AI changes e-learning production

AI stands for artificial intelligence.  If you are curious about what it means or how it works, you are in the right place. In this blog, I show how AI impacts our work at Three Mountains.

Artificial intelligence is a cool topic, readers. It’s when machines can do things that humans usually do, but faster and easier. They seem to have minds of their own and can think for themselves. That’s the wonder of artificial intelligence.

I was creating voiceovers for a digital marketing course. Hesron, a colleague of mine told me about D-ID which can turn a word document of 5000 words into a voice-over in just 3 minutes. I signed up for a free account and began to make voiceovers. I was very happy with the result. It was quick and very simple and the English voice was better than what we had before.

A few days later, Hesron gave a presentation on different artificial intelligence tools to our team. In the following discussions, the team asked how D-ID compares to Speechelo which we use for voiceover generation. “Is D-ID  capable of creating dialogues with two distinct voices?” Unfortunately, the reply is negative. While D-ID works more efficiently and saves time, it is much more expensive than Speechelo.

Here is an example of a video made by D-ID. We used a picture of one of our former staff members. She is now a robot!

 

This result is not good enough to put in a course. But, with time, these programs will improve and will be very useful.

Another tool I really like is Chat GTP. I use it in the Bing browser. I use it to write texts and make them better. I put my text in the chat and ask it to rephrase the words. It improves the grammar in my English and even shows me words I don’t know. That is a bit dangerous, so then I have to do it again. You can ask it a question like, “Explain the use of AI in the creation of e-courses.” The results give ideas for this blog!

Hesron and Ineza found a very useful tool for reducing background noise in videos. It is called Adobe Podcast. It removes noise from recordings with voice speech enhancement. My colleagues showed the Three Mountains team how it works. We fed it audio with a lot of background noise. The result: background noise is gone! At times I interview someone in a crowded place or close to the market and the audio is poor. This tool will help to improve the quality.

As a team, we concluded that AI definitely changes the way we produce e-learning. AI helps to produce text and to search for information. We don’t have to go to a studio anymore to record a voiceover, we will generate them by AI.

On the downside, what is still lacking is a good voice in African English. So far, we only found a Kenyan voice that is acceptable. We also need a Kinyarwanda voice in AI!

AI makes course construction simpler and quicker without compromising quality. But, it is still expensive.

To sum up, if you’re interested in using artificial intelligence in your businesses, I advise you to encourage your staff to try out  AI tools and evaluate the findings. You may decide that AI is beneficial for your company.

If so, good luck to you.

Christella Uwicyeza