Introduction

So Josh asked me to introduce myself, which I'm not going to spend much time doing. I do a variety of things as an entrepreneur and a lawyer and an investor.

You can find that on my LinkedIn profile.

Project Overview

I'm basically gonna tell you about the business that I'm here to talk about today, which is Playlist Builder.

And I forgot where I put the slides. There we go.

Presentation Structure

So I'm gonna talk about, I've got three slides for you and then we're gonna do a live demo.

Playlist Builder: The Application

1This application, Playlist Builder, is for curation of YouTube content.

The basic idea, which I feel rather passionate about, is that YouTube, we all know, is the world's biggest repository of video content, and it's underused for education. Google does some stuff on education, but not that much.

Gemini products are starting to have education mode, and it will use YouTube videos but still not in an extremely sophisticated way. And because search is difficult, Google has a different goal than search, it's an engagement. And they've tried to improve this, but they would admit, and we work with them, that there is more that can be done.

There are lots of videos on YouTube. I've got some quotes here from some great sources talking about the problem. We've confirmed this through extensive market research, particularly in the academic market, that this is an issue.

Platform Features

We've built a platform, which you can see here on the left, and I will show it to you. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that.

Some of the key features on the right, it's, we think, an intuitive ad-free interface, although it's an early product now. So we think it can improve and we love feedback on it.

It's free for the time being.

We have steadily expanding search features.

Metadata and Search Enhancements

key moments in building this is you realize when you get a corpus of YouTube videos on a topic, there's lots of stuff you can do with it. At the moment, we're using fairly straightforward AI, convolutional neural networks, and some non-AI data science to categorize videos, but there's a lot more that we can do with this with LLMs.

Once you have the metadata on videos, you can do quite a bit. That's the patent-pending data pipeline, which is

basically for search through an API, because everybody gets the same access to YouTube videos. You can do it through the app, or you can use their API, which we do. And the API is a keyword search. We hit that API a number of times, and then we get a universe of videos, which we can then apply to the metadata or the content of the video, various algorithms to produce a better search.

Company Background

So just briefly, the company that does this is called Learnershape. I founded it some time ago.

For a while, we had a concept that we called open source learning infrastructure. We still do this. Some of our good customers are on the right.

For a number of years, we made money doing this, but it was a services business. We were looking for a product. One, our work with Northeastern University led to the Playlist Builder product, and we decided to really focus the company on that.

We do still have some pretty cool taxonomy independent content recommendation software, which is free to use. And feel free to ask me questions about that afterwards.

Live Demonstration

Now I'm going to move, though, to the demo of playlist builders. Because we interact with YouTube, at the moment, you're required to sign in with Google. Some of the features of our platform you could theoretically use, but we're requiring people to sign in with Google at the moment.

So it's the usual sign in with Google interface. I sign in with my learner shape. email address.

I get a couple of options here. The bottom one is the one that we use for Playlist Builder. It's our brand account. So on YouTube, you can have a brand account where multiple people can access using the same account.

you get a dashboard that looks like this. Each of these are what we call a workspace, which is a Google search. I'm going to show you in one of these that I've created what the results look like, but I'm also going to do a search here, and I'd like somebody from the audience to tell me what they would like searched. I planted the idea with Adil, but if somebody who I don't know gives me an idea, that would be a little bit more of a challenge to prove that it works.

Anybody? Say again. Flat earth. Flat earth. Flat earth.

Flat earth. Flat earth theories. OK. So I'm going to put down.

So we're going to create a new workspace. And let's see. We'll say flat earth theories. The earth is round. I'm assuming that, I guess. But some people think it's flat. Learn about it here. This ought to be a pretty good result because it's a fairly

The algorithm attends to each of these. We can choose the video length. We can choose how many videos we return. But I'm going to just stick with 25 and not specify the video length. So it's now off crunching. It should take about a minute to do this. We can look at the results of the search.

What you get when you do a search is you get a series of videos like this. You get information about each video. You can watch it here. And you can watch it without ads because whether or not you have a premium account, Google allows the widgets to watch it without ads. You get a description, you get various stats, you get various information on why we selected this video. And then you can choose whether to include it in your playlist.

Search Results and Playlist Creation

And I did this on a demo with, I've forgotten who the other day, but he was really impressed that we found I'm remembering who it is, but it doesn't matter. We found a lot of videos that he was familiar with on this topic. And so in the included tab we have here, the ones that we like to be included in a playlist.

But anyhow, I'll go back to my workspaces and we've got flat earth theories. Why people think the earth is flat is a pretty good question. The truth about flat Earth's theory seems pretty good as well. Flat Earth versus round Earth, that was in there as well. Is Earth actually flat? So this one pulled up a lot of clearly relevant videos, and they should be fairly high quality videos.

I like to say we look for relevance, quality, and level. At the moment, we have some tech that looks at video level, like beginner, advanced, etc. At the moment, we're looking at relevance and quality to some extent, which is a little bit harder.

That's not in this version, but we aim to get there.

When we've chosen the videos that we want to include in our playlist, we can then create the playlist. I'm just going to use that button to copy the description, but it could be anything you want. And then you can choose the status, which are the same three that you get on YouTube, public, unlisted, which means public but not searchable. And that's the one I'm going to choose. And then we create the playlist, which takes one to two seconds.

And there it is. And then we're back on YouTube. So, and rather than building a complicated interface, the YouTube interface lets you do stuff like move it around.

YouTube Integration and Publishing

So when...

This is now in our YouTube channel for LearnerShape, but if you were to sign up for this, you would get into your YouTube channel. You have to have a YouTube channel. If you don't have a YouTube channel, you'll get an error message.

You can do the whole search function, you just can't publish.

Availability and Future Potential

This is available at the moment for free, but we're trying to build engagement with it at playlistbuilder.ai. You can try it out.

And we think some of this stuff you can do on YouTube. This is not the solution for you if if you just want a video that shows you how to fix your refrigerator or something like that because that's very specific.

But if you want to build a collection, it's a pretty powerful tool because we can now go back to our list and we can say, you know, I want to add this one about the Flat Earth Convention and take out this one, reconsider, we'll put it back in the list of videos we're considering and I can build another playlist.

And this sits there, we've built but not rolled out tech to update this, to update playlists on an ongoing basis and let you know about it. And we're excited about taking the tool forward.

Conclusion and Q&A

So I'm gonna stop there and take any questions that people have.