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The first chapter: personalized children’s books. This page preserves the story of Slokie’s original book business, launched in May 2022. I’m now preparing a new chapter focused on school bus operations. I also hope to rebuild the book software on an independent platform and reopen ordering in the future; no reopening date has been announced.

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During the pandemic, remote meetings became increasingly popular. But many people didn’t want their messy living room in the background. So, Zoom and others started allowing users to automatically remove the background from their video stream. From my previous experience making YouTube videos with a greenscreen, I was curious how this was done, so I dove in. Pretty soon, I’d learned how to use machine learning to remove the background from images using human segmentation models, and was able to start using this in other projects.

I was also working on another project at the time, which was a sort of AI coach for online workouts using human activity detection. This, coincidentally, used many of the same packages/libraries as human segmentation, so I started to get fairly well versed in how these worked. Over the next several months, I started to apply this technology to new problems, until, at last, I settled on using it as a way to create personalized children’s books (along with some other techniques I’d picked up).

I spent the next year iterating on the code, and learning how to properly deploy this on Google Cloud Platform so that I could keep costs down while ensuring reliability and quality. The cloud architecture piece of this was actually pretty tricky. I also had to write an actual book to use this technology on, as well as find an illustrator for the background art. Oh yeah, and the million other things associated with starting a new business, such as incorporating, getting insurance, setting up marketing campaigns, and figuring out ways to drive organic traffic to the store.

In May 2022, I launched Slokie.com.