Every March in the UK we mark World Book Day. It’s an excuse for children to go into school dressed up as their favourite book characters, and also to recommend the next new book that they’re going to fall in love with. At Vixen Labs our parents are perhaps a little old to dress up, but we loved the photos being shared on Slack of the Vixen Labs cubs.
LOOKING AT LLMS
We’ve been talking a lot about where to find the opportunities for Large Language Models (LLMs) to be applied. And World Book Day is one of them; how do we find more books that we might enjoy? Or more specifically, where can we find more books that our kids might enjoy?
This was an itch that had to be scratched, and out of it came a little internal tool that we’ve had fun playing around with: Fox Tales.
IT’S STORY TIME
Fox Tales is a quick proof-of-concept website designed to help make recommendations for books; you tell Fox Tales a few things about the books your child likes, and it’ll think about it for a minute and give you two or three other recommendations that might be worth exploring. Here’s a demo:
BETWEEN THE LINES
Behind the scenes we’ve got GPT 3.5 taking the input, working on the results, and then returning a set of books which we can then format and display to the user. Most importantly we’ve asked GPT 3.5 to return the ISBN meaning that we can pull other information from other sources, such as looking up a book cover.
This is a wide open recommendation tool; text (or audio) in, and a book recommendation out. But that’s not the limit for how we can work with LLMs, a common way of building a recommendation engine interface is to collect a number of different data points such as genre, or age. In our second exploration of Fox Tales we built a filter tool to help our parents fine tune a little bit more the type of book they might want to find.
ENDLESS RECOMMENDATIONS
In so many online demos we’ve been seeing the LMMs have been used in a chatbot type model; ChatGPT has set the way there. But these videos are just the tip of the iceberg; imagine limiting the responses just to a single bookshops catalogue of books, or a music publisher’s library, or to a tea company’s different blends… LLMs can not just help your customers have great conversations with your brand, they can help them find the perfect next product to add to their basket.
Let’s talk
Ready to see how LLMs can boost your business? Or fancy experimenting with us? Get in touch.
