So one of the projects I've been working on for the past few weeks is a way to automate the creation of my PDF handbooks. It's a painstaking, slow process. I hate doing it myself. I've had other authors write them for me in the past, like Alex. But I knew it was only a matter of time before AI got good enough to do it for me.

Well, after working on this for quite a number of hours, I think I'm finally getting close to a finished product. Check it out. Here's a PDF handbook generated from the video that's 99% automated. There are still a few manual steps, but it's mostly uploading files and clicking buttons. And I eventually plan to get that to the point where it's ONE click.

End of VBScript PDF

So, the way it works is, I upload the finished video file to an AI-based service that performs voice recognition and creates a closed captioning SRT file. That file has all of the timestamps for each line of text and the transcript. That's crucial for knowing where to put the screenshots. I then use ffmpeg, which is a video editing application, to detect where the scene changes are in the video. That's where I move from slide to slide, and that works great for the beginning of most videos where I'm talking about stuff and showing PowerPoint slides.

So, for the rest of the screenshots, I again send the transcript to OpenAI and have it use artificial intelligence to determine where in the video I'm directing the viewer to look at or click on. This is the part I'm still working on, and you won't see any of that in this video because this end of VB script video is all just PowerPoint slides. But I'll post something like this in a bit. I've been working on it with my Access beginner one lessons.

Then, once that's finished, I again use ffmpeg to extract screenshots in JPEG format for the time indexes that I've already listed. And then I use a little Word automation to have VBA create a Word document for me, which is then exported as a PDF. Again, 99% of this is all automated. I've got a little bit to go, but I'm very happy with it. And it takes making a handbook from a two to three-hour ordeal to just 5 to 10 minutes. And most of that is waiting for the AI to process.

So, check it out. Let me know what you think.