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- What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #63
What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #63
My podcast returns with a season 3 premiere this Saturday. This week we've been using AI art to tell the story of season 2
I'll be part of this panel running through 2023 predictions with Nicole Butler-Davis, David Leary, Dawn Brolin and Andrew Wall
An AI-assistant built into Excel - I love this, and suspect it's just a matter of time until Microsoft builds it natively, but it does things like: autofill data based on column headers, generate formulas with text commands, factual autofill pulling info from the web, and GPT-3 prompts in a formula. For example, write a prompt that references various cells, and display the result of the prompt when those cells are updated.
Meghan Blair and the Fogged In Books crew join forces with GrowthLab
Posterity gives you a way to transfer your password vault to loved ones when you kick the bucket
A Chrome extension to detect gpt-3 generated text
v2 of the most popular finance tracker on Notion - While not a replacement for a proper accounting system, I do think there's a fun firm to be built here to support clients who want to live in Notion
Easy Peasy AI is a whole bunch of AI applications rolled into one, at a super cheap price. Copy generation, image gen, AI summarization and more
Olivia Look with a zap to send her a notification if it's going to be pipe-freezingly cold tomorrow
I am hopelessly addicted to image generation right now. It has greatly reduced the barrier to visual storytelling. Midjourney is the best place to start today
🤖 Automate My Thing
Summarizing Meeting Transcripts
Let's use ChatGPT to generate a summary of our client meeting, and a list of action items. With recent updates to ChatGPT, this use-case got a lot more valuable.
You can now create persistent chats. That is, you can come back to them later via a static link. So once you have a transcript, be sure to select "New Chat" so you can come back to it later if needed.
I'm going to use the transcript of the most recent Cloud Accounting Pod episode. If you have a meeting transcript, use that. At the top of the message, I used the following prompt:
The result is pretty good. It doesn't know the difference between an ad & regular dialog, but you won't have that problem with your client meetings 😊
Now here's the catch: there's a maximum input prompt length. In this case I had to trim it down to about 1/3 of the total transcript length. GPT-4 is expected to support longer prompts, but the possible length will likely never be infinite.
So what does an automated version of this look like today? You need an automated way to fetch transcripts after each meeting. I think you can do this with Zoom natively, but it may be easier with a dedicated recorder like Grain.
Then it's a matter of:
Splitting the transcript, according to the maximum allowed prompt length
Summarizing the clips individually
Joining the individual summaries, saving those & the action items somewhere useful, like your CRM or task management system
Look for this to soon become a standard feature for meeting apps, but in the meantime let me know if you set this up, or if you're feeling intimidated this would be a great opportunity to contract with your first no-code expert.
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My community Realize is a private space for people to swap ideas & collaborate. At $180/mo it’s also the way I finance everything else I do, pay a full-time creative director, and a part-time developer in an effort to make the accounting industry a slightly better place. The community is currently about 270 members strong.