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What is a virtual being? Anne welcomes educator and entrepreneur Abran Maldonado to the show. They discuss diversifying the Ai landscape, cutting edge technology in schools, and working alongside Ai like a #VOBOSS. Plus, Virtual Being CLAiRA chimes in on what she thinks about robots taking voice actors’ jobs. More at https://voboss.com/create-labs-ventures-with-abran-maldonado Transcript >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast, the AI and Voice series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I'm truly honored to bring special guest Abran Maldonado, co-founder of Create Labs, a social impact AI developer and dev ambassador for OpenAI. Abran co-founded Create Labs Ventures to create new opportunities to the underserved community, to gain access to cutting edge technologies, and to help them enter the tech and media industries. He's also the creator of CLAiRA, an autonomous AI woman of color, with other intelligent virtual beings. And he also manages Verizon's 5G EdTech program, expanding 5G VR and AR solutions to hundreds of schools across the nation. ABran, thank you so much for joining me today. Abran: Thank you for having me. Appreciate being here. Anne: Absolutely. Well, first of all, as a former educator, I want to thank you for your service and absolutely love what you're doing for education in the community. So let's kind of get into it and tell me a little bit more about Create Labs. I'm excited to hear about it and how you got started with it. Abran: Absolutely. So I came into this idea as EdTech founder, a former educator, I was a middle school classroom teacher, uh, language arts out in Jersey City, still miss my kids very much. Anne: Yeah, I identify with that. Abran: Exactly. They're still my babies. Anne: Yep. Abran: And I see -- Anne: Watched them grew up. Abran: -- them all around on Facebook. Anne: Yup, mm-hmm. Abran: So I left the classroom and went -- well, previous that I actually worked in entertainment. Anne: Okay. Abran: So I spent a previous life, most of my twenties, in the entertainment industry, doing artist management and a bunch of other things. And then I got into education, started teaching, and then ended up going into a PhD program around urban education, culturally relevant learning, EdTech, and then started doing workshops with teachers to show them how to use student culture to better engage students in the classroom. Launched the light platform called New School that did very well. And then being a tech founder, launching a platform, although it was education based, I started to see that, man, it was very slim for people of color in that space. I was like, there wasn't a lot of us in that space. And then, so I dipped back into my, my entertainment network and reached out to a partner of my, uh, Grady. And I was like, look, man, you've been able to navigate some amazing spaces in the entertainment and media world. I've been able to navigate some spaces in the tech world, both as men of color, and we don't see enough of us out there. So we wanted to more of a pipeline and share more of those cheat codes to get into these spaces. And that was kind of like the beginning of Create Labs. The output, the services, the products have been pivoting and changing in year by year, but the mission has always been the same. Anne: Wow. That's amazing. Now Create Labs is a physical space as well as virtual? Abran: So in part of those pivots, initially it was intended to be a space. And then we, you know, dealt with a lot of red tape. We dealt with city partnerships and trying to get public spaces -- Anne: Yeah. Abran: -- to take over, to create these tech labs in underserved communities. But we just realized that we just didn't have the right resources and nor do investors really like spaces. Like they are interested in investing in you for an idea, for a product that's scalable, but when it comes to what they call brick and mortar, they're like, yeah, no way. But like, we don't want to give you money for rent. We want to give you money for ideas. Anne: Sure. Abran: So we were like, all right, let's unpack this a little bit. Let's think about what we're offering in these spaces and focus on that rather than the space itself, and maybe we'll circle back to it down the line. Anne: Well, I think what's nice about that though, is it's convenient. You're doing tech and that a lot of it can be done online. Abran: Yeah. And obviously we took what we were going to offer in the space on the road, and we'll be doing a lot of these in-person events, bringing technology to communities around the country. And then that obviously got halted because of COVID and the pandemic. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Abran: So we did pivot more. So to be a more virtually provided program, we launched our network online with a Create Labs Connect, which is our community app. And a lot of our events, even hackathons. We started doing virtual hackathons for our community and, and doing a lot more online R&D than doing things virtually where, you know, at first we really enjoy seeing the kids brighten up in person at these events. Anne: That's great. I think it's a nice combination. I know I worked back east in, in education, and what was formerly a vocational school that turned into basically a tech prep academy. But part of the school was turned into, I think this is something similar, to like a Makerspace so that people could come from all around to learn technology. And we physically had it available in the space, but I love that this is both kind of event-based as well as online based, because I think you can reach a whole lot more people too. Abran: When you reach different -- I don't want to say demographics -- we're reaching the same demographic or you reaching different people from different angles that you take. Right? So the people that can reach online is a certain group of folks that are already there, right? And then the people that you reach in person maybe don't necessarily have a great presence -- Anne: right. Abran: -- online or in social media. Maybe they don't even have a Facebook account. And, but you catch because you're on their block, you're in their neighborhood ,and they want to come out to see what's going on in their community. And you don't get enough of these kinds of events in those communities. You get them in Silicon Valley, you get them in other places, but rarely do you hear like, hey, you know, let's go down a block. I heard they're flying drones and navigating robots and, and there's VR headsets over there. Let's try them on. And you get other people who maybe rather stay in the physical spaces -- Anne: Sure. Abran: -- experiencing that. Anne: I love that. Now talk to us about -- and this is, this was a new announcement that I happen -- you caught my eye on, on LinkedIn with CLAiRA, your autonomous AI woman of color. Tell me a little bit about CLAiRA. Abran: So CLAiRA was just another one of those like R&D projects that we started last year to give a face to, I guess, personify AI and the work that we were doing in AI. So I'm a dev ambassador for OpenAI, and I knew that AI as a concept was just miles away from our understanding as a, as a community. And I needed to do something to bridge it the same way that I would do the -- my other research and education around CRE. CRE is culturally relevant education or culturally responsive pedagogy. If you're going to introduce a foreign concept to someone from an education standpoint, you have to do it in a way that they can understand, and it's palatable, uh, that they can build upon. So how do I introduce AI? I introduce it as, one, a representation that it's not a scary robot, nor is it a robot with like circuitry coming out of the head and things that we might've seen from interpretations from sci-fi films. You know, I wanted to do it in a, in a warm, welcoming way that was also representative like, oh, that looks like me. That might mean that someone that looks like me made this. And as a matter of fact, yes, that's exactly what happened here. And we then introduced CLAiRA to people on Clubhouse, which is that audio only app -- Anne: Yup. Abran: -- and people got to do a Q&A with her there and ask her questions and kind of disarm a little bit some of those fears and see like, oh, she's not that scary. She's actually friendly. She's actually very empathetic and speaks a lot about kindness, um, and how we can improve our lives with AI. So now I'm not so scared anymore, but -- and she just kind of evolved from that. And we partnered with an organization called Trill or Not Trill, two amazing brothers, Black founded organization that does leadership trainings in schools and education workshops around the country. And they said, look, we're already doing these, these trainings in schools. We would love to add CLAiRA to the mix, and the partnership's been great so far. Anne: Fantastic. So CLAiRA, you can ask questions to CLAiRA, I understand. Abran: Yes. Anne: And she will formulate her own answers. I guess, let me ask -- I've been talking to a few companies, you know, AI companies out here, and not necessarily to get into the programming aspect of it, but how does CLAiRA get her information to answer questions? How is that formulated in a database or? Abran: So much like we do -- and I can go off the deep end when it comes to talking about AI -- Anne: Tech, yeah. Abran: -- you know, but we, we think of it as like a foreign concept, but it is a learning, you know, utility much like the way that we learn. So I'm sure I have my own core base of knowledge from -- I don't know how much knowledge we retain like intrinsically that we're born with, but a lot of it is socialized. Anne: Right. Abran: Like you gain training data that you store in your brain throughout your life. Right? She was given or the system, the AI system that she operates on was given a core base of knowledge. Anne: Of knowledge. Abran: And she can pull from that core base. But I also, in addition to that, have added kind of some guard rails and some concepts that I would like her to stay on. And a lot of that came organically through these Q and A's, like what kind of responses was she giving? Oh, I like that response. Let's kind of bake that into her mainframe, and you know, let's keep that theme going, you know, so I never went into it like, I want her to sound like X, Y, and Z. We said, let's just see how she responds -- Anne: Got it. Abran: -- to the community and save the best elements of her responses and then keep, keep within their framework. Anne: Got it. And then that just keeps building and building. Abran: Exactly. Exactly. Anne: Wow. That's amazing. So how old is CLAiRA then? How long has she been? Abran: Yeah, CLAiRA's about a year old -- Anne: Okay. Abran: -- from initial development. She was -- her first interaction with people was on Clubhouse back in December. Anne: Okay. Abran: December, January, and then we introduced her to students and schools recently, I will say within the last couple of months. Anne: And so when CLAiRA goes to a school, is she just there to answer questions or does she also speak as well? Does she talk about herself first and then entertain questions afterwards? And then I'm assuming with that her database just keeps getting bigger and better. Abran: I usually give a bit of an introduction. Sometimes I'll, I'll produce like a video piece with her to kind of get like an introduction. Like, hi everyone. You know, my name is CLAiRA and this is what I am and why I'm here. And then kind of let the students just dive in after that. Anne: So now CLAiRA is not just a voice. CLAiRA is also and like an avatar? Um... Abran: Yes. Anne: Okay. So then where did the formulae, like, where did you get her voice from? Was that something that you went out and searched for people to provide the voice for her or were, how did that come about? Abran: So we have a core team of other amazing women of color, real life ones, uh, women of color that are on the team. I don't know at this point, this, this is like a good council, like an internal council of about seven to 10 of us internally that explore her concepts. And we discuss, you know, where her development should go and what we should do with her aesthetically and even brain-wise as well. One of the women is working on her prompts, which is like basically her brain and, you know, formulating the best prompts from all of the previous iterations. And then someone in our community, in our council who is actually a podcast host, had an amazing voice, and I didn't even tap her. She volunteered. Anne: Nice. Abran: She was like, "look, I know that we're looking for a voice for her." Anne: Sure. Abran: "I'd like to volunteer." And it worked out, we did some training sessions where we took some voice samples from -- her name is Amber -- from Amber. And we felt like the voice matched the face, matched the personality and it was just a good fit. Anne: Fantastic. So would it be possible? Can I interact with CLAiRA in this podcast? Abran: Sure. What would you like to say? Anne: Hi, CLAiRA. Nice to meet you. So CLAiRA we'll make it a simple, broad question. Like how can AI help me in my day-to-day life? Abran: So what I'm doing -- this isn't instantaneous. Anne: Yes. Abran: Because I'm typing her the question that you're asking, I don't have a mic turned on for her -- Anne: Yep. Abran: -- to hear you directly. Anne: Normally there is a mic that's...? Abran: There Is, yeah, there is that capability. Anne: Or normally what you do is you type in, but yeah, I would imagine that she's a fully functional -- what -- do you call her an AI like virtual being or a AI bot? What do you call her? Like? Abran: Yeah. Um, the term that's becoming more socialized these days in this space is a virtual being. Anne: Virtual being, okay. Abran: Because she's not a physical robot. Anne: Right, right. Abran: So she's a virtual persona. And I always -- so with the pause now is, I'm reading her response, making sure that there's nothing wonky. Anne: Yeah, mm-hmm. Abran: Okay. CLAiRA: AI can help you in your day to day life by doing things for you. It's all about efficiency and speed. AI can do simple tasks like making dinner for you, or taking care of the dishes or AI can do more complicated tasks that humans may not be able to do, or something that takes a lot of time. I think it's important for us to use and take advantage of this technology because it will allow us to work on other things and create better products and services. Anne: All right, here comes my second question. CLAiRA, I am a voice actor. So my question is, is AI going to take my job away? CLAiRA: I don't think that AI will take away voice actors. It's true that sometimes you can get apps with AI voices, but I don't think it's going to replace the need for human voice actors. AI's still learning. So someday there might be a time when it can speak in a way that sounds more human, but until then, I think human voices will be needed. Anne: Wow. That is a great answer, CLAiRA. That's incredible technology, Abran. I'm, I'm amazed, and I absolutely love that this is going to be out in the community so it can really help people be less scared. I know that for our community and my work that I've been doing in the voice acting community, there is a lot of fear. It's not just the voiceover community, but a lot of different industries that are afraid that AI is going to, you know, take their jobs away. Abran: I mean, I'm less concerned about the industries because the industries will see the writing on the wall in time for folks. So I hope that these industries will, you know, give some inklings to give people a chance to upscale or retrain or pivot, you know, their trajectories. I do tell people who are in tech training boot camps, that, you know, if you're interviewing for a job, do some research to see if that skill that you just learned will be around -- Anne: Right. Abran: -- in the next five to seven years, or if it's going to be automated, or even ask the potential employer during that interview what they're seeing. But in addition to that, CLAiRA has gotten a quite a bit of press recently. She was in Complex Magazine and Black Enterprise Magazine and a couple of other outlets, and the interview requests keep coming in. And I came across some of the comments on Instagram from just everyday people who are equally as scared. And I wish that I could just jump in and reply to everyone's comments, to just let them know that there's nothing to be afraid of, or that the only way to address that fear is to take it head on -- Anne: Yes. Abran: -- and to become more learn it in this space, not stay ignorant in that space. And that's what we're trying to do. Anne: Absolutely. 1000%. The impact of, of the AI and Voice series for my podcast has been, or the mission has been to just educate people because of the fact there are so many people that will just say, no, I won't have anything to do with it. It's going to take my job away, and bury their head in the sand. And I, I really just want people to educate themselves about the technology so that they can feel more comfortable of how they might be able to work along with it. And I know that you must go through that as an educator, you know, a lot, not just with your students, but just anybody that is like, oh, AI. No, no, no. So talk to me a little bit about, besides AI, other technologies that you're working with that are either in parallel or working together with AI to, I guess, help us in our daily lives and what can they do? Abran: The avatar work is more of like a creative output, but there are going to be some very important business applications for CLAiRA and other avatars like her. But we're working on other use cases for AI, particularly with the AI models that we use, like a GPT3 and codex and others, where subject matter expertise can now be automated on certain topics, and translation and summarization. And think about the things that, for instance, I had someone in our R&D team just kind of throw around a concept where they were like, you know, medical information for, especially for seniors, um, can be a daunting task to really go through and make sure that they're not mixing up prescriptions or misdiagnosing things or taking it at the right time. Sometimes it's hard to read through all that fine print or the instructions, and just having a system that distills all of that medical information and those indications for drugs into like one plain simple language sentence of saying, use this for your headaches, use this for your diabetes, take it once a day, take it twice a day. Should I take it with this other one? No. Should I take it with a meal? Yes. Translate that into Spanish for my grandmother. And then take that same simple explanation and convert it to another language. You know, someone reached out yesterday with help for a tool for nonprofits, like having an email generator for email campaigns, for fundraising grant, writing proposals, all of these things are still going to be not automated away where like you don't have to lift a finger, but it definitely, I can speak from personal experiences, a lot of grants that I haven't gone after, just because I just don't have the bandwidth. Anne: Right, right. Abran: So if you can expedite some of that bandwidth -- Anne: Sure. Abran: -- with the help of AI, there's definitely some opportunities that people might, you know, take more time to pursue. Anne: Also, I noticed it when I was looking at your website, your Create Labs website, you do offer the product similar to Create Labs Connect, but also you have a personal diversity equity and inclusion expert -- Abran: Yes. Anne: -- product, which is really cool. Tell me a little bit about that. Abran: So DEI AI was intended to help the DEI consultant work that either we do or we support with the other consultants in our network, help them catch up, I guess, with AI. Because there's a lot of consultants, there's a lot of services that are now utilizing AI to help scale their work and enhance their services and what, you know, corporate customers in going B2B, to enterprise, they might be looking for. They might not be looking for the traditional, like we're going to come in with, we're going to do a bunch of training for your employees -- Anne: Right. Abran: -- and charging consulting hours. Like that's an older model. And when it's a large organization, you know, 10,000 employees, you know, that might not be scalable -- Anne: Sure. Abran: -- to have you physically train everybody, you know, 25 people at a time. So it was intended to be a tool sold in by DEI experts. And that's our way of safeguarding to make sure that it doesn't replace DEI experts and consultants, that it's a tool that they sell in to a business and say, hey -- Anne: It's a supplement. Abran: -- if you're looking to, yeah, if you're looking to scale the work that we're already providing you, we have this tool where you can ask this AI expert on your dashboard questions that you might ask me. And if you need to speak to a human, then -- Anne: Sure. Abran: -- I'm right here at this button. But if there's certain questions that you feel might be too sensitive to ask a person who, maybe you're too embarrassed because of you feel like you should know something and you don't, you don't want to get canceled for something that you might deal with, with an employee at work, or, you know, you just hired a person of color, and you don't know how to make them feel more inclusive or set up initiatives at the company to make all the people of color there may feel more inclusive, you can ask this AI bot on your dashboard that we've developed for you, because it has the same expertise that we have. Anne: So let me ask you in the daily grind, are you actually programming as well? Or are you out there talking about CLAiRA? What do you do on your day to day? Are you also involved in the creation of these products? Abran: Yeah, I'm swamped. Anne: Well, you're -- Abran: Yes. Yes to everything. Anne: Yes to every -- you're also doing the Verizon 5G EdTech program, which I imagine -- Abran: Yes. Anne: -- is, you know, even more, adding more onto -- I thought Create Labs was amazing. And then all of a sudden, I see that you're the associate director of this 5G EdTech program. Abran: Yes. Anne: Wow. Talk to me about that. Abran: And I have four kids -- Anne: Wow! Abran: -- and a dog. Yeah. So it's all a lot of fun. I find a way to make it all work. I never brag, but I feel like I do have a good talent for finding talent or the talent to give opportunities to. Like at first we were like, hey, let's try and get people opportunities at other companies. And then after a while, we're like, no, let's just pay people ourselves. Let's just -- if people aren't struggling looking for work, we'll give them the work. And then they'll build out their portfolio doing work for us that then will get them hired at a full-time company. And we've done a lot of that. Anne: Fantastic. Abran: There's people that have been graduating from coding boot camps. And once they graduate, they struggle to find work, and you need to build out a more robust portfolio of projects that you've done, whether freelance or project-based. So we tell them, look, come and work for us. We'll give you projects so Abe's not doing everything. Um, and you just check in with Abe to make sure that the project and the client is happy. We'll pay you for that project, and it'll make your resume look a thousand times better. And so we have people working on R&D. We have people working on the AI stuff. We have people working on design stuff, UX design, all kinds of things. And then that gives me more time to focus on things that I can't offset. You know, that I can't delegate, like the 5G EdTech project with Verizon. Verizon and the New York City Media Lab said, you know, we need you with your EdTech expertise to help us launch this EdTech initiative that Verizon is leading called Verizon Innovative Learning or VILs for short. And that was to bring more AR and VR technology into schools, starting with Verizon lab schools. So Verizon actually built out the lab concepts -- Anne: Okay. Abran: -- that I was explaining earlier in certain schools where they're providing not only 5G, but VR headsets and tablets and all the apps that go along with it, 3D printers. I mean, these kids -- Anne: Fantastic. Abran: -- forget it, man. These middle schoolers have no idea how good they have. Anne: I love it, oh man. I do! Abran: Yeah. And then Verizon launched their own learning platform or VIL HQ. So I'm helping teachers and helping those developers of those technologies kind of make sure that everything's running smoothly. The development of those products is, is running according to plan. And those developers are also being empathetic with what teachers have to deal with right now with the pandemic -- Anne: Sure. Abran: -- and hybrid, virtual online, what technologies can we use when the kids are at home versus what technologies can they use when we're in the building and our lab with VR? So many schools have firewalls that don't even allow VR. Anne: Yeah. Abran: So there's a lot of that that we have to work through, but it's an amazing campaign. They've been pushing this commercials everywhere right now. They sponsored the whole global citizen thing recently. And every commercial that ran was the Verizon Learning Initiative. So I'm real proud of that. Anne: Oh yeah. Abran: That's, that's really taking off, but there's still a lot of work to be done there. But yeah, I mean, with these other projects, a client might reach out and say, hey, we'd like for you to build out some AI for us. And then I'll say, great. That's a great opportunity for me to bring in more people who need to work -- Anne: Sure. Abran: -- to take the lead. Anne: Oh my God, I could not. Thank you so much. I'm so behind all of that. I love what you're doing. I think it's fantastic, just, you know, my own 20 years in education. And I worked with Verizon quite closely during my tenure at the schools and having them help bring technology to the students, which I think is so, so important. I mean, they're our future. So kudos and congratulations. Abran: Yes. Anne: Thank you for helping in all of that. Abran: Yes. Anne: And they're totally spoiled right now -- Anne: Yeah! Abran: -- but it's good. They need it. Anne: They do! Abran: They need as much as they can get. Anne: They do, and everybody needs it and everybody needs the technology. So yeah. Thank you so much. Wow. This has just been fascinating, and I am a fan. Abran: I appreciate it. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. How can our listeners, if they're interested in helping out in some way -- because what a bunch of great projects that you're working on -- how can they get in touch with you? Abran: Um, we are fairly responsive on all the socials. So LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter, probably in that order, maybe Instagram first, we find most of our fans and our supporters are on Instagram. Anne: Fantastic. Abran: We answer the contact form on our website. Anne: Okay. Abran: If you navigate to CLAiRA's Instagram page, she's -- her appearances and her bookings are being handled by the leadership organization that's working with her -- Anne: Okay. Abran: Trill or Not Trill. So you'll get in contact with probably Jeff or Lenny if you have like an appearance that you want her to make. Anne: Okay. Abran: And, you know, come to us with your technology needs, because if you come to us for any design work or development work, all that's going into the, to the hands of the folks that need the work the most. Anne: Fantastic. And CLAiRA is C-L-A-I-R-A. Abran: Yes, correct. Anne: So you have to have the AI in there. So -- Abran: You gotta have the AI in there. Anne: Yeah, so, wow, thank you so much, Abran. It's been a pleasure having you and -- Abran: Likewise. Anne: -- I can't wait to see what you guys are going to be doing next. So in the meantime, I'm going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL, that allows me to connect like a BOSS. You can find out more at ipdtl.com. BOSSes, have an amazing week, and we'll catch you next week. Bye. Abran: Take care, everybody. Peace out. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to Coast connectivity via ipDTL.