top right. It's, allows you to scroll vertically and do all sorts of amazing customizations with backgrounds and stuff like that. So I'll share some, I'll share some demos with you guys so you can have a real play and a real look, but I'll also introduce you all to Reese at Chameleon, who will set you guys up with trials to play and, and, and have a really nice adventure. Yeah.

Daniel (34:31.4)
I actually loaded the website. I loaded the website where we're talking. Yeah, 100 %

Scott (34:35.679)
As soon as you said that, you piqued my interest because, okay, I'm just gonna raise my hand and I'm sorry, articulate. Hey, I get it. That's the gold standard has been for years. That's where people go, but I gotta raise my hand. I hate storyline. I have some people that work for me that refuse to build in storyline, right? And so whenever anything breaks in storyline, I have to fix it because everybody else...

Steve (34:41.486)
Yeah, sure.

Steve (34:53.914)
Me too.

Steve (34:58.809)
Mm

Steve (35:04.068)
Correct.

Scott (35:04.445)
doesn't want to go in there. And so it's like, we got Rise, and this is great. But you're right. Every learning in Rise is the same. It all looks the same. And you could add all the widgets you want. It's still a Rise. You're right. OK, here we go. We're doing a Rise. And I got to say, it's a better experience a lot of the time than, say, Storyline a lot of the time. But it's still not great. So when you tell me you've got something that is

Steve (35:12.772)
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve (35:32.144)
dude, dude, dude, trust me, we'll get you a trial. Reese, when you listen to this and when I message you straight after this, we finish recording this, let's hook our nerds up with... 100 %

Daniel (35:39.947)
Hahaha!

Scott (35:41.853)
Well, want to, our, hey, our audience needs to go check it out as well. My question is how easy is it? That's the thing. Cause like storyline, need a PhD to do storyline in my humble opinion. Right.

Zeta (35:45.692)
Definitely.

Steve (35:48.418)
good. Yeah, absolutely. No, so I think like my team, so Mike, we've got a team of six designers and so every one of them, including myself for the first two weeks, it's like, why do I hate this?

but it's so cool. And it's only because that you've got more flexibility than you do in rise, which then allows you the customization, but you don't have the same variable suck and death of storyline. So it's just a new, it's just a new UX and UI that you've just got to get used to. But after two weeks, you're off to the bloody races. And let me give an example, right? How long would it take you to create a certificate that's triggered off a text entry variable? So if you wanted to put name, if you wanted to generate, so at the end of the learning,

I was able to generate a certificate in Storyline that had my name, my employee number, the date, the time, and four responses that you've captured via a text entry box throughout the module. How long do reckon that would take you in Storyline? Just in hours?

Scott (36:46.687)
was gonna say a day. It would take me a day.

Steve (36:47.856)
Yeah, I would, I would say a day that that stuff is out of the box. Yeah. Daniel, Daniel good in 20 minutes.

Daniel (36:48.52)
It'll take it'll take a minute. like, listen, no, it's no, no, listen, like, so like, I'm a I'm a captivate road warrior, not captivate to be storyline road warrior. But and I teach, I teach people how to do ID work. And every time we get the storyline, they go, why do I have to do this? I'm like, because this is what everybody uses. And

Scott (36:51.891)
Daniel's laughing at me because I'm dumb, but it would take me a day.

Steve (36:59.62)
Yup, yeah dude.

Steve (37:11.342)
Mm

Daniel (37:14.256)
I promise you it's better than the bad old days of captivate, but that's the only nice thing I'm going to say about it. So let's all grit our teeth and roll forward because it is, you're right. It's like I was working for a client and literally one of the things they like asked me to do with my, with my hours is, Hey, can you teach some of our staff how to do the basics and storyline? And like, I'd be like, yeah. And like, you know, like my time isn't super cheap, but like,

Steve (37:21.061)
Yeah.

Steve (37:36.954)
Yeah.

Daniel (37:43.246)
Literally, I was like, because even if you just sit down with YouTube and stuff, it's so complex. At times it's very obtuse and it's just like, my God. But yeah, so anything out there in the space. Yeah, yes.

Steve (37:50.564)
Yes.

Zeta (37:52.639)
And buggy too.

Scott (37:52.827)
it and

I don't want to diss on it too much. mean, there's still the gold standard and you've got to have somebody on your team that understands it. You've got to, because you never know when you get a client that's going to say, can you please clean this up? Right? So you got to have a Scott on your team that can you clean this up? Yeah. Okay. Hold on. Let me go clean it up. Right. So that that's cool. And there's a lot of really great stuff you can do with it. And Rise has its place as well. But I love the idea that we can go ahead and again, just we were talking about, can we innovate? Can we go ahead and try to solve problems in a new way? Can we?

Steve (38:01.272)
It is. One thousand.

Yes.

Steve (38:16.912)
100%.

Steve (38:24.868)
just hit it at the same time. Yeah.

Scott (38:26.815)
and make

make the learning more relevant. Like if you can go ahead and change that UI experience for our audience, all of a sudden, just from the experience that the audience goes through, you can enhance engagement tenfold. Like, this feels new and different to me. I want to continue doing it.

Steve (38:31.62)
Yes, I'm beautiful and easy.

Steve (38:43.749)
Yes.

Steve (38:47.086)
Yeah, definitely. So just to just to round out that that that little example that I was giving. So we're like a day in to create a certificate that's generated off variables with name that's personalized, that's, that's all that sort of stuff. So Chameleon as a rapid authoring tool, that's out of the box functionality. So it has text entry variables, it has a certificate block interaction that you can then just go, all right, I want to put a certificate, I want to put a name entry variable here, I want a text entry variable here. And then you literally like in rise, you drag the certificate block

into the canvas, it creates it, and then you just click where you want to put your variables and it populates. So I could build in 20 minutes, what would take me in a day in storyline. Now for my clients, when they're in storyline, and they've got storyline Stockholm syndrome, I will always ask, does do we need to keep storyline as the main tool because you're telling me that you're overworked, you're spending too much time editing, you don't have the skill set, or there's one person in the company that knows how to do it, wouldn't it be better?

if you had three licenses of Chameleon, and you could get all of the stuff that you're doing in one hit, and it's editable, it's easy, it's manageable, it's flexible. And once they see it, and once they and I'll share some of our examples that we've done, and you'll be like, Whoa, this is this is absolutely unbelievable in terms of where it's going. But just like the Adobe Suite storyline is the Photoshop Illustrator Chameleon is the Canva of the of the authoring tool world. It's just simpler.

for people that don't want to, but if you want to be a absolute Jedi knight, then you go into the storyline well, because you can do anything in storyline if you've got the patience and the level of spectrum that you're required to be able to tolerate what goes on there. But I've just gotten too old where I just don't have the energy to embrace the suck when I know that something else that's better is out there. And then people will say, right, but rise, but rise, you can do customized shit in rise. No, you can't. If you want to put a text entry variable in rise,

Daniel (40:16.008)
That's awesome. That's awesome.

Steve (40:43.362)
excuse my language. No, I won't even say it because I get sweary when I get passionate. So I'll just be like, if you want to do a text entry variable in right, you have to put a storyline block in sorry, or you have to buy or you have to buy a frickin maestro and bolt something else to this dog of a piece of a piece of tech. Now, I'm a paying customer, I can say this, but all rise has to do is get smart like chameleon and they can they can do that but they won't because they're the OG they're the apex predator.

Daniel (40:48.562)
Hahaha!

Daniel (40:53.853)
Yes you do.

Steve (41:12.516)
They're the big dog. They don't need to because no one's gonna no one's gonna ditch their their storyline license because their whole organization graveyard is built on it. we've created a rant the Aussies on a rant. Stop him. Stop him.

Daniel (41:21.788)
Yeah, it's true.

Ha ha ha!

Zeta (41:25.431)
No, that's truth. That's truth though.

Scott (41:25.51)
No, no.

Steve (41:28.684)
you

Scott (41:30.463)
I think that's great. And I love you brought up Canva. That's one tool that I wish that I had learned, but I'm really good at Photoshop. So sometimes I feel like I don't need it. Like I just go to Envato and I get a template that meets my needs and I go to town and there's dance shaking in her head.

Steve (41:37.902)
Well, fair play to you.

Steve (41:43.876)
There you go.

Daniel (41:45.768)
So I'll say this, I'm pretty good at Photoshop. I've got like 20 years in Photoshop because I'm a giant nerd. But I can't tell you how many, I still have a canvas subscription because it's awesome to be able to drag drop one, two, three, done. Hey, do you like this? That's great, that's perfect. Can we have it? Like, that's the mockup. And like I'm done. And then the same thing, I use Placeit. I don't know if you guys have seen Placeit, but Placeit's by Envato.

And it's just you go, here's this picture I got and I need to make a poster. I need to make this or I need to make a mock up of something. And it's you just drag and drop and it smart tools. It's done. You're done. You're done in five minutes. That's it.

Steve (42:18.638)
Yeah, amazing.

Scott (42:24.979)
going to have to follow my own advice. I'm going to have to play in Canva to solve problems so I can understand how awesome it is. I appreciate that. But with the new AI tools in Photoshop, they're amazing. Have you played with that?

Steve (42:30.32)
100 % 100 %

Zeta (42:32.483)
Me too.

Steve (42:37.316)
the new AI tools in Photoshop? that like what I because I mean, I'm not an Adobe dude at all. Like I can't I I'm happy to admit that I have no business being anywhere near the Adobe suite and I have no interest in either. is that where you can just sort of say, hey, replace this and it does it? Or give me this? Yeah.

Scott (42:52.127)
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I mean, you could take a four by three and expand it out and get a 16 by nine image. It'll just fill that all in. I want to get rid of something. I want to get rid of Dan out of a picture. I circle him and he's gone. Right. That kind of stuff. Yeah. No, it's really, really cool. And then it learns to the one thing I have learned about the AI tools in Photoshop. You can watch.

Daniel (42:52.571)
Yeah.

Daniel (43:04.84)
That's fair.

Steve (43:05.168)
Yeah, cool.

Scott (43:15.135)
If you use it enough, can watch it learns. if you don't like what's going on, you just regenerate, regenerate, regenerate. And then, I'm going to select this. It learns from what you selected. Scott, like this. So the next time I go and do that, it got better at it, which is kind of scary, but cool. Right? Like, so what initially would take you a couple hours to fix, but I don't care. I'm playing with AI. So it's fun. Eventually it gets to like five, 10 minutes. It's like, okay. This is what I know you need to do, which is cool.

Steve (43:26.81)
Mm.

Yeah, that's cool. That's cool.

Steve (43:45.114)
Yeah, brilliant.

Scott (43:45.247)
Let's before we kind of wrap this up pick one more cool thing that you're playing with that our audience needs to know about that we can all learn from it rant about go

Steve (43:54.51)
All right, cool. So what if we just, what if we open up the, so whatever context you want to apply to this container or example, feel free to, but let me present you with this. When you open the index .html file inside a SCORM package, you can put whatever the hell you want script wise in there. So for example, if you wanted to put live chat into your elearn modules that are SCORM,

All you do is you open up the SCORM file, you open up the index .html and you paste the script from your CRM or your chat widget like intercom or parrot or whatever, and you drop it in there. And then when you then upload onto the LMS, guess what? You've got a little chat bubble in the bottom right -hand side of your eLearn. All of a sudden you could then trigger live chat. Hello? Holy shit, how cool would that be? But then roll it up into sort of like these AI brains.

where if you get the right AI brain and you feed it all of your storyboards and all of the content from your course, now you've got a little little sidekick that the learner can ask questions of the SCORM. Everyone like everyone's getting like, you don't need SCORM anymore. SCORM is like the coolest fucking thing ever because you've got this you've got this file hierarchy that you can leverage to absolutely weaponize based on whatever the limitations of your brain or cognitive ability are.

Daniel (45:17.84)
I love that. I love that.

Steve (45:19.834)
Cool,

Zeta (45:20.471)
That is awesome.

Scott (45:20.479)
To that end, we've been looking at how we add Chatbot into some stuff that we're doing. And I don't want to do Chatbot 1 .0, which is these are all the things I wanted to ask, and these are all the answers to the thing. No, we're past that. We're in Terminator 2 land. I want this thing to go to a well of stuff. So what are your favorite? What are a couple of go -tos our audience can go to?

Steve (45:33.285)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's it. That's it.

Steve (45:49.121)
Yeah, there's a couple of newbies. Yeah, there's a couple of newbies. There's a couple of newbies in the market. So there's a there's one that there's one that it's sort of the ugly duckling. So they don't they're the ugly duckling. They don't know that they're hot yet. But once they realize that they're hot, they're going to get expensive. So while right now, it's like, hey, jump in while the iron's hot. They're called school chat, SKL chat. And they're a new startup in Aussie in in Oz.

Scott (45:50.068)
I love what you're asking me do, where do I go get the smarts to do that?

Steve (46:16.974)
And what they set up as originally, or they still are is for elementary school or schools to be able to have a chat bot on their website, the parents could ask questions about like, Hey, what date what dates the, you know, parent teach interviews, or what's happening at school this week, or how much is a hot dog or a burger in the canteen or the tuck shop, whatever you call that in in the US. So Nicole and school chat started that. And then what I said when I met them at a conference, I'm like, Hey, could I upload like

policies and procedure docs into this? Could I feed this like storyboards? Yeah, you could feed it anything website data, documents, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so with that, we were able to demo it a couple of days ago. And I'll share that I'll share another chameleon container that we demoed it in. So you could share that with the show notes if you like, and let the let the people consume it. Because again, that's I've got nothing to hide here. It's all just like show and tell. But I found that was really cool.

I mean, the other ones are sort of like we've used our CRM. So we use go high level or high level as our CRM in our business, because they're a really interesting tech company based out in Texas in your in your world. They have like a live chat widget that you can embed on your website. And so if you can embed it on your website, you can embed it into the score. So we put our live chat in there. And we started playing around with students being able to ask questions and submit and then our CRM would

light up and say, someone's asked a question. And one of our operators would go, Hey, yep, we've got you. No worries. So yeah, they would be the two things that I would have a look at for sure.

Scott (47:52.159)
Ha.

Steve (47:53.008)
Cool,

Scott (48:00.504)
my God, Steve, I could talk all day or all night. We could.

Steve (48:03.662)
We could feel like I feel like we could do it. could do it like a marathon set the Guinness World Record of nerd episode talk.

Daniel (48:09.0)
We could live stream.

Scott (48:09.407)
I've got notes. We're gonna bring you back if that's okay. If you'd like to come back, I'd love to have you back. 100%, sir.

Steve (48:12.1)
you

of course, anytime.

Scott (48:22.035)
Forgot I had that drop, you know. So, hey, could you do us a favor? Could you let our audience know how they can get ahold of you?

Steve (48:23.983)
you

Steve (48:28.738)
Yeah, if you just search me, Steve Corny on LinkedIn, I've got the Batman mask on, feel free to connect and just tell me like, come and pick my brain. Like I think again, I can't, I can't emphasize enough how much of a privilege I see my role in the L &D space is is to be the Robin Hood or Batman to help you solve solve your problems. So I'm super generous with my time because I've got to a point in agency life where we get to pick our clients, we get to choose who we work with. And

If it means giving back and spending half hour like nerding out and pointing you in that direction, that fills my cup a lot. So yeah, I'd absolutely encourage you to take advantage of that for sure.

Scott (49:06.973)
Well, learning people are good people, but learning nerds like yourself, we are special people. And I just want to thank you for your time. I am so jazzed and energized and my brain is full of ideas. I don't know how I'm going to go to bed and get some sleep because I'm just totally thinking, but thank you for your time. Folks go take a look at his LinkedIn profile connect and get some groovy stuff. Daniel San.

Steve (49:09.412)
They are. We are good people.

Daniel (49:34.192)
Yes, Scott.

Scott (49:35.817)
Can you do me a favor? you let everybody know how they could get in contact with us?

Daniel (49:40.472)
Absolutely. All right party people, you guys know the drill. Email nerds at thelearningnerds .com. I think for this week, tell us what new tool you're using. If you're using AI in any of your work, just new tech stuff. Nerd out with us, it'd be great. If you're on Facebook, you can find us at Learning Nerds for all our Instagram peeps, Fab Learning Nerds. And lastly, for more information about us, what we do and updates, www .thelearningnerds .com. Scott back at you.