What the Lumen5 text to video service taught me about...text

Last month, Sheila Scarborough wrote about repurposing content. One of her suggestions was to use Lumen5 to convert a blog post to video.

Lumen5 crawls the blog posts and makes a short draft video with key phrases and matching stock imagery. All we have to do is tweak the draft, maybe change some of the phrases or images (machines are not THAT smart!) and boom – we have a new video.

Good old artificial intelligence, or A.I., is supposed to make this process easy.

So I thought I'd try it.

I selected one of my more popular Empoprise-BI posts from 2018: Before Blogger is sunsetted, I'd better write this post on Google's customers.

When I loaded it into Lumen5, the A.I. went haywire.

And I can understand why.

My blog post writing style is notoriously dense. So Lumen5 had trouble automatically selecting portions of text to highlight in a video. When I tried to select text manually, even I had trouble.

Just for fun, take a couple of minutes to read my original post.

Now watch the video.



If I am going to convert text posts to video...

...they need more streamlined writing.

(Let's see if I did it.)