What a nasty day. It rained yesterday afternoon, evening, last night and all day today. Gray, dreary, 54° F – just a day to be inside trying to find something to do. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck doing that. I had hoped to go get some shopping out of the way today but forgot it was a holiday. I guess I will be going tomorrow so all the stores I want to go to are open. I might even wait until Wednesday so it will be less crowded. Hopefully my towing part will be in and I can also get that picked up while I am out.

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I have talked about using AI before to just do simple question/answer things. I then started doing multi-part questions and I was pretty impressed with some of the info I ended up with.

I decided to try some trip planning using AI. I did two trips; the first one was a road trip. I entered the things I want to see and do and a route I’d like to take for part of the trip. It was amazing. I kinda had an idea of how it should flow, but the route was not fully planned. The AI took everything I entered and made a trip plan complete with a route, suggested things to do each day and places to stop for the night that were cheaper than the bigger cities.

I then tried a few questions about an international trip with regards to medical insurance. I asked about medical coverages with my cardiac history. The AI mentioned something about a credit card covering cancellations if the card is used to purchase. I mentioned the travel cards I have and one card has that coverage for travel for no extra charge. I would still need to look into stand-alone health insurance for the trip but I would be covered in every possible way. It ended up creating a list of the things I would need to do in order.

I would look over each reply when I asked a question and it made me think of other questions so I would type those in and it would look at that scenario and it gives you a pat on the back for asking a good question. It then answers where your answer fits into the flow and why.

I saved these AI chat threads for future reference because the info I got was pretty much usable for any trip. It was an amazing source of information for both questions and the scenarios presented to it. The questions were answered fully and clearly and it made you think about more questions. At the end there were no more questions to be asked but I got such good responses that these are things I can use for travel.

Anyway, you can find a private AI agent like Proton Lumo, DuckDuckGo or Brave that are privacy-focused so you can keep things you ask private. Don’t do a basic search – you can do that on the internet. Go on and ask complicated things with multiple parts. I did and was so impressed with the results I had for both topics. I have seen it get much better the more it learns as it is used. I still struggle with many aspects of AI but I think with Apple going with “on-device” AI it will help with the privacy concerns many of us have about the technology; won’t do squat about the environmental/political implications though. Along those lines, I saw an article that said in, I believe, Denmark they are using an AI facility’s excess heat to supply heat or hot water to 10,000 homes. Pretty clever idea.

I won’t use it for planning everything, but I can definitely see using it to help with routing a trip like I did. I will be doing that myself to make my trips more efficient with my time and money. I do not usually look at much more than a map when looking at routes but this can help with points of interest, where to stop and sleep, etc. You could even say “I am leaving at 9AM tomorrow and I want to drive 5-6 hours a day, but I want to see this, that, and the other thing if they are open.” and it will give you all that info, how to get there and where to stop.

Anyhoo, that is it for tonight. See you again.

Shawn