Simon WillisonAug 6, 2023

I wrote about my process for publishing annotated versions of my talks - like my recent talk on LLMs - and shared a new tool I built to help with that progress, allowing me to OCR my slides for alt= attributes and type up annotations for them in Markdown

https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations/

How I make annotated presentations

Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one …

Simon Willison’s Weblog
Show threadSimon WillisonAug 6, 2023

Here's the new tool I built: https://til.simonwillison.net/tools/annotated-presentations - plus an animated GIF showing how it can be used

(I used ChatGPT extensively in building it, the prompts I used are included in my write-up of the tool)

Annotated presentation creator

Show threadSimon Willison
I experimented with using Claude to clean up the YouTube transcript of my talk and turn it into text I could use in the annotated presentation - it did a pretty great job, though I ended up using just small portions and applying many of my own edits anyway
Aug 6, 2023 at 5:25pmWeb
Show threadSimon WillisonAug 6, 2023

A particularly fun detail of the https://til.simonwillison.net/tools/annotated-presentations tool is how it uses Tesseract.js OCR (running in the browser) to extract suggested alt= text from the images

I wrote more about that in this TIL: https://til.simonwillison.net/javascript/tesseract-ocr-javascript

Annotated presentation creator

Show threadSimon WillisonAug 6, 2023
I also shared four ChatGPT transcripts from sessions I used to help me pull together that annotated presentation tool https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations/#chatgpt-sessions
How I make annotated presentations

Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one …

Simon Willison’s Weblog
Show threadSimon WillisonAug 6, 2023
Of those four transcripts this one is probably the most interesting - demonstrates me getting it to iterate on code, then throwing in some more code I've written and telling it to use additional libraries that might not be in its training data https://chat.openai.com/share/5218799e-0423-49ad-88ba-c72ee27e3fe3
Show threadJames KingAug 7, 2023
@simon Thank you for sharing. Did you use Code Interpreter for those? They look like regular Chat GPT session transcripts.
Show threadJames KingAug 7, 2023
@simon Ah - answered my own question… Code Interpreter is Python only so doesn't make a lot of sense for a JS/HTML web-app.
Show threadSimon WillisonAug 7, 2023
@jamesking yeah I'd love to have a version of Code Interpreter that could show me rendered HTML and JavaScript for me to interact with
Show threadJesse VincentAug 6, 2023
@simon the YouTube audio transcripts are surprisingly good. I’ve been starting to flirt with using whisper instead whisper seems to do a better job of generating the sentence you meant to say, but I’m not sure that’s better.