Exploring GPT-3: A New Breakthrough in Language Generation
Substantial enthusiasm surrounds OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, recently made accessible to beta users of the “OpenAI API.”
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Artificial Intelligence is the use of computers or machines that have been created to work and react like humans. Some of the computers that have AI, are designed to include speech recognition, and learn user behaviours so they can predict activities or decisions before they happen.
AI creates a bridge to a new kind of interface, making work processes easier for businesses and customers alike.
Why is AI Important?
There are constant AI technological advances being made, so why not make the most of them and start integrating them into your toolset today? Read on to find out just why AI is important and how you can benefit from it in your work too.
Lower Costs
By integrating Artificial Intelligence into your toolset, you can stand to both save and earn more money. AI will leave you spending less time on various aspects of website management and development, freeing some of your time up and allowing you to finish websites faster. It will also leverage your set of skills and allow you to build greater sites that people will be willing to pay more money for.
Improve Customer Experience
Artificial Intelligence can be used to analyse data in much more depth than the human eye, so will greatly improve the customer experience. It will allow a more personalised and streamlined experience that users will be grateful for. By integrating AI into your toolset, you will soon learn about certain trends and patterns that AI picks up and utilise this with future sites you build, as well as being able to make suggestions to improve the customer journey on the site.
It’s The Future
With so many devices in our everyday lives tuning in to AI, it’s important websites are no different. Just look around many homes and you will likely see a device such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home. Phone’s have Siri or Bixby and many laptops have AI systems such as Cortana. As our technology continues to develop, websites need to do this too. Soon we will expect everything to be integrated and be able to control websites in a similar way to our AI devices with voice control and recognition.
How To Integrate AI Into Your Toolset
Chat Bots
One popular example of AI that is integrated into many different websites now, is the chat bot. A feature on a number of major sites, chat bots allow customers to ask and receive answers to questions without an employee having to take time out of their day to answer menial questions that they get asked all the time. The use of AI cuts out the middleman and recognises certain phrases and words to give the most relevant and comprehensive answer.
The first chatbots used to rely on simple, pre-programmed conversational pathways, but these had disappointing and often irrelevant results. More recently they use sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) systems which are a lot more complex and don’t follow just a scripted path, but allow for more meaningful conversations.
Sketch to Code
If you’ve just started in web design, or there are certain elements you are still learning about, AI can help with “sketch to code”. This clever piece of AI can transform a handwritten note, sketch or diagram into a valid HTML mark-up code that maintains itself. This can work from something as simple as a new design for a quote system, to something more complex.
Background Systems
AI can work in the background of a site in the run up to events and collect key aspects such as website analytics. Once this data is complete, the AI can take final instructions from you such as the content, theme and color preference and create a design from scratch that it thinks will perform the best due to the intelligence and knowledge it has been gathering in the background.
Voice Recognition
Back in 2012, the W3C Community introduced the Web Speech API specification with the aim of enabling speech recognition and synthesis in modern browsers. At present, Google Chrome is the only browser that has introduced this, however there is a HTML5 Speech Recognition API will allows JavaScript to have access to a browser’s audio stream and to convert it into text.
It’s important to get up to speed with voice recognition API’s as it’s predicted voice control will be huge in the future. If populating websites, think about how people speak and be sure to include some long-tail keywords that sound more natural. This will help those sites to rank when voice control is adopted more widely.
Adobe Sensei
Adobe Sensei is an AI and machine learning framework that is powering Adobe tools. It is a handy option to add to your toolkit to manage and work on your files.
If you are sourcing images for a website in Adobe Stock, there are over 100 million assets to sift through. Adobe Sensei uses AI and deep learning to understand what exact objects are within an image as well as deeper components such as the aesthetic quality, composition, color palette and even the emotional concept behind the images. This means it can quickly find the image most matched to your needs, saving you hours of time you would have spent sorting through to find the image you want.
Yossarian
Yossarian is a great tool that allows you to craft mood boards. With an aim to generate new ideas faster, it cites itself as “discovery with a twist.” Yossarian uses AI when creating mood boards to return “diverse and unexpected concepts” that share loose associations with what you have searched for, allowing you to be more creative. It will source different ideas and inspiration around what you are searching for, including many you might not have thought of associating with your initial search term.
Brandmark
If you create logos and design templates within your work, Brandmark logo maker is a great AI tool to add to your library. They cite themselves as the most advanced AI logo design tool on the market at the moment. Whether logo creation is something you currently offer, or something you are looking to do, this AI tool can make it easier.
Autodraw
Autodraw is another useful tool you can use for design jobs, where you draw a rough sketch and it will turn it into a neat graphic. This is a handy one to use in association with the concept of sketch to code above. It pairs the magic of machine learning with drawings to help you create professional looking graphics and visuals, quickly.
Featured image via Unsplash.
Like it or not, we’re slowly edging towards a two-tier web: those sites that are secure, and…everything else.
There was a time on the web, when we didn’t have SSL certificates, and lots of people’s data got stolen. To address the problem, and regain users’ trust SSL certificates were introduced to secure sites handling sensitive data. And because they were initially a niche technology, you paid through the nose for them.
(An SSL certificate, for those that don’t know, is the difference between http:// and https://)
Then, thanks in part to privacy initiatives, and in part to high-profile data breaches, a few big players decided that all data should be protected. And the next thing you know, Google’s using SSL certificates as a ranking factor. And then suddenly browsers are warning people that non-SSL certified sites are insecure and they should “Get Out of Here!” And before long your hobby blog about cat-friendly board games is being billed hundreds of dollars a year just to be seen on the web.
Choosing whether to jump on the SSL bandwagon is simple: you have to have one. Finding an affordable SSL certificate, now that’s a challenge.
Most hosting companies will provide you with an SSL certificate as an add-on, and they’ll charge you anything up to $200 per year for it.
That’s why we’re blown away by ZeroSSL, because ZeroSSL is the first practical opportunity to grab an SSL certificate for your site, for free!
Get an SSL Certificate for Free
Now, it must be said that ZeroSSL isn’t the first place to offer a free SSL certificate. Plenty of hosts offer a “free” SSL certificate for the first year, when you pay for premium hosting. And there’s Let’s Encrypt which offers free certificates if you can work out how to access them.
ZeroSSL is just the first place to offer a genuinely free SSL certificate that you don’t need a post-grad degree in server engineering in order to use.
Get a Free SSL Certificate from ZeroSSL
Using ZeroSSL’s free-forever plan you can register three 90-day certificates entirely free. You’ll never need to pay for them, just renew every few months.
ZeroSSL also offers a variety of packages for simplifying your SSL management. The Basic package for example starts at $8/month and offers unlimited 90-day certificates, and even three 1-year certificates so you can renew annually and forget about them the rest of the time.
ZeroSSL also scales; if you need unlimited 1-year certificates — because you have, erm, unlimited websites? — that’s possible too.
Where ZeroSSL Excels
ZeroSSL offers a number of benefits over its competitors.
Firstly there’s the full-featured management console, that makes SSL management transparent. It sounds like a little thing, but with many other suppliers the first thing you know about your SSL certificate expiring is your site breaking.
ZeroSSL…makes managing your certificates…insanely easy.
ZeroSSL has an easy-to-use REST API, which can be used with the language of choice: PHP, Ruby, ASP, anything. It makes managing your certificates for multiple sites insanely easy.
Verifying SSL certificates can be confusing, and technically difficult. But ZeroSSL streamlines the process with automatic CSRs and one-step email validation (even for multiple domains) — considerably faster and easier than industry standard DNS validation. There’s even a one-click check to make sure your certificate is installed correctly.
Most importantly, ZeroSSL offers superb technical support on all of its paid plans. So if you’re one of the many people who started reading this post without fully understanding what an SSL certificate is, you can be confident that if you run into difficulties getting set up, there’s someone available 24/7 to dig you out of the hole.
Getting Started with ZeroSSL
If by now you’re planning to try ZeroSSL, the best place to start is the free-forever plan. ZeroSSL allows you to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time, so it makes sense to start with the no-credit-card option and upscale if you need it.
Using ZeroSSL’s dashboard you can create a free 90-day SSL certificate in minutes, and the step-by-step installation instructions will guide you all the way through.
ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection
ZeroSSL auto-generates certificates in different formats depending on your choice of platform, to speed up installation.
You can register certificates for multiple domains — you will have to verify each domain individually, but it’s simple to setup. Premium plan users can even use wildcards, allowing you to secure a site with multiple sub-domains, from a single certificate.
ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection and are the option that most site owners will come to rely on.
If you’re running an agency and you’re responsible for maintaining multiple client sites, ZeroSSL is made for you. ZeroSSL’s dashboard gives you one central location to monitor the status of all of your SSL certificates, and you can set expiry reminders to notify you by email when a certificate is about to expire.
Automated SSL Renewal with ZeroSSL
If that sounds too much work, and you’d like to automate your SSL certificates, ZeroSSL has you covered.
ZeroSSL works with both its own dedicated ACME Certbot, and more than ten other third-party ACME clients to fully automate your SSL certificates absolutely free, on a rolling 90-day schedule.
If you really know what you’re doing, you might even consider the ZeroSSL’s REST API. It enables certificate creation, validation, renewal, and management using HTTPS Get calls and JSON responses. The API handles millions of requests per month using 256-bit bank-level HTTPS encryption. You can access the API for free, and the Pro plan offers unlimited access.
Go Get Certified
There are millions of sites that drop traffic every month because they lack an SSL certificate.
Whatever your site, it’s not a question of whether you need an SSL certificate, it’s how you can affordably manage to create, install, and monitor a certificate.
ZeroSSL solves all of the problems of SSL certificate management, and for the majority of users, its free-forever plan is all you’ll ever need.
Head over to zerossl.com today to boost your traffic with a free SSL certificate.
[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ZeroSSL –]
Since its release in 2015, GraphQL has become the alternative to REST. It gives frontend developers the flexibility they had craved for for so long.
Over are the days of begging backend developers for one-purpose-endpoints. Now a query can define all the data that is needed and request it in one go, cutting latency down considerably.
API-First is an approach of defining your API specification before jumping into the development phase. With an API-first approach, instead of starting with code, you could start with design, planning, mocks, and tests.
By choosing an API-First approach, teams can crystallize their vision before development, removing the unnecessary complexity in implementation to deliver a resourceful, smart API that can no only keep R&D costs low, but has the ability to meet today’s modern IT landscape where a single operation to query several systems and components to get the job done. The specification is shared internally, as a general to-do list for the project teams to work on independently.
When discussing the development impact on existing applications while transitioning to microservices, there are five questions that keep popping up in one form or another. They are the same regardless of the size of the organization and seem to become part of strategy discussions later in the process as organizations move towards microservice architectures.
This week, we check out how Microsoft Teams could be breached with a single GIF image sent in a chat, and Auth0 by changing the case of a single character.
In other news, a report on security issues in smart home hubs has been published, and a new online training on OAuth2.0 and OpenID Connect is available.
When you are creating a RESTful API, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the different things you need to take into consideration: throttling, REST verbs, security, authentication, input validation, etc., so it’s easy to forget about the more subtle issues that can make a lot of difference in the long run. Most of the topics described above were already discussed (extensively if not exhaustively) elsewhere, so I’ll try to give my take on how to create a readable API for developers to consume. It’s a more subtle and less-discussed topic that can have a significant impact on the success of your API. After all, an API that no one can read, no one will use.
Use a convention for endpoint URLs and method names: plural vs singular – pick one. There is nothing worse than trying to fetch information from /api/v1/orders/{id} and debugging this forever just to find out that this is the only place where you have chose to use /api/v1/order/{id} (singular instead of plural) as the endpoint URL.
In 2020, you can’t be a B2B company without having an API program. Whether your API is the product or APIs are leveraged to enable additional integrations and functionality for your web app.
Even though an SDK could seem simple in terms of lines of code, SDKs need to be reliable and handle scale with ease. A poorly designed SDK could cripple your customer’s infrastructure and reduce trust in your service. At Moesif, we put a lot of effort into creating SDKs that are both high performance while adding in fail-safes in case bad things happen. This article walks through some of those practices. Given Moesif is an API analytics service, some of these practices are specific to high-volume data collection. However, other features are applicable regardless of your SDK purpose.
Modern businesses are highly consumer-driven. Delivering value to our customers should, therefore, be our first priority. Making the tasks of our customers more convenient and efficient should be our primary goal. To do that, we need ways to figure out “what” exactly makes our customers more efficient and brings them convenience in their tasks.
This requires a lot of trial and error. This requires us to build and experiment with systems and features to see if these capabilities actually bring significant value to our customers. This is the primary motivation that drives enterprise architecture to be much more disaggregated and composeable. Heard about “Microservices” anyone?
