Putting artificial intelligence to use
Putting artificial intelligence to use
Thanks to fellow member bw2520 I added 20 more issues to my collection today.
Most of these issues did not have contents added on the website, so my first job is to type these in. However, the thought of a few hours typing didn't appeal.
Then I wondered if AI could help me out. And it turns out that it can and I was able to add all of the contents in minutes rather than hours.
Here's what I did in case it helps anybody else.
I took a clear photo of the issue's contents page, trying to avoid any text that I didn't want included. It worked best when the picture was up the right way too.
Then I went to Google's AI website (https://gemini.google.com/), although you could probably use any including Microsoft's Copilot.
For each magazine I uploaded the photo and typed in "convert image to plain text" (later refined to "convert image to plain text with no extra spacing" to avoid unnecessary padding) and was presented with some text I could copy and paste into the website. Although I spent some extra time to tidy each listing up by adding the asterisks to indicate sections and articles.
Even complicated contents pages like the one pictured here were able to be converted. And I rarely found any errors, unless the photo was not clear.
Last edited Mar 28 '25 at 09:02 (UTC)