Building a Document Q&A System with Google Gemini / / No Comments Document summarization is a powerful and pretty darn useful feature of generative AI, but a proper "question and answer" system can really enable users to interact with a document. This is why you see various document viewing apps, like Acrobat, adding these features to their programs. I thought I’d take a look at building such a system via a simple web app to see how difficult it would be, and honestly, it wasn’t that bad. Having this in your own web app, versus an external vendor, gives you more control over the experience as well. Here’s what I built. The Stack The web app lets you drag and drop a PDF into the page, it then renders a preview of the PDF on the left... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, Document, Gemini, Google, system
How Google Maps Works / / No Comments Google Maps Explained is an awesome walkthrough that breaks down how Google Maps figures out the best route when you ask for directions. The star of the show is Geo, a cute little green guide who walks you through the behind-the-scenes magic that makes Google Maps so smart. At the heart of Google Directions is some seriously clever tech – powerful pathfinding algorithms. These are Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Google, maps, works
The Google Maps Platform Awards Winners / / No Comments Google has announced the winners of the very first Google Maps Platform Awards. The awards were launched to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of the Google Maps API and were open to anyone who has used the Google Maps Platform over the past two decades.As one of the judges for the competition, I can attest to the overall quality of the maps submitted. Winners were named in 10 Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Awards, Google, maps, Platform, Winners
The Google Maps Platform Awards / / No Comments To mark two decades of mapping innovation, Google has announced the Google Maps Platform Awards, a new program created to celebrate the developers and innovators who have shaped the digital mapping landscape over the past 20 years. For those who build with geospatial tools, APIs, and data this is your opportunity to showcase your best work.Google aims to recognize the impact that developers have Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Awards, Google, maps, Platform
Parsing Uploaded Resumes into Form Fields with Google Gemini / / No Comments As I’ve recently become somewhat familiar with job application sites (sigh, thanks Adobe), I’ve noticed an interesting feature some sites use. After selecting your resume to upload, they will parse the resume and either offer to, or automatically, fill in some of the form fields of the application for you. I thought it would be interesting to try this myself making use of Google’s Gemini APIs. Here’s what I discovered. The Test Script As always, I began with a script that would take a hard-coded resume and attempt to parse it. For the most part, this is basic "upload a file and ask the AI to talk about", but in my case, I wanted a very particular set of data... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Fields, form, Gemini, Google, into, Parsing, Resumes, Uploaded
Automating Object Detection with Google Gemini GenAI and Pipedream / / No Comments For my last technical post of the year (although I can’t promise I’ll stop blogging!), I wanted to share an interesting workflow I built using Google Gemini and Pipedream. The idea was somewhat simple – how difficult would it be to build a "general purpose" workflow to look for objects in images and trigger an alert if certain things were found. Here’s what I was able to build. Step One – Image Input In my mind, I imagined this workflow would be tied to some service that was either streaming in video or generating still images. You could image a security camera posting new pictures every 30 seconds or so, or some other system that takes a picture at a regular... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Automating, Detection, Gemini, GenAI, Google, Object, Pipedream
Adding AI Insights to Data with Google Gemini / / No Comments Yesterday, Elizabeth Siegle, a developer advocate for CLoudflare, showed off a really freaking cool demo making use of Cloudflare’s Workers AI support. Her demo made use of WNBA stats to create a beautiful dashboard that’s then enhanced with AI. You can find the demo here: https://wnba-analytics-ai-insights.streamlit.app/ I found this incredibly exciting. I last looked at Cloudflare’s AI stuff almost an entire year ago ("Using Cloudflare’s AI Workers to Add Translations to PDFs"), and I haven’t quite had a chance to try it again, mostly because I’ve been focused on Google Gemini for my Generative AI work. From an API/usage perspective, Cloudflare’s... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, data, Gemini, Google, Insights
ColdFusion Component for Google Gemini / / No Comments This week I had the pleasure to present on Google Gemini at the ColdFusion Summit. If you weren’t able to make it, I do plan on giving the talk again on the ColdFusion Meetup sometime later this year. After the presentation, I took my ‘rough and ugly’ code that called Gemini and decided to wrap it up in a nice ColdFusion component. This allows for (hopefully) easier use. For example: gemini = new gemini(key="your key", model="gemini-1.5-pro");result = gemini.prompt('why is the sky blue?'); And that’s it. The result variable will contain two keys, a raw value that is exactly what Gemini returned, and a text value that narrows down into the text response. Multimodal... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: ColdFusion, Component, Gemini, Google