Looking for a direction

I had one of those evenings where I started to get itchy feet about not doing enough to save the world. As arrogant as that statement is, that’s what I think about when I’m staring off into space as my wife watches yet another TV show about long-lost families. What can I do? What would be neat to see? Etc.

So, I was thinking away and I thought about how I could apply what I’ve learned building up my automated T-Shirt business. And I thought it would be interesting to look at a hybrid approach to automation. This allows the ability to explore the coordination of people and automation to deliver a product or service. In one sense this is very much like the t-shirt project which relies on a print-on-demand company within the workflow.

Looking at global living wages, and it is roughly £100 a month in Lagos, Nigeria and £450 a month in Mumbai, India. As a bonus both countries have strong English skills. What would it look like to hire someone in Nigeria to smooth over parts of your process which were difficult to automate. You’d only need to raise £100 within the month to ensure their livelihood. And giving a project a person either at the end of an email or phone or just to manage something more complicated improves the ability of the project to weather challenges.

As an idea how about building an application that transcribes audio. We can automate the transcription of the audio which is a relatively straightforward process. Then utilize the employees to interact with customers. They contact a customer through say a Fiverr type website give it the whole spiel and collect the audio file only to then pop it into an automated system. Then wait a bit of time and then send the transcription back to the customer. Collect our fee and away we go, repeat  throughout time making bank.

There are drawbacks, but in the round it’s building a tool to be used by individuals to help them earn money. Maybe taking it further you could build a system for an enterprise. Something that collects all files throughout the business and copies the text. If the file is an audio or video file then we can transcribe the data. Pull it all into a database and you will then have a searchable database of all knowledge in your company. What might be more valuable here is the ability to ask a question and then build a second algorithm to run off, collect data around a particular keyword or keywords and then use machine learning to summaries the collected data. Perhaps even offer a series of links to the original sources next to dates that those sources were created.

That second idea seems to have less to do with hiring people and more to do with making money. Oh well, if I have to, I will become a billionaire. I’m not the billionaire that people wanted, but the one they need. That arrogance just keeps coming.

That summarizing algorithm could be fun. What about a system that you join and add in your social media accounts. Then from there you allow it to go off and look through your subscriptions and summaries what is happening. Maybe even issue alerts like BBC breaking news when a creator you follow releases a new video. It can summaries the trends you interact with and maybe even show a few of the larger trends that you might be interested in based on what you post and what you follow. Kind of like a daily news paper for you social media personas. I can’t see a way to do this without advertising though. Oh well. Like I said, I don’t mind being a billionaire.

I’ll have to keep thinking on this.