Welcome friends and visitors to Monet Cafe. I am happy to bring you this very peaceful, relaxing, and colorful tutorial where I will be playing with color and I'm going to be using a product I haven't used really with soft pastels before. It's gouache and it was very fun to use similar to watercolor but there are some differences that I'll describe in this video.  I'll be using two products in this video by the Arteza company. First you'll see this watercolor book that I'm using. I really like this. It's just a neat little book and presentation for your art. The two-pack as you saw before there is about $29. It's cold pressed watercolor paper. I did like the way it behaved while I was working on it.  You can keep the notebook closed if you want and it also has inside once you take that wrapper off. It's got a neat place where you can put your name and information. It's a good idea to put your contact info on your art supplies just in case you lost it. Another neat thing in the back it has this little plastic holder that you can put artwork in, maybe brushes, you know whatever you find practical for using in your art endeavors. So I was very pleased with this book. I've already used it. I have another one that I've already used quite a bit. Now another product from Arteza. Now these are not artist grade. These are student grade gouache paints and this it's premium. I mean they were good. I didn't feel they were inferior or anything but they're not considered artist grade. They are though archival which means they're acid free but the price is right on these okay and that comes look at all these colors. You don't have to buy the 60 set. They sent these products to me to review. So I really loved them and I hadn't worked with gouache that much before but you'll see how I use them in this video and it was really a lot of fun. And for the price you know you can just play with these. You don't have to be so serious. These would even be fun you know if you've got kids or grandkids and you just want to have a fun art project. It's a really inexpensive and fun way just to do like the video says to play with color. You know sometimes we just have to play as artists. We don't need to be so serious. Sometimes you need to paint with the intention of I'm just gonna throw this away when I'm done because it's just for practice. Often we don't do enough of that and we want to create a masterpiece. Now check this out. This is a really neat way to divide your paper in such a way where you can get four equal sized paintings. All I'm using is artist tape here. I'm just marking it out. You can measure according to the size of your book or whatever paper you're using and these are the gouache colors that I'm using. This is saffron orange. I love this color and I'm using these just to fill in the squares for underpainting a mood I'm setting by using the different colors. I'm speeding this part up but I want to make mention stay tuned because by the time I get to the pastel part I'm gonna do some real-time painting. I know a lot of you guys like that. So you noticed I put water down before I added the gouache and it just makes a more of a translucent look. Gouache is opaque for the most part. It's not translucent as watercolor and this is rose the color that I'm using in the next square but you can make gouache. You can thin it down by adding more water and especially this technique that I'm using right now by putting water down first. Again it just makes for a smoother application. Aren't these colors just beautiful? So again gouache is similar to watercolor that you can you use water with it and you can work on water color paper but it is more opaque meaning that you can actually put down lighter colors afterwards. Alright this color here is pale green. Oh just this is just a nice in-between green. I really like this color. But anyway so gouache can be more like a watercolor with more water added or more like an acrylic with less water added. So it's really just has a neat consistency I am good. I'm gonna do another gouache painting alone a bigger painting and apply pastels after I upload this video because I had so much fun with it. Again this product oh my water is dirty there. I'm just pointing out you want to use clean water and doing this. I had already changed it there but I had so much fun with it.  It was really neat. Arteza makes some good gouache. Now this is a pearl aqua blue. It's got a little pearlescent sheen to it. It's really neat. That was the neat thing. You don't have to get a set of 60 if you want to play around with these but it sure was fun and again it was only I mean I think it's like $50 for 50 I mean for 60 colors that's a lot. But again we got to have fun and oh look at that. I just slowed that down because sometimes I just enjoy playing with this beautiful color. Isn't that neat? It's my little tea cup I'm using. Now what I'm doing now is I am taking the color that I used and then I'm going across the color wheel to get its complement. The complement to that golden yellow color are those purples. Alright so I'm going to use purples to lay down my basic underpainting of sorts and these are the colors that I'm using here. I need a dark dark. Now that violet there is a really good dark dark. That's one neat thing about gouache also. Lilac and mauve you see that. So I have a dark a middle value and a light value but one neat thing about gouache is they go on darker and they don't they don't dry as light as watercolors. If you've done a watercolor underpainting before you usually get this rich gorgeous color and then after it dries it really pales out and becomes lighter which is neat too. So there's just advantages to each one and disadvantages to each one so you just kind of you know play around with it. Now again I've got my three different values here and as I typically describe in my on my tutorials we want to use our darkest darks for things that are vertical like trees okay and the closer things are the darker they are. The further things are the lighter they are in value their lightness or darkness okay. Also things that are dark are things that are in the foreground such as grasses and things and especially down deep in the roots of grasses but right now what I'm doing is I'm using and I'm still just playing here. I'm using some of those middle values there that pretty purple and I'm see how did it kind of in the middle and I'm making some directional strokes here. I'm using a decent amount of water because I do like that runny feel. I'm not trying to create anything specifically but I am going ahead and making a visual trail a value trail going through the painting that will lead the eye back through and it's already kind of setting my my root system down for how I'm going to lay those flowers all right. So you see I just kind of that created a neat little composition in itself. So I'm I continue to play around with these colors. I could have left this just like that and started painting but I just thought I'd go ahead and and play around and kind of see what these colors do and how they behave. Alright now I'm going to the next one which is kind of the rose and the complement to that is going to be one of those cooler greens, teal-y cool greens. Now I've got Viridian Green, Emerald Green and Pearl Eucalyptus I think that's called another pearl color. So I have a dark, a middle, and a light value. Now again that that dark green that I'm using there, it's pretty dark but you'll see in a little while how that purple that I did in the previous example. Oh look at that pearlescent color. It was so pretty. The purple is a good dark to kind of mix my other darks with. You'll see me do that. So these paintings as you could see from the beginning of this video, they're all going to be kind of similar in composition. I'm doing this out of my head because this is kind of a theme that I like and I actually have some trees in my yard that are shaped almost just like this. I have pictures of it and I've done paintings like this so I'm just kind of painting out of my head now. So you just create your basic tree line in the back and your trail and that's really getting your value set and that's really all you need for your underpainting. But here I'm playing with it. See that pearl sheen to that and this one how I think both of those have a little sheen to it. This one was a little too light. I'm just kind of seeing what it does but it was a little too light. But notice how this is a good example of showing how you couldn't have done that with watercolor. You can't put a lighter color on top of anything in watercolor. You have to preserve the white of the paper for your your brightest brights and your whitest whites. But with gouache you've got again it's like acrylic. You can paint. It's kind of like pastels. You can you can put layer colors and have it have it work well like that. You can put your lights down at the end sort of like we do with pastels often. Not always. All right this next one is that pretty green and if you go down to the bottom of that the complement to green is reds orangey reds. It can go even more into the magenta side but I'm picking here. Oh let me see did I write them down. Oh a crimson red, a vermillion red and a oh they're there. A pearl scarlet. And I don't often do a green underpainting like that. But I actually really liked this one. So again I've got my darkest red. Then I'll have my middle red and my lightest red. And again I use that purple for making the dark darker. All right so you just enjoy this next bit and then I'll get to the part where we have to add some grit to this to make these pastels stick to the paper. So I'll be back when we get to that part. By the way enjoy this lovely music. I was very blessed to have one of our members in Monet Cafe Art Group on Facebook contact me about her daughter plays the piano and sings beautifully. And she has some original music and she offered to let me use the music in my videos which was so great. You hear this peaceful music. Now here's my dilemma. Just follow me on the video as I talk. My dilemma making YouTube videos is YouTube doesn't allow me to share any music that has a copyright. And so that really limits me to only like the little sound clips that YouTube provides. They're usually only like three or four minutes long.  You've heard my videos. It works. But I don't want to... I like to listen to music while I paint. So this is why I often do voiceovers. It's because if I'm listening to music while I paint and it's music that has a copyright, most likely it is, I can't share that on YouTube. I have to remove the sound and add one of their sound clips. But what was so neat about this is Hannah's music. It's her original music. So I can play the music and work and record the sound. So that's what I'm actually doing. Not here. But when I get to the pastel part, I actually put on Hannah's music and I painted to it. And it was just such a beautiful experience. And I loved it. It was wonderful music to paint to. So you're going to hear not only her music but my little pastels scratching on the on the surface that I prepare. So it's just kind of neat that I could actually play music while I'm working and let you guys hear the real sound while I'm working. So that's coming after all of these under paintings are done. So stay tuned and pretty soon we'll be adding the product that will make this take pastel. I think a lot of you guys probably already know what that is. But it's coming up. I mentioned that, you know, I often forget that some people may be watching this that I have never seen under paintings. It is really messy at this stage and that's kind of the point. That's kind of what starts the looseness about it. All right, so now it is time to take our little creation and make it able to be able to receive pastels. And the product is Clear Gesso. If you've seen my videos, you know this is a great and inexpensive way to kind of create your own pastel surface. Pastel papers can get expensive, but you can use Clear Gesso on watercolor paper. Usually watercolor paper is relatively inexpensive and make a grit or a sanded surface for yourself because Clear Gesso has grit in it, little flecks of sand or something that creates that abrasion to it that'll allow your pastels to stay in place and not fall off the paper. So I, you know, with my Gesso, I kind of paint similar to the strokes that are in the painting. Instead of just a wash all the way across vertically or horizontally, I feel like it adds the texture, a textural element to it that enhances the painting when you go to apply the pastels. So that's pretty much all there is to it and then you just let it dry and it's ready for pastels. Here are the pastels I've chosen for the first painting that has kind of that golden underpainting. I wanted to have some orangy yellowy flowers, reddish orange flowers and some cooler greens for the grasses and some purples too. So I got a combination of pastels here, but this is the part where you're going to get to see real-time pastels and you're going to actually get to hear the music I'm listening to, which is Hannah's music in the background, and get to hear those neat little scratchy sounds. I love that when my pastels are being applied because of the clear gesso and the grit that it's added. So enjoy this. This is just going to be real-time and no commentary and I think sometimes the best way to learn is just to watch and these slower real-time segments really do help, especially beginners, to see what I'm actually doing. So enjoy this process. I'll I'm sure I'll pop back in later. All right. I'm about to finish this first little one up and I wanted to point out. Notice how I'm adding that blue. I had the background trees. I had lightened them in value and cooled them off with the purple, but this blue is going to cool them off even more to make those distant trees, really push them back into the distance. And you may have noticed I used a really beautiful blue that was my spicy color. You know, I love to pick a color that's just going to add some pizzazz to the painting and it was that blue that you kind of see under the the distant trees back there. It's kind of underneath the shadow bottom part of the tree. Now I'm incorporating a little bit of this kind of a teal blue in here. So this one I'm just having fun with color and and I liked it. I thought this one was really enjoyable and fun, but as with anything in life, practice obviously makes you better and I really feel by the time I got to the last one, I was just really getting in my groove. Okay, here's the pastels for the next one and the underpainting of that one was that pretty pink color and so now my pastel selections. I'm choosing teal blues kind of like for the trees and for that trail that meanders back through there and I'm going to be using the golden colors, the yellows and goldens for the field and the flowers in this one are going to be purple. So and you know I I've talked a lot about the color that I put down in the compliments for the the value kind of underpainting study, but these colors that I'm choosing also will compliment what I've already put down and I'm kind of going just on some gut instinct if you want to call it or just from all the many paintings I've done before and making color choices and the same will happen for you, especially beginners. I want to encourage you don't get overwhelmed or frustrated with all of this. None of this made sense to me when I got started too. I do think I have my leaning. If I have an artistic gift, I think it is more in the color realm, but it was not natural to me at first. It just it grew and got better the more that I practiced and so one of the best things that you can do as a beginner is just to emulate other artists and don't worry about doing that. It's like you're not copying another artist. You're just learning. Your own style will develop in time. So there's nothing wrong with doing that until you start to get some of these things. You don't have to think about them as much anymore. So and now you see how I'm putting down the darkest color of the flowers first. They're going to be purple and I thought that would make a nice color for this, the pinks that are under the undertones of the pinks, even though I'm going to cover it up with gold. But anyway then I add on like the lighter colors on top of this, but I'm not you probably notice these are somewhat abstract. The point of this was to play with color and not to create picture perfect flowers. I'm just kind of you know putting them in there just for color's sake and and also still just trying to have fun and not get too fussy with all of this. So do the same. Just have fun. Don't worry about whether it's going to be a masterpiece. These little Jack Richardson's notice sometimes when I put them down and I don't have a flat surface. They're kind of not symmetrically rolled sometimes so I have to kind of smooth them out. But anyway just play and have fun and don't worry about things coming out looking professional because they're not going to at first. And like I said before don't be afraid to throw artwork away. Goodness knows I have thrown so much away. It wasn't that long ago I throw away. Oh my gosh probably 30 paintings that were earlier I had done and I was just like nope that's just that's not me anymore. You know I've grown since then so and the same thing will happen to you. So all right I'm gonna you saw that one in the real time. I'm reaching my max with my YouTube upload ability here. I've got real slow Wi-Fi so it takes me forever to upload these if I get them too long. So I think I am going to speed this one up and the other ones but not so much. I know some artists speed them up so fast you can't see anything. So I'll maybe speed them up just a little bit so you can still see what's going on. All right guys enjoy. All right so I am wrapping this last painting up and wow I enjoyed this so much because I really did just put on some music and I mean other than setting up everything and doing the under paintings well it was all fun really to tell you the truth. I just had a nice time. But now here comes the really fun part. If you've never done this before when you put down a little tape border like this I mean look how messy the edges are right now. But the very fun reveal is when you pull the tape off and you've got this nice clean edge and it makes for a very neat and tidy presentation. I mean it's just kind of a cool effect you should try. Now I use the white artist tape here. It is it's good tape. It's more expensive than like blue painter's tape. You can't see it as good in this video but it works great. And you know if you can't afford to get this I mean use whatever you can right now. But I like this because it usually doesn't pull up your paper. It pulled up a little bit of the watercolor paper but not too bad. Now here comes the last one and you're just going to get this nice clean edge. Doesn't that look neat when it's all done? I just love it. So this was such a blessing for me to paint, relax, listen to beautiful music. And I hope it blessed you as well. And I hope you learned something about color. And if you haven't subscribed already please do so. And we are always learning and growing here in Monet Café. So happy painting!


Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. But you record the show as we are doing today, and it will be posted to our Encompass Live website later for you to watch at your convenience. So I'll show you at the end of today's show how to access our recordings. Both the live show and the archive recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries here, similar to your state library. And so we provide services to all types of libraries in the state, so you'll find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public academic, K-12, museums, archives, corrections, really our only criteria is anything that has a library or is doing something library related. We have guest speakers that come on the show from all across the country and in Nebraska. But we also have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do sessions for us. And today, that is what we have. It is the last Wednesday of the month, which means it is pretty sweet tech day. Yay. It also means that October is almost over. Oh no. Where does it go? So pretty sweet tech day is every last Wednesday of every month. Amanda Sweet joins us to talk about something techie related. We have other techie things on the show sometimes too, but you can always depend on Amanda being here with us at the end of the month. And today we're going to learn all about chatbots. It's true. That can really help you do all your repetitive stuff, which I love the sound of that. Ready? So go ahead and take it away, Amanda. So first in the chat, if you could tell me, does your library already use a chatbot or not? Because I'm willing to bet that a lot of you probably already do. And you might be looking for other alternatives or other options to do it, but while you're typing that in or pondering it, I'll kind of go over what you're going to find out about today. I'm going to kind of redefine chatbot because from what you, when you first learned about chatbots, there are a lot more different types of them now. And there are different categories and little offshoots of what you can do with chatbots. And then I'll go over some of the, there's a variety of planning guides for chatbots that are available online, but I'll share the one that I kind of adapted that seems to be working for people so far. And then I'll share some of the tools that are out there that go according to level of difficulty for learning how to use it, which is kind of the most common way that people have asked for recommendations for tools is how long is it going to take me to learn it? Am I going to need a lot of help setting it up? And is it going to be hard to maintain it and keep it going once it's out there? And then I'll just kind of go through some little tips and tricks that I picked up along the way. So this I'm not actually going to play it. I embedded it into the slides just for your future reference. I'm actually just going to talk about it right now. But if you want to actually get, if you want to share what a chatbot is, and you're trying to make the case for adding a chatbot to your library, you can use this video or something similar to it just to explain the concept and kind of communicate the idea. But a chatbot in general right now, they're actually better suited to handling really, really, really specific tasks. The chatbots that you probably most commonly interacted with are like through Amazon and through places where you do e-commerce. So they're designed to handle specific troubleshooting questions. And I'll pull open. Amazon's, actually the easiest way to do it is to show this slide here. These are two common examples of a chatbot that you've probably seen. The version on the right is actually through a service called MobileMonkey. MobileMonkey is one of like the top rated, easiest to set up and use. And you'll see that it starts off with an introductory question. And this is going to be the first thing that the user engages with when they're clicking and using your chatbot. And then you'll see where it's on the right hand side where it says set it for free Facebook group product support. You kind of want to set the stage right away for what that chatbot is actually geared to do. Otherwise, people are just going to start typing in any old random thing and be frustrated when it doesn't do what it thinks. Doesn't know what to say. Yeah. So you can tell off that the mobile monkey version on the right, the goal of that organization was to just do three things and interact with three different types of object or three different types of items. So when it says that chatbots are designed to handle specific tasks, this is what it means. It means that you have to assign it different categories. Otherwise, people are going to be super, super confused. So the right hand side uses a button system, but the left hand side is actually it has an AI baked into it. You don't have to know AI to set it up. It's already built into all these tools. But the reason that you can just type in any old thing and the chatbot will respond back relatively normally is because it's using that AI tool to kind of understand what you're saying and kind of learn the context and then it responds accordingly. And usually the tool on the left is usually a little more expensive than the tool on the right because the tool on the right is rules based. You tell it what to do, it spits it out and does it. The tool on the left is AI based. So it has that system baked in. You don't have to do anything with it, but it's more expensive because it was set up so that it would understand what people are saying without you telling it what you're saying, if that makes sense. And I'll mention, too, you said that the previous slide had the video there. The slides will be available afterwards. This is all on Google side. So when we have the archive posted up, you'll have access to all of these slides as well, too, in that video. And you may have also seen chatbots that have like a baked in personality. So I'll go back over to here on the left hand side. If you see the girl in the icon, they so the chat bot best practices recommend that you start kind of assigning a mini personality to your chat bot just so that people are more willing to engage with it. But they use an animated character because they don't actually want people to believe this as a real human. When people think that they're talking to a real human and find out that it's a computer, you lose trust from people. And people also it gets more confusing to actually get transferred over to a real human because well, they thought they were already talking to one. So be really careful about kind of the face that you're putting on your chat bot when you're designing it. And that's why I pull up in this example right away. And so the rest of it is just to. I already talked about the AI versus rules base. I'm just going to skip over to how chat bots are actually commonly used. Amazon uses it basically to automate their fact sheet. It uses it to funnel you over to say I want to get help using this service. And I need to and I'm trying to funnel my way over to a fact page. So you would click on a button that says I'm looking for help with Kindlefire. I'm using the Kindlefire 10. This is the appropriate tutorial sheet for Kindlefire 10. And if I need help beyond that, I can interact with like a natural language processing agent to get more answers about it. And at the library specifically, you'd be able to use it to say we're open from eight a.m. to five p.m. Monday through Friday and on 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday. And we offer black and white printer color printer. We have 10 computers in our computer lab and 15 tablets available for checkout along with like a 3D printer that you can use. And you can start automating it through so that people understand the services and resources you have available. And it would basically go through this system. I welcome to the Nebraska Library Commission. Would you like to learn about our services? Then you would have a system of buttons that say book club kits, tech kits of mail. Kristen, my mind's going blank. Can you list some services through the commission? Oh, like some of like the regular things we do. Um, grants, e-rate, talking book and Braille. You said that, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, I thought it really hard. I didn't say it. Yeah, certification. You know, we've got lots of really good basic, really good info pages for all the things that we do that discounts on products and services and Nebraska Access, Nebraska Memories, maybe one book, one Nebraska, which just got announced this past weekend. And so that way, like very easy ones, because it's just like sending it surely right to that page, just that page, just that page. And there you go. Yeah. And like that. So that would actually be a different way that people would interact with the Library Commission page is that like a little chat box chat bot would pop open in the right hand corner of your screen, say, hi, welcome to the Nebraska Library Commission. Which services would you like? And then it would be just this little list of like menu options down here. They'd click it and then it would shoot them over to like a link for a landing page. And that landing page has like it would you can click it straight over to the website or you can keep making them live in this little chat box until they get more specifically where they want to go. And this would be something too. I mean, we have so many things that we do here at this Library Commission. That would be a lot to list as we were just doing here. But something I assume you could do is, you know, take look at your website statistics and where do people most likely go? Yeah. What are they looking for? Almost often, if you have a search box, just a generic usual search boxes on your website, what are they constantly looking for? So the most popular things maybe put up here first, not everything that you do because it's a lot. And sometimes there actually is a resource that you want to promote, but people just don't know what's the thing that they can search to. Like in the beginning, people didn't know that they could even search for the tech kids of the mail because they didn't know that it was a thing. So you wouldn't want to promote something. So put it right up there. Yeah. Yeah. And because how can you search for something if you don't have the keyword for it? And so there's like a message and another I just got asked by a library about setting up a chat bot, one for workforce development resources and two for digital like digital literacy resources. So it would basically be and I'll jump back over to my little standby here. Hello, welcome to the public library. Which digital literacy tutorials are you looking for? And it would say it would have a menu that says job search skills, parenting and technology, team tech guides and like just a little list of your most common options and then people will be able to click on that button and it would shoot him over to like more specific categories. And then once they found the category that they needed, they'd open up the tutorial and then the little chat bot would say, did you find the resource that you were looking for? And you'd get like a little smiley or frowny and then you can use that to improve your chat bot as you go along. So like your chat bot can be used to navigate specific resources or category types and overdrive would also be a really good candidate for that. Or I guess overdrive is more or less Libby now, but you could add in like a little chat bot that says, welcome to the public library, would you like help using Libby? And then you could say little buttons that say set up an account troubleshooting, accessing ebook, audio book and like all the common different tutorials that way you don't keep getting that repetitive question over and over again. And any library that's been looking for more smooth ways to get people registered for events, you can also use it to as like an event information and registration form. And you can also use it to basically do like a chat bot story time. If you've ever used the Q-Robot, the Q-Robot actually has a chat bot that is geared specifically towards storytelling. So you can use that to like engage like a younger audience or to just give people something to do on their board. It's one of the top used apps on Alexa and Google like and the Google services. Like my dad uses the tell me a story function just because it's funny. And he likes to entertain my niece and nephew. Sure. Sure. Yeah. But we can move on from that. If anyone has any like preferred chat bot use cases or ideas of how they want to use a chat bot, you can also type it in, let me know. Yeah, yeah, let's use the question section. I made it as early if anyone is using chat bots at their library. I only have one person appliance that they are not. So I'm assuming maybe the other ones who else is here. Well, else is here is not as well if they didn't chime up and say, oh, yeah. So everyone's interested in doing this. I assume. Wait. All right. So once you have kind of your what you act a better idea of what you want to do with the chat bot, you can start kind of choosing what kind of chat bot would be best suited to meet your needs. So these are kind of like the main categories of chat bot. I already talked about that natural language processing one, which is basically you can type in any old thing in the chat bot. We'll just try to figure out what you were trying to say. And then it'll go through its little menu of what you gave the information resources you made available to it to route you in the right way. That is that one's a little harder to set up because it's kind of like the while, while West a chat box. You never know what's going to come out of people's mouths next. And the scripted and quick replied chat bots would be the example of like little buttons on the right where they just have to go through that little routed map where they only have so many options they can choose from. And the service and action chat bots are the ones that are geared to do specific tasks. So if you go over to this use case here, it would be the like a digital literacy resource navigation would be a service and like filling out a form would be an action. So if you did like event registration, it would be a service action chat bot. And a social messaging chat bot, like things like WhatsApp and some of like the popular social medias, they actually have chat bots that can be integrated into your website and kind of synced up that way. So. We'll get to that when I get to the planning guide. It's a whole thing. But the and the context enabled chat bots is like natural language processing and AI on crack. Like it just it does all the things and the voice enabled chat bots are like the ones that my dad likes to likes to use where he just says, Alexa, tell me a story or like and it'll spout out kind of like any old story or he really, really likes to make it fart because my nephew likes to hear farts. So. And so this is kind of like your rundown of what your options are. So you can use this as you're planning out what you want to do and just so that you know what chat bots are capable of doing. And so this is kind of like my quick preview at a glance of the chat bot tools that are actually halfway decent. There are eight million in one of them that are out there that I'm not saying the other ones are bad. It just these are the ones that I actually looked at and people got some use out of. So I just classified them out based on easy and halfway decent to use. And the advanced one is you basically need to know you pretty much need to have a developer like you can outsource it to a third party and they can develop it for you. Or if you happen to have an in-house person who is really comfortable with code, they can do it for you. But if you see anything in the advanced section, that's pretty much what you're getting into the easy section is you can just download a you can go to a website or you can download an app onto your computer. And it is like a simple template system that will walk you through step by step. And you can have like a chat bot set up in less than five minutes. And so the the ones in the easy section are really good for. So you automate a fact sheet to answer the common questions like hours, services, direct people over to tutorials. You can use it for the services and resources. Some of them you can use for the event, information, registration, not all of them. It depends on what kind of integration you need into like a calendar or registration platform. Not all the freebies or the easy versions have that integration baked into it. And you can also use it for like a to an extent. You can use it for chat bot story time. And the intermediate one that Zendesk one has the most flexibility. It's a paid one, but it's also got the highest number of integrations. And it's got the highest number of features for the ones that I looked at anyway. And it is like middle of the road. And IBM's visual chat bot builder is like the easy version of the Watson assistant. Visual chat bot builder is no code, but it can still do quite a lot because it's IBM. And so when you're starting to get into. Actually setting up and planning your chat bot. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to jump out of the slideshow here. And I'm going to copy and paste this. Into. Just a Google doc and I'll show you what it would look like to just do kind of a quick and easy fill out of these questions. It won't take long, I promise. So when you're asking, when you're trying to figure out what you actually want your chat bot to do, the easiest thing to do is actually just walk through your day in the library. And if you've ever used a worksheet called day in the life. And here's hoping I actually called it that. And I didn't call it some worksheet category. I did call it some worksheet category. Confounded. I'm going to do a quick scroll through my eight million canva templates on here. If I can't find it right away, then I'll give up the good fight and just find the equivalent online. I did not realize that I had made this many here. We love canva. So in the library, you would basically just go step by step and say, we open up the library, pull books out of the book drop, respond to early like the emails that stacked up in the inbox and reference desk answers these questions. Circulation desk answers these questions and just kind of start making a running list of what your entire day looks like. Once you have this, this is tedious, but I promise it's helpful. Once you have this all laid out, you can start establishing where the pain points are in your day. If you start saying once we we got our circuit or like our Cirque Dust people got everything checked in, but now they're starting to get a line of people that are asking for help setting like getting their tablets set up or they're asking for help for the computer stations in the front. Then you can start saying, OK, we keep getting questions about how to use overdrive. We keep getting questions about what time different activities are in the library. Then you can start saying, OK, instead of having to call up or search people or call up or reference people every time, we're going to start putting a little mini kiosk. This kiosk is just going to have a tablet that has a chat bot loaded onto it. That chat bot is going to have basic information about our hours. It'll talk about the return policy. It'll talk about the which events are going on that day and it'll talk about which events are going on that week because we ran through our day in the life here and we pinpointed the most common questions that we get and the common things that we run into that we just don't have time to do. And tracking out the emotions of staff to find out where people are frustrated and where people are feeling OK can be really helpful. And tracking out where you are in the library will help to find out whether that chat bot is going to be embedded into a separate kiosk. Let's just set out or if it's going to be embedded into like a computer lab workstation so that anyone can access it or if it's embedded onto like the library's website so people can get to it from home and from anywhere there may be. And so that is your basic and for this I'll actually put in the link to this template just in case people want to use it. So I'll go in here and link it there. Now you have that canva template just in case. So let's assume that you filled out the canva template. And found out that you want to be able to direct people over to digital literacy resources over drive tutorials which kind of the same thing but you know you get the idea. And I'm going to turn this into a one and this into two. So now when it says what is your communication workflow and where does the chat bot fit into this. This is where you would start filling out like a little and this one will actually switch back over to the dots. So patron walks into library approaches. Front Cirque Desk asks Cirque Desk for help with digital literacy. Cirque Desk sends patron. To reference desk and reference desk looks up tutorials on resource portal. Ref desk asks like narrowing down or focusing questions. I mean they ask reference they ask reference questions understand patron problem. Tutorial or resource online or library service options. So the online or service options would be a patron walked into the library. They said they really needed to help learning Excel because they needed to get a job. And some libraries would wind up sending them over to like LinkedIn Learning or to the Goodwill Foundation to be able to get an Excel tutorial. Others will say that there's a local community college that offers an Excel class for low cost. Others will say that they offer an Excel class in the library. So that's when you start prioritizing which one of those options you want to promote first. And how you're supposed to be able to handle those different questions. So this is just your understanding of what people do. Your next question is where does a chatbot fit into this equation? Is this actually a good problem for our chatbot to solve? Or is there some other better way to do it? So then you start asking yourselves alternatives to say if we had a chatbot available. So how many people actually choose to go from the circulation desk over to the reference desk and stands in line to get their question answered. Are you losing people as you're making that shift over? In which case you'd want to actually embed a chatbot in the Cirque desk station so that people don't have to make that leap. And you'll keep and retain more customers that way because you're making life easier for them. And you can also make it so that the chatbot with your digital literacy resources has actually baked into your library's website. Because you look back at that first step and say the only reason a patron walked into the library is because they had a clear and set goal that they wanted to learn Excel. But if people don't know which technology and resources exist and what their options are, they would never walk into the library to begin with. So if we put that digital literacy guide that digital literacy chatbot into the library's website to begin with. The people who never knew that the library had parenting and technology guides and teen tech safety guides and teen tech fun activity guides. The people who didn't know about those would now know and then they'd start using the stuff. Did I explain that halfway decently or do I need more coffee? It made sense to me. Oh, good. It's the kind of thing that libraries struggle with all the time. They don't, somebody asked about a thing that we've been doing forever and well. Right. Definitely. So at this point, this is where a lot of people start busting out their post-it notes. And I'll, I'm going to drag over this here. So this little chat, this little chatbot building guide is going to be your best friend as you start putting this together.  You can close your eyes for a second if you don't like the scrolling motion. But I'm looking for my little post-it planning guide that walks through the workflow of what people have to go through to get where they want to go. Because that is the best visual representation that you can use to route out your chatbot. Oh, come on. It's a big, bright, colorful post-it chatbot. There, here it is. So what they're using here is a tool called Miro. Miro has both free and paid options, but I use the free version.  And you can say patron walks into the library. In this case, they already know what they want. And now they went to the Cirque desk, they need to go to the Ref desk. The Ref desk will then look in their little, they'll start asking questions and start narrowing focus to which option that the person wants. So you start laying out stickies for the path people have to take. And each, every time you have to make a decision, that's a new little branch in the tree. This is like a decision tree. And this is going to help you lay out and plan the chatbot so that you know the steps people are going to take to get where they want to go. And then this translates over into the actual chatbot itself. And you'll find out in that workflow of how, of where people go, what is handled by the bot itself and what is handled by a human. Because if you're going to be sending people over to get one-on-one help with learning a specific part of Excel, your bot can't do that. But your bot can do an easy transfer over to the reference desk so that the Ref desk can easily step in to take that over. And if a person has to be waiting in line for too long or they have to manually physically dial a phone or figure out what they want to say in an email, that's when you start losing people more and more. When they have to, the more work a person has to do, the less likely they are to follow through to get to the end goal. And it's what Google has done to people. Yeah. I mean, yes, eventually they may have to actually talk to a real human. I'm all about doing as much online and email as I can. But it's going to happen at some point that you're going to have to. Yeah, depending on your issue, your question, whatever. Yeah. And as far as you can without having to do that. I mean, the whole basis of this, we talked about the beginning. There's so many things that we already have the information on our website. We just need to get them to the right place. Like, I don't know, even with the math on it, the percentage is at least 75, 80% of the things that I answer in emails or phone calls is just, the information was out there. Yeah, they just didn't realize it. And I just go to our website and send them the info and the right page to go to I do it. I'm the chatbot. Making you taking your time out from doing that. And yeah. And like, like the sheer number of people, like I just went to like a couple of different conferences and like the sheer number of people who walked up to me and said, I kept meaning to email you and ask you. Or I kept meaning to call you and ask you. And then they would like ask me in person or they would like, but then when I just set up like a little button that says, click this button to fill out this form or click this button to ask this question. Then they don't have to go through a separate little service to write out an email. It kind of prompts more people do it. Yeah. Yeah. Add an easy button. So in this case, when you're actually designing your chatbot, it would look like patron opens website pop up appears in bottom right chatbot greeting. Welcome to, I would just say, which digital literacy resource would you like, and you can add as many different categories on here as you want. You can even break out like, which makerspace resource would you like or which job search resource would you like and say like resume building or interview assistance so you can break it out however you want to do. You just want to make sure you have that really specific greetings so that people know this is the narrow topic that this chatbot can help you with. And then this would be the decision tree, and it would send you over to so user chose parenting and technology. New menu opens. That says cyber safety, or I'll say cyber bullying recommended team tech guide online communication. There's a mess of these but I'll just leave it at that. Just keep going. Yeah. And then so if they chose team tech guide new menu opens link to specific website or guide link to information page about upcoming workshop. Yes, speaker, etc. link to local partner resource, and then it would go to when someone chooses from that menu. Question pops up. Did you find the resource. You were looking for smiley frowny. Yeah, frowny is any why I'll take it whatever. And then you can use this as your feedback to say this is working. This isn't working. So that is basically just your quick and easy mapping for what your chatbot would actually look like. And you can either put it into a big long list like this, or you can put it into your post it style like. I'm going to close this close this. Oh no, did I close my post it style. Don't matter. You saw it. You can put it into the post it menu with like little decision tree. It's cool looking. And so then this question is whether you need to actually have your chatbot be compatible with different social media platforms or social media platform services or compatible with different telecommunication software. So if you want to be able to directly forward someone over to a to your to the front desk phone, or if you want to be able to directly transfer someone over to like a Instagram or so or like Facebook, then you need to know that the service you choose is integrated with that platform. So let's say that you want to be able to integrate with phone system or forward to specific numbers. And you also want to integrate with WordPress. So then you have your criteria set for what you need to find for compatibility, and your budget is nothing anyone who wants to experiment. Then you want to set out a plan for how you're going to train and implement this chatbot because if you have a large staff half the people aren't even going to know that it exists and is an option or they're going to start getting calls or questions about it and they're not going to know how to answer them. So you can start saying one day workshop, then online fact portal knowledge base for staff, or monthly webinar. I'll say monthly or monthly is fine. So how are you going to let staff know about this and support them in being able to implement it and management training update guide. And then from the type of chatbot that you want to use you would just go over to this slide here.  And so this one, we want the service or action chatbot, and you want it to be able to do and sometimes these overlap. So like the scripted quick reply is like that button one, and it also happens to be a service action because of what it's doing. So you want it you want to know that it can do this on the right hand side. You don't need my email. What type of chatbot do you want service action button based. So the chat bots and the list that I provided can do both AI and button based chat bots. Some of them can only do button based. And some of them can do like a hybrid between the two. So that's why I put that in the planning cheat so that you don't get any surprises. In this case, we are going to use video. So I've got just a few minutes left. So, and luckily it is super easy to actually set up to do. So, to do is actually a, there are free and paid options. And it's basically just a template portal that you can use to set up. This is, this is what the main dashboard for to do looks like there are different templates that you can choose from that you can just set up. This is a really fun engagement tool that you can use just for kids that are wanting to do like a Halloween or a holiday activity just online, like bring kids in and get them interested. They already have like pre made color palettes and everything like that. And you can also choose like your specific end goal in mind. So in the library increase sales would basically be bring more people into the library, or increase circulation or increase maker space use. So sales is just an increase in the amount of people using your stuff. And generating leads would basically, and you'll use that, but in some ways, but he's going to translate it into library. Yeah. Talk about more, you know, something we're always struggling bringing in the non library users. Yeah. Yeah. And solving problems is basically, I can't find a thing. I don't know what I want. I don't know what I need. I am having trouble communicating with my teen about tech. I don't know what to do about cyber bullying. I don't know how to, I'm looking for a job. I'm looking for local job support resources. You're helping someone solve a problem and navigate to a solution. So let's explore templates for problem solving. And I am going to go over to oh, they added a, they have an AI response. Oh, they added stuff. I like that. So I'll go over to automate repetitive answers and we'll use this template. And I'll just click that and say use template, loading, loading, loading. And then I'll click on this one. So you click on this first step and then it'll pop open like a little prompt, where you'll put in the question. This is a trick question because most patrons don't actually use the term digital literacy. They have no idea what it means. And then you can go over to click over to the next one. And you can start automating your answers. And this is where you can start saying how did it go. So I just toggled over and said, it'll ask basically ask for feedback as to whether they got what they were looking for. And you can also, if you want to be able to get more specific about how you're guiding people over to where they like what you want. You can also add in images and different things that'll specifically describe what they're looking for. And come on. And the delay time is how much time goes in between each different prompt. So you don't want to overwhelm people by pop like popping up or open a new question every second because they won't have time to read it. So it's defaulted to say wait four seconds between each question. So people have a little time to process. And then you can start asking like different questions so that you can. Let's say that the next repetitive answer question is Excel questions or Excel resources. And you can also go through and say, you can give your options in here. Parenting add text, job search word and Excel and save and activate. It doesn't like something in here. Let's find out what it is. It didn't like it because I had that little empty box where it thought I was going to upload an image. And I didn't upload it. So it just said, by the way, did you know you had this and you didn't use it. Cool. And then you can go through here and so this is where it'll actually it'll start tracking the responses and the interaction with that form. That's actually good because someone just asked a question about that. Yeah, yeah. This is a good question for what it leads into as well. Do any of the bots that were suggested track usage statistics. Yes, yeah. Now the usefulness of a bot to justify the need for adopting live chat based on how often it's used. So like, could you use your bot statistics, which the whole point of that is to help you answer these repetitive questions but are there certain things that keep getting more in depth I guess that they need to talk to a real person so then these statistics help. They actually now we really need a live chat. And this is our proof of that. Of course this one doesn't have any stats loaded in yet, but it'll actually go day by day the amount that it was interacted with. And different chatbots have different levels of tracking. And for the most part, like the video app will track what you need, but you can also do more like you can do a higher level of analytics with. When you get to the intermediate and advanced versions, you'll also get a higher level of analytics and tracking. Nice.  So when I go over into and logging into my WordPress website, and then going into the video chat, loading, loading, loading, sipping, sipping, sipping. It'll ask you to log in, and then it'll ask you which project you want to integrate into it. Loading, loading, loading. It's going to special kind of slow. Of course. And then you can go into your pages, or you can go into pages posts wherever you want it to live. Wait for it to turn only stop bouncing. Go into I'm just going to add a new page. Don't matter. I'm going to delete it later. This I'm on a training site. Now this is basically like a platform for like a playground for testing out different stuff. And I'll go into this plus sign. Go to browse all so I can get to my plugins. And I am looking for wherever to do landed. And just search it. I can tell you where it used to be. So the other thing I'm going to do is I will just try this because they may have updated it to just automatically embed. So let me test this out. I'm going to open up a different browser. Open this. So then there's another thing that I can try. Which is. Did I sync it to the right site? And did I select the right project for embedding? Or did they update their instruction and you just need to Google a tutorial. I'm going to go with the last one. Don't take this out on Tideo. This is a me thing. I should have run through this and found out if they updated their instruction for syncing stuff over because I've used eight the million tools and sometimes I mix them. Yeah, that's technology for you. Yeah. So don't take this out on Tideo. It's still an awesome tool. It just you need a tutorial to get the updated instructions to sync it over to a page. Are there any other questions about chatbots and which ones to choose? Let's see here yet. Does anybody have any other questions? We are a little after 11, but we started 11 am central time. But we just started a little after 10 am central time. So that's okay with us. We will stay here and answer any questions you do have. Go ahead and type into the questions section of your go to webinar interface. If you do have any questions, comments, thoughts, anything about chatbots. Are you going to use one at your on your library website? Are you thinking about trying it out? You can always reach out to Amanda with any questions you have later if you can't think of anything right now. That's great. If you start trying to work on one of these and as Amanda just experienced things don't seem to be doing what they should. Look for up to info or yeah, reach out to Amanda. No problem. She will help you get things going. Nine times out of 10 you go to the Tideo tutorials and it's just right there. Yeah, so it'd be too hard to figure. Yeah. And they also have like an entire page full of tutorials. So and they have like a whole getting started guide and like a easy installation.  Tideo is awesome. And install Tideo. If you are using Nebraska libraries on the web, Tideo is already automatically installed into the WordPress installation. So you can skip this part for adding the plugin. And all you would have to do is create the free account for Tideo. And set it up so that it goes the little steps that you want it to and sync it over to I'm scrolling down to the site to the part where you embed it into a page. By default, the Tideo widget is located on the lower right hand corner. You can change position. Okay, so what happened is that when I when I synced it over to the site. It either sync to a different site or did not sync that specific chat bot that I just created. So it didn't know which one to pop in. So there you go. Yeah, and for those of you just wondering the Nebraska libraries on the web project that's where here in Nebraska at the Nebraska Library Commission we will host websites for public libraries on WordPress installs for free. So if you are in Nebraska library and need a website for your library contact Amanda and get one. True. We have over 130 libraries now and I'm not sure what the number is at the moment I know that's what it says in the site there. I think it's up to like 137 or 130 something. Nice. Yeah, there's always new ones that yeah. Yeah. And so we do have a question here that's more for me yes and the recording for this webinar yes, we record every week and compass live and it's posted to our website. After today's show is ready there man has got it for me awesome. That's our main and compass live page as you can see you can just search and compass live. Your search engine of choice but the only thing called that on the internet. And you'll find our site there's our upcoming shows and the link right there to archived and compass live shows. Go ahead and click on it and Amanda. And this is where this one will be it'll be at the top of the list most recent ones first. Should I should have it processed and ready sometime tomorrow. So everyone who attended today's webinar and registered for today's webinar will get an email directly from me letting you know. We just posted it onto our Facebook page and our social media as well on this archive page while we're here there is a search feature so if you wanted to know if there was something we've done a particular show about you can search for it. You can find all the pretty sweet tech shows yeah. So there's the full show archives or the most recent 12 months as you saw one Amanda scroll scroll down there. This is our full show archive going back to when and compass live premiered in January 2009. So, there's a lot of things there. So just keep that in mind when you're watching any of these archives you can see it does give you the date when something was originally broadcast. So, things may change over time, resources and information maybe totally different services and products may have changed drastically or no longer exists at all. But for you know where librarians and this is one thing we do keep things available for historical purposes. And as long as you have somewhere to host stars, it will always be there. Right now, all of our archives are on our YouTube channel the Nebraska Library Commission's YouTube channel. So, as long as we have YouTube and a place to host them they will always be there. If we ever need to move them somewhere else we do have our own in house copies of all these archives to but for now, everything is right there on our YouTube channel. And if there are slides we put links to slides. If there are handouts or other resources we put links to those that you know whatever the presenters have provided us with we will put links to. So, our recordings are both also free and open to anyone. So, if you find something there and you know share it as well. They never, well, that's how long do we keep recording yeah they never expire we never take them down, but the information might be come old and outdated. Some of them stand the test of time, no problem. But you're trying to find the compass lives Facebook page. Yeah, if you go back to the compass live site there's a link there on it. Yeah, we have a link on the end compass live main page and on each event page. If people have dug down that far there right there up to the right next to the logo. Yeah, there you go. There we go. There's our compass live website or Facebook page if you like to use and compass live give us a like over there. We do reminders like there's reminder logging today show you scroll down there's a little intro to our presenters. When the recording is ready we I also posted a message up here letting people know that it's ready. You can also follow the hashtag and comp live little abbreviation for our show. And when we do a pre sweet tech one I also add a pre sweet tech hashtag to. And that's on our Facebook we have Twitter, Instagram. I think that's what we're all using right now the commission to promote stuff. So anybody have any other questions for Amanda. About her presentation about chatbots. There's our upcoming schedule. If you, if you want to sign up for any upcoming shows. I've got you'll see there's some open dates there I'm working on confirming things for those different dates so keep an eye on the calendar. For new things being added. Not sure what Amanda has on deck for next month for pretty sweet tech we'll find out. Oh, it's funny because I just said like, Oh, I'll do this and now I don't remember what that was anymore. We've got a month that's figured out but you see even started getting into our January 2023 shows. You'll notice here we do have I like to highlight this Sally Snyder our children's new services librarian every year does a series of presentations for us, one on the upcoming summer reading program titles for that, and then a best new children's books of this year and tune teen books of this year so what has come out in the previous year. And we've got those added to our account our schedule now so if you, I know those are very people always waiting to hear what Sally titles that she's come up, come across over the past year. So those are all schedules in there and then what title she is found that might be good for next year's summer reading program, the theme of all together now. How do you do the Internet Librarian recap because that just ended. Oh, right yeah Internet Librarian conference was just last week. If I had thought about it I would have done it this week that. Quick turnaround. It's okay. Yeah so next month we look for that we'll get a description of their specifically specifically for that. I think we'll wrap things up and doesn't look anybody had any other questions that came in while we were chatting here. That's fine, you know where to reach out to Amanda about her presentation or myself about the show. So thank you everybody for being here good to see you again, Amanda. We'll see you in a month. And hopefully we'll see some of you all joining us either future episode of encompass live. All right, bye bye.