Notes from Achieve

Using OpenAI's Speech-to-Text with Siri Shortcuts for Automatic (and Cheap) Audio Transcriptions on MacOS

Achieve Business Solutions — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 18:00:00 MDT

In today’s fast-paced digital world, having access to efficient and accurate transcription services is essential. OpenAI’s Speech-to-Text API offers an excellent solution for developers looking to incorporate automated transcription services into their applications. Plus, it only costs about US$0.006/min of transcription (as of April 2023). This blog post will guide you through creating a Siri Shortcut on your Mac that leverages OpenAI’s powerful Speech-to-Text API to automatically generate transcriptions from video and audio files.

Understanding OpenAI’s Speech-to-Text API and Siri Shortcuts

OpenAI’s Speech-to-Text API is designed to convert spoken language into written text, providing accurate and near real-time transcriptions. It can be utilized for various applications, such as voice assistants, transcription services, and more. Siri Shortcuts, on the other hand, are customizable, multi-step actions that streamline everyday tasks on your Mac.

Prerequisites for Creating the Siri Shortcut

To create the Siri Shortcut, you will need:

A Mac computer running macOS with Siri Shortcuts enabled. (Monterey, Ventura and later). This will also work with the latest versions of iOS and iPadOS that have Siri Shortcuts.
An OpenAI API key, which can be obtained by signing up for the OpenAI API platform.

The Quickest Way: Download the Pre-built Siri Shortcut

If you prefer not to create the Siri Shortcut manually, you can download the pre-built shortcut using the following link: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/dcaa8c4c0c584b7083e0ff552ce016c0

This includes functionality for handling video files as well as audio files, but won’t work for all formats. If your video or audio file is super long (typically around 1hr and longer) you can try splitting it into shorter segments before passing it through the Siri Shortcut, as the final file still has to be under 25MB according to OpenAI’s limitations.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating the Siri Shortcut

Step 1: Open Siri Shortcuts and create a new shortcut

Launch the Siri Shortcuts app on your Mac.
Click the “+” button to create a new shortcut.

Step 2: Configure the shortcut actions

Add a “Choose File” action to allow selecting the audio file to be transcribed.

Choose File / Receive Media

Insert a “Convert Media” action and set the output format to “Audio Only” to extract the audio from the selected file.

Encode Audio

Add a “Get Contents of URL” action to send a POST request to OpenAI’s Speech-to-Text API using your API key.
- Set the URL to https://api.openai.com/v1/audio/transcriptions
- Configure the request headers with the following key-value pairs:
  - “Authorization”: “Bearer YOUR_API_KEY” (replace “YOUR_API_KEY” with your actual OpenAI API key)
  - “Content-Type”: “multipart/form-data”
- Configure the request body with the necessary Form parameters, such as the extracted audio data and any desired API options. This should look something like this:
  - file=”Encoded_Media_Filepath” [required]
  - model=”whisper-1″ [required]
  - response_format=”text”
  - language=”en” (or another supported ISO-639-1 format language)
  - prompt=”Hello, welcome to my lecture.” (It can be useful to add a prompt here if you’d like the transcription to include punctuation, or to clarify certain words, etc.)

Get Contents of URL (POST)

In the case of a “text” output, all you need to add is “Show Contents_of_URL in Quick Look”. This will display the generated transcription with TextEdit (or your default text editor application), which you can then save from within TextEdit.
Within the inspector on the right-hand side, under Details, select “Use As Quick Action” as well as “Finder”. This will allow you even easier access to the speech-to-text functionality, as you’ll be able to right-click a file from within Finder and immediately submit it to the Siri Shortcut.

Set As Quick Action

Using as a Quick Action

Step 3: Save and test the shortcut

Give your shortcut a descriptive name, such as “Transcribe Video/Audio.”
Save the shortcut and test it by selecting a video or audio file to transcribe.

By following these steps, it’s possible to create a cheap, easy-to-use speech-to-text transcription functionality to use on Mac, or even your iPhone or iPad with Siri Shortcuts. By referring to OpenAI’s API Documentation, this could easily be adapted to provide a subtitle file (.srt) or even translate audio from other supported languages into an English transcription.

In our experience, this speech-to-text functionality is more accurate than the built-in (Apple or Siri-powered) transcription abilities, and even Google’s functionality to automatically generate a subtitles track once a video has been processed with YouTube. The primary downside with this (and many other) solutions is that you’re submitting your audio file to OpenAI directly, which could raise some privacy concerns. But this is a great solution if you’re looking for an easy way to transcribe audio or video files.

Free Transcriptions Using Siri Shortcuts

If you have a powerful computer, such as an M1 or better, there’s the possibility of running OpenAI’s Whisper model locally. This also addresses privacy concerns you may have. This option does require some terminal commands, and is not recommended for those not comfortable or familiar with using the Terminal.

Using this shortcut, the files will be transcribed locally, and it will automatically output a .txt file of the transcription in the same directory. This requires Python (and Homebrew) to be installed on your Mac. This is an easy-to-follow guide on how to install these requirements.

Small automations like this pay back fast. See how we approach AI automation for Calgary businesses.

One of The Best in Calgary

Achieve Business Solutions — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 18:00:00 MDT

We are excited to share that we have been chosen as one of “The 38 Best Digital Marketing Agencies in Calgary“!

We’d like to thank all our clients for continuing to work with us, especially during these pandemania-times! Also, a big thanks to The Best Calgary for featuring us!

Lists like this matter more now. They are one of the places AI assistants look when someone asks who to hire. That is what GEO is about.

How to Remove Footer but Keep Bottom Bar in The7 Theme

Achieve Business Solutions — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 18:00:00 MDT

If wanting to keep the bottom bar, but want to remove the main footer area for widgets, try the following code in Theme Options >> Advanced >> Custom CSS

.footer .wf-wrap:not(#bottom-bar .wf-wrap) {
	display: none;
}

Rather not maintain WordPress yourself? Our website care plans cover updates, backups, and monitoring.

Google reviews can be the crucial tiebreaker

Achieve Business Solutions — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 18:00:00 MDT

Customer reviews are among the first things people see when they search up your business on Google or Google Maps. It has also been shown that positive reviews provide a greater boost to conversion rates than other local SEO efforts.

Let’s say I was craving Mexican for dinner in downtown Calgary. A quick Google search shows me a list of restaurants in the area.

I can automatically see star ratings of local restaurants displayed in the accompanying map. If I choose to click on the place pin of the restaurant, I can also see summaries of the latest reviews shown alongside all the essential information, such as the business’s location, hours of operation, phone number and website.

If I was unfamiliar with the area, this is all the information I would need. If the business is open at the time of my search, how close the location is, and features more positive ratings and reviews than other comparable businesses, it comes out as the winner. For small business competing against similar establishments , Google reviews can often be the crucial tiebreaker.

To help level the playing field, here’s how to get Google reviews and ensure they are working to your advantage.

Step 1

Verify your business on Google

To verify your business on Google, your business needs a Google+ page. If there is already one setup, you can claim this listing on Google. The search engine favors verified businesses, so take time to confirm the information Google by postcard or phone.

Step 2

Respond to existing reviews

Once your customers leave reviews, make sure their efforts are rewarded . Monitor all reviews and respond to every one of them—especially the negative ones.

Apart from a complete absence of reviews, there is nothing worse for your business’s than negative reviews without a response. Not only does this leave readers without your perspective , it can also come off as lack of caring about what your customers think.

With that in mind, learn how to respond to negative review s in a way that leaves your customers satisfied. You may not be able to placate every disgruntled customer, but you should make the effort to show that feedback is important to you, and that customers have a say in how your business is run.

Step 3

Ask current and past customers

Online reviews are one of the best direct channels for customer feedback. Therefore, it’s important to make a point of telling your customers that their opinion is a huge contribution to the way you do business. Ask your customers for feedback throughout their journey with your brand, and encourage them to share their experience . Don’t be afraid to be straightforward with your intentions—use the information you’ve just learned about the importance of Google reviews to make your point. If you’re a small business trying to take off in a new location, and your customers leave the business happy, they will be eager to help you grow.

Generate your direct review link

Step 4

Promote your Google page

Your social media-savvy customers likely won’t be opposed to visiting another online property to show appreciation for your business. Once you have verified your Google+ page, let your customers on other social media networks know by sharing the url link.

Step 5

Include a CTA on your website

Don’t be shy about reaching out to audiences who are already interacting with your business online—especially those who visit your official site. Include a call-to-action button in a prominent spot on the homepage, and encourage people to share their experience.

Step 6

Display In Store

Just because you have left a sign about Google reviews on your website, don’t neglect to do so inside your brick-and-mortar business. A good place to place a sign encouraging customers to write a Google review is at the point of sale—or, if you run a restaurant, make a note on your menu.

You could also offer a small discount to customers who can show proof of having reviewed your business, regardless of the tone. Remember the golden rule of reviews: there are no bad ones, if you take them all as opportunities to grow and improve as a business. Reward customers for giving feedback, and who knows—that gesture can lead to better reviews in the near future.

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Reviews are one part of showing up in local search. Here is how we run SEO in Calgary.

How to Outshine the Competition

Achieve Business Solutions — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 18:00:00 MDT

When was the last time your business performed a competitor analysis? If you’re not routinely running an analysis, you’re missing out on valuable insights that could help your business grow.

Completing a competitive analysis is an important step in your marketing strategy. With this, you can establish what sets your product or service apart. When completing your analysis, it is important to answer these questions:

Who are your top competitors?
What products or services do they sell/offer?
What are their current marketing strategies?
What types of media are used to market their products and services?
What are each competitor’s strengths and weaknesses?

How to Identify Your Competitors:

Learning how to identify your competitors is essential in business. To stay competitive, you must understand who your competitors are, what they are offering and how your business fits into this competitive environment. Regardless of your industry, competitors will likely fall into two categories:

Direct Competitors

Local Businesses that offer a product or service that could pass as a similar substitute for yours.

Indirect Competitors

Local Businesses that provide products or services that are not the same but could satisfy the same customer need.

Find out what services they offer

Once you identify your top direct and indirect competitors you’ll want to analyze their complete product line and or service offering and the quality of each. You should also note their pricing and any discounts they’re currently offering customers. You’ll likely want to track down answers to many other questions such as:

Are they a low-cost or high-cost provider?
Are they using different pricing strategies for online purchases versus brick and mortar?
How does the company differentiate itself from its competitors?
How do they distribute their products/services?
What does the sales process look like?
What channels are they selling through?
Do they have multiple locations and how does this give them an advantage?
Are they expanding? Scaling down?

Review Marketing Channels

Analyzing your competitor’s website and social media accounts are the fastest and easiest way to gauge their marketing efforts. Take note of the following and copy down the URL for future reference:

Do they have a blog?
Do they post videos or webinars?
Do they have a FAQs section?
Are there featured articles?
Are they active on any Social Media Marketing Platforms?
What kind of content are they posting?
How much of this content is original?
Posting frequency and consistency

Review Content Published

Choose a small handful of sample content to review instead of tackling every single piece to make the process more manageable When reviewing content, it is important to look at the quantity. Next, determine the frequency of these content assets. When analyzing your competitor’s content, consider the following questions:

Do they have several hundred blog posts or a small handful?
Are they posting something new each week or once every few months?
Is the content structured for readability?
Is their content free and available to anyone or do their readers need to opt-in?
Do you see social sharing buttons with each article?
Are there linked to their social media channels in the header, footer, or somewhere else?

Check for Optimized Content

When you have a solid understanding of your competitor’s content marketing strategy, it’s time to ﬁnd out if it’s truly working for them. Speciﬁcally, you’ll want to look for keyword optimization in these areas:

Page title
URL structure
Title
Header tags
Image ALT text tag
Use of internal linking

Complete a S.W.O.T

As you evaluate each component in your competitor analysis it is important to get into the habit of performing a simpliﬁed SWOT analysis. By doing this, you can better position your company, and you’ll start to uncover areas for improvement. Some questions to get you started:

What is your competitor doing well?
What is the weakest area for your competitor?
Are there opportunities in the market that your competitor has identiﬁed?
In what areas, would you consider this competitor as a threat?

FREE S.W.O.T Templates

Ready, Set, Go

So now that you know what you’re going to compare, it’s time to start the competitor analysis process. For each competitor, set up a spreadsheet or download this helpful .

Create your Action Plan

Uncovering Intel is only the ﬁrst step. If you’re not using it to your advantage, you’ll end up wasting all your hard work. After you’ve audited 3-5 competitors, you’ll be ready to analyze your results. Highlight any rows of data that stand out on your spreadsheet. These may be areas where your competitors are doing well or those they’re not doing so great. Next, come up with the speciﬁc steps you’ll take to improve your current position. You’ll want to break this into goals that get broken down into speciﬁc weekly and daily tasks.

You should answer:

What marketing, sales, or product/services improvements need to happen? How should we change our strategy?
What changes do we need to make internally?
What materials, campaigns, and processes need to be updated to gain a competitive advantage?

In a separate tab on your spreadsheet, write down this action plan and the exact steps you’re going to take.

Monitor Progress

After a few months of making changes, take a step back to analyze how you’re doing. Go back and review your action plan. Take note of how effective it is. Are there any areas that you can improve on? Are there areas that your team is doing well with that you can expand on? What’s working and what has missed the mark with your audience?

Outshine, Rinse and Repeat

Remember to use this intelligence as a guide in your marketing strategy. You don’t want to copy your competitor’s every move and lose your unique point of view. Instead, use what you uncovered as a starting point for strategies that will make your business outshine the competition. If you find this work tedious consider hiring a virtual assistant to help, the second pair of eyes is never a bad idea.

What are some helpful things you discovered while completing your competitor analysis? Do you have any other tips to share? Share them in the comments section of this blog post.

Want a second set of eyes on your marketing? See how we work as a Calgary marketing agency, or how we run SEO for Calgary businesses.

Stay up to date with Google Alerts

Achieve Business Solutions — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 17:00:00 MST

Google Alerts is a notification service. The service sends emails when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user’s search term(s).

When setting up alerts you can determine the following:

How often you get notifications
The types of sites you’ll see
Your language
The part of the world you want info from
How many results you want to see
What accounts get the alert

Google Alerts may not be one of Google’s most popular services, but it’s one of the most useful. Here are some ways you can stay up to date with Google Alerts:

Find out who is talking about you

Google Alerts allows you to listen to conversations you may not be aware of. Conversations that involve you, your brand or your employees. As you establish and maintain your online presence, it’s important to listen to what people are saying. You want to know if other sites are linking to you, quoting you, supporting you, or complaining about you online.

Stay up to date on industry news

The more informed we are, the more valuable and influential we become. The good news? You don’t have to possess superpowers to stay on top of it all. With Google Alerts you can set up industry keywords and or phrases and get updates as they are posted online.

Know what your competitors are up to

When you create Google Alerts for your top competitors, you are creating an automated stream of intelligence. A few things you can use this data for include:

Discovering where competitors are building backlinks and where you can too! (We never buy links. Here's how we run SEO in Calgary.)
Learning about news-worthy moves your competitors are making
Being informed when customers post about competitors and learn what they like/dislike

How to Set Up Google Alerts

Setting up Google Alerts is simple.

Go to http://www.google.com/alerts/
If you don’t have a Gmail account, you can just start filling out the form.
Enter the search terms you want the Google Alert to track, separated by commas.
Choose the Type of results you want Google Alerts to find and share with you.
Choose how often you’d like to receive your Alerts.
Choose how many results you want to get.
Choose where you’d like the Google Alerts delivered.
Click the Create Alert button and finish.

Google Alerts is one of the easiest tools you can use to track mentions and alerts. It’s also 100% free, which is another reason it’s a great first stop. Make sure you don’t overwhelm yourself with too many alerts. Too much information can be just as bad as no information. If you find yourself skipping alerts because you don’t have enough time, it may be time to pare down your keywords.

Marketing with your Invoice

Achieve Business Solutions — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 17:00:00 MST

Invoices are often overlooked when delivering integrated marketing campaigns. Compared to other ways of promoting your business, creating a unique, customized invoice is by far the least expensive place for communicating with your customers. Invoices are typically promptly opened and reviewed– which gives you the immediate attention of your target audience and an advertising opportunity not to be missed. This form of advertising is not overly invasive and allows you to piggy-back an existing communication, avoiding additional marketing costs.

Here are some tips to put your invoice to work :

Build Your Social Media Following

If you already send invoices electronically you should update your template to include links to a few of your Social Media Profiles and encourage customers to follow and or like you online. By making it easy for customers to connect with you, you will be raising awareness of your company and can get your customers to help marketing your business online.

If you do not send invoices electronically, save a tree, a few cents on paper and consider making a shift from paper invoicing. Since an electronic invoice can be edited over and over again and new information can be included without any cost implications like reprinting.

Show Off Customer Reviews

Reviews are crucial for marketing. Right when a customer has made a purchase, when the connection is fresh, ask for a review. Include a link to your Google+ profile and make the review process as easy as possible. The easier the process, the higher the possibility of getting reviews from your customers.

Announce New Services/Products

Do you have a new product or service that you are ready to launch? Why not inform your current customers and give them first dibs or a sneak peek by including a link to it on your invoice? It’s the quickest most efficient way of reaching out to your existing customers while also billing them.

Collect Referrals with an Incentive Program

Inform clients of your referral program on your invoice. Offer an incentive or discount if they refer your products and/or services to people in their social circle.

Offer Exclusive Deals/Discounts

Offer your clients exclusive deals and or discounts codes on your invoice and keep them coming back for more. You could also add a link for them to share the deal or discount with their social circle.

Acknowledge Loyal Customers

We all know how important it is to build solid relationships with customers and to nurture those relationships into more loyal clients. A simple message on their invoice will jump out and show them that you acknowledge and recognize them because of their repeat business.

In Conclusion…..

Your invoice message/s should be short, direct and few in number – just one is ideal and variety is key. If the message changes all the time, once your customer sees you are using that space for marketing, they are more likely to look at it.

The message works best when featured upfront on the invoice, so the reader sees it right away before they get involved in the financial transaction of the bill. Since the bill is primarily text, using graphics is an additional way to draw the eye.

Realistically it is not what you put into the bill that is important as much as making the most of the touch point and reconnecting with your customer.

More low-cost ways to bring in work: see how we run marketing for Calgary businesses.

The Backbone Of Your Online Presence | SEO Guide

Achieve Business Solutions — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 17:00:00 MST

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Advertising your business online can seem overwhelming and time-consuming. The most important thing that you need to focus on is to build an online presence.

Your online presence is the sum of all the identities you create to keep your business relevant. It includes everything from customer interaction, online participation and social identity. With a broader online presence, your business will improve organic traffic, increase brand awareness, improve fan following and enhance your leads.

Search Engine Optimization is the backbone of your online presence. Once you have a website, your aim is to be found by search engines so they can list your website in their search results where potential customers are searching for your products and or services. Because search engine optimization can boost your company’s online presence, global popularity and click-through-rate, small businesses can see a significant change in their business outlook and growth when they invest in search engine optimization efforts.

What Do Search Engines Want?

Search engines perform the basic job by referring users to a website that they are looking for. When a user searches something using a keyword or phrase, the search engines list all those relevant websites showing a back-link and sponsored link to the search keyword. To determine the relevancy of the keyword, search engines depend on important factors, some of which are listed below:

Unique Content:

Search engines highlight contents that have relevant keyword, titles, phrases and descriptions. In short, they depend on quality content to determine the relevancy of the searched keyword.

Speed and Performance:

Search engines will never list your website on the first page if your website is slow. A website’s performance is important too.

Strong Links:

If your website has enough content to link and accurate reference sites to good websites, then search engines are going to rank it high.

User-friendly:

The layout, look and landing page of your website matter. If your website has a clutter-free layout, a smart design and has a low bounce rate, search engines will rank your website well.

Helpful SEO Strategies

Build Local Citations:

Adding your business to local directories can benefit you immensely but at the same time can be time-consuming. This process is straightforward and easy to accomplish. If you wish for your website design to boost in local search rankings, then this is a great local SEO strategy you can use for your business.

Here is a list of our Top Canadian Business Directories:

Complete a NAP Audit:

NAP stands for Business Name, Address, and Phone Number. By having this information consistently listed in important directories such as Yelp will help boost your rank. If you have an inconsistent or incorrect NAP it could hurt your ranking.

Get Listed on Google Maps:

This is an obvious one that any local marketing firm will tell you. You must create a Google “My Business” for each location for your business. This is completely free to do for anyone and will appear right next to other relevant search results.

Another important local SEO strategy to help with your business marketing is to create local landing pages that target local keyword searches.

Get Reviews:

Search engines favour companies who have more reviews. In fact, close to 90% of consumers have read a review to determine the quality of a local business.

No matter what kind of business you run, you always want to more people find your business. Implementing a good SEO strategy is one of the most effective digital marketing methods you can use to start you off on the right foot.

Optimize Images for SEO

An overlooked part of SEO is image filenames. When you import an image from a camera, it will have a generic filename like DSC_0007.jpg. and is not going to help describe the photo or earn points for SEO. Instead of leaving these undescriptive filenames, give the file a name that better describes it for indexing by Google.

Build Backlinks

Backlinks are inbound links to your website from another place on the internet. They are useful to search engines like Google because they give an indication if a website is reputable. Another website adding a link to you is essentially a vote for your website, as it shows their customers that they think your site is worth visiting.

A good backlink will have some of the following attributes:

Come from another reputable source
Be included on a page with relevant or related information
The anchor text will be a relevant keyword
Your own website will be of good quality

Want this handled for you? See how we run SEO for Calgary businesses.

Why You Should Care About Password Security

Achieve Business Solutions — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 18:00:00 MDT

We all know how frustrating it can be when you’re asked to update or change your account’s password/s, but it may not always be clear why. Having a strong password policy can avoid a number of dangers like identity and credit card theft. Even with new security technologies like two-factor authentication becoming mainstream, it is still just as important to have a strong password policy. For websites, devices and services that have two-factor authentication, fingerprint readers or other additional security measures, we recommend using those as well as strong passwords.

Limiting Multiple Hacks

It is easy to use the same password over and over since it’s much easier to remember one single word or phrase. However, it also means if one password is compromised, every account you have is now accessible. Changing your passwords frequently will make it so that even if someone does get a password, they cannot use it for multiple accounts.

Prevent Continued Access

Not all hackers will take what they need in one visit and leave. They may access your account/s and continue stealing information over a period of time. By changing your password you can reduce the risk of other people accessing accounts.

3 rules to remember when using passwords:

1. Choose a strong password. (See suggested rules below)
2. Never, ever reuse the same password for any reason, ever.
3. Change your passwords often. (Recommended every month)

Prevent Password Exploitation

If you switch or share computers with other people, or if you get rid of old computers without reformatting, it’s possible that anyone who uses your computer will have access to your saved passwords and accounts. If you have to send a password to someone, do not send it via email. It is relatively easy for an email to be hacked into and read by others, especially if there are unsecured servers involved. If you have no other option than to email someone a password, or if you receive a password via email, change it immediately! This can usually be done in account settings as soon as you log into a service/website.

Note: we do NOT recommend sharing passwords at all; this exponentially weakens security, as it creates multiple breach-points. We understand sharing passwords happens, so if you have to do it, perhaps do it via a phone call if you can.

Choosing a Strong Password

When selecting a new password, you want to choose something that can be safe from guessing and hacking. Some basic rules to follow are to ensure your passwords are at least 9 characters, contain a combination of letters, numbers and symbols. Avoid using any personal information such as important dates, addresses’, and don’t use simple words and phrases; if you do, make them grammatically incorrect.

One handy trick we recommend using is coming up with a short word or phrase, and shifting all the keys you type to the right (i.e. an “a” would then turn into an “s” and a “5” would turn into a “6”). For example, the password “butterFly” would turn into “niyyrtG;u.” Another trick is to put a number or symbol in the middle of a word, rather than the beginning or end. For example, “but5terFly” is more secure of a password then“butterFly5.

It may seem impossible to remember strong, unique passwords for every account; instead, we recommend using a password manager like Zoho Vault or 1Password.com, which generates and securely stores secure passwords for you, which are all accessible by remembering one single password.