Start Writing Prompts Like a Pro | Google Prompting Essentials

[Music] chances are you've already experimented with generative Ai and you've probably gotten some results that have been

helpful and maybe some that fell short throughout this course AI experts at Google will teach you the difference between a good prompt and a great prompt so you can work faster and smarter with

Gen at your side and we'll share practical examples of where you can use gen at work hi I'm Amina I work on generative AI at Google in this course my colleagues and I are going to teach

you how you can get the most out of gen you'll learn when to use gen and how by designing better prompts to get the best results you'll apply what you've learned with Hands-On activities and quizzes to

level up your prompting skills after you've completed this course you'll have lots of practice applying gen in ways that matter to you and your job as recognition of your work you'll earn a

certificate from Google to share with your network and potential employers we have a lot of exciting stuff in store so let's get to

[Music] it hi I'm Timothy a director of developer relations at Google for the

last 14 years I've been helping developers and Google work better together I've recently been working a lot more with Gen to do things like technical writing and generating code

I've also been helping more developers integrate gen into their apps prompting is a new skill that a lot of us are learning and trying to get better at myself included now my first experience

using geni that was transformative was for a pretty simple task I needed to quickly collect everyone's availability for an important team meeting I asked over chat and everyone responded in a

different format as people are likely to do and it was a lot to track but with the help of gen AI I was able to organize everyone's availability into a table and then transposed it so the

table was sorted by date not by chat message a task that would have taken forever manually only took me a few minutes with Genai and that was my breakthrough moment using Genai in my

everyday tasks to turn things that used to be a headache into something simple and easy and that's what this course is about using gen to help you get your job

done so what is prompting anyway put simply prompting is the process of providing Specific Instructions to a gen tool to receive new information or to

achieve a desired outcome on a task those instructions are called prompts when we write a prompt for a gen tool we're giving it a series of inputs and telling it what we would like it to

generate some gen tools can generate text or images While others generate video audio or even code a prompting is both an art and a science to get the

best results we need to be precise in defining what we need now this is similar to the way you would help your teammate get started on a new project providing context and setting parameters

will get you the best output from gen the first thing you'll learn is the prompting framework it's a formula for writing great prompts you'll use this framework throughout the course and

after that it's all about putting prompts to use on specific tasks that can save you time in your job you'll use gen to brainstorm ideas develop plans

and draft emails for different audiences we'll teach you how to summarize meeting notes assign action items and more we'll also teach you how to analyze data and spreadsheets with geni you'll write

prompts that can help you find insights buried in data you'll then use gen to turn those insights into visuals and eventually turn it all into a slide Deck

with talking points for presentation next you'll learn Advanced prompting techniques to help you untangle complex tasks for example you'll learn how to create prompts that can help make

long-term complicated projects easier to plan and execute you'll also learn how to design a prompt to create your own

personalized AI agent to do things like practice before an interview or prepare for difficult work conversations and finally you'll learn

how to use geni responsibly including guidelines for using it in your job and on your team this is crucial gen tools help you with the work that you do but

they don't do it for you anyone using gen should always be a valuating and factchecking outputs there are a lot of gen tools out there and in this course we're going to demonstrate how to prompt

using Gemini and other Google AI tools like Gemini for Google workspace and Google AI Studio but all of the techniques and best practices you'll learn in this course can be applied to

other geni tools like chat GPT co-pilot or CLA last thing we designed this course to give you skills that you can use at work right away so all of these lessons and techniques you're going to

learn are rooted in real world scenarios you should experiment and play around to figure out what works best for you and as you go through this course feel free to pause the video and test what you just learned with something you're

working on right now now let's get started with our first

[Music] prompts in this lesson you're going to learn how to create effective prompts a

good prompt follows a simple framework task context references evaluate and iterate if you

ever forget a step just remember thoughtfully create really excellent inputs first is Task you need to describe the task you want the

generative AI tool to help you with now this should include a Persona and a format preference so that the task is specific Persona refers to what

expertise you want the Gen tool to draw from you can ask the tool to take on a Persona like a professional speech writer or or a marketing executive with

15 years of experience or you can ask it to create output for a specific audience a customer or even your manager you can be as detailed as you'd like when adding

a Persona to your task format refers to how you want the output to appear whether that's a bulleted list short sentences or a table so there you have

it task next you'll include context or the necessary details to help the Gen tool understand what you need from it this is the difference between writing give me some ideas for a birthday

present under $30 and give me five ideas for a birthday present my budget is $30 the gift is for a 29-year-old who loves

winter sports and has recently switched from snowboarding to skiing sometimes you'll add references for the Gen tool to use while creating

its output you just asked a gen tool to give you ideas for birthday present right well if you add examples of birthday presents you've given in the past as references the Gen tool can give

you a more useful output there aren't always going to be clear references of what you need especially if you're working on something more abstract or searching for ideas and inspiration once

you have your output it's time to evaluate ask yourself if the input you provided gave you the output you needed this leads us to the final part of the

framework iterate if you evaluate your output and determine that you're not getting what you need you can try again by adding more information or tweaking your prompt and this is a key part of

prompting effectively and we'll explore it in depth later on in the course one more note on the framework there are plenty of ways to construct an effective prompt the order of how you construct a

prompt is less important than the substance of the prompt itself as long as you're thoughtfully creating really excellent inputs you're outputs should be

[Music] great let's put the framework into action first we'll log into Gemini and then use the tool to help us brainstorm

ideas for a new high performance sneaker line first let's add the task generate five ideas for a new high

performance sneaker line okay we've asked Gemini to complete a task but we're not really applying the prompting framework yet remember thoughtfully

create really excellent inputs this prompt is all task and nothing else which might give us an output that's too broad and not very useful still Gemini

generated five ideas with unique names and descriptions this isn't a bad start but we can do better let's add some more details like our desired format and a

more specific task for the tool to complete list the concepts and materials for each sneaker

in an outline that's much better now we have a set of unique ideas for a sneaker line that includes the materials for each

shoe and it came in our preferred format I think we can do even better don't you let's add some

context the sneakers should be made for athletes doing cross trining activities with the new information

Gemini created Five new sneaker ideas that are more suited to our specific goals remember getting tailored outputs means we need to provide a Genai tool

with more details and context in order to generate more useful results success is all about the details so let's give references a

try references give gen tools examples to work from and that can mean asking a gen tool to learn from the tone style or length of a given reference providing

multiple references is also known as few shot prompting shots are just references or examples and the term is used a lot there's also singleshot prompting which

means we're giving it one reference and zero shot prompting which means we don't give the AI tool any references now most of the time between two and five

references is the sweet spot for a geni tool too few references and we don't give enough context too many we could skew the results and limit creativity to practice few shot prompting with our new

sneaker line let's include descriptions of shoes that already exist one of them is from a budget line of shoes and the other one has a new adaptive soul

we can input those descriptions like this keep the five ideas generated but

refine them using these two examples as references here as we paste in the references ah there's a lot of choices

here and they all seem like good options for the task and this is cool a shoe that regulates temperature evaluating the output and iterating might be the last parts of our prompting

framework but they're also where we get to experiment and get creative each new output is an opportunity to further refine your prompt until you get the response you want in fact we've been

evaluating and iterating this whole time we evaluated the sneaker ideas from our first prompt and we iterated by adding context we evaluated the output again

and we iterated by adding references and remember we can always add details or tweak phrasing in order to change our outputs we like to say ABI or always be

iterating give the prompting framework a try yourself remember it's always better to start simple and then slowly add complexity iterating as you go if your

outputs start to lose quality you might need to go back and make your prompts simpler and that's okay learning what works and what doesn't is all part of the journey if you ever get stuck just

remember to thoughtfully create really excellent inputs and you'll get back on [Music]

track there are going to be times when your prompt simply isn't giving you what you want but instead of scrapping all your work and starting again from zero think about how you can always be

iterating or Abi to try and mold the outputs into something more useful by the end of this video you'll learn four helpful iteration methods the first method is to revisit the prompting

framework and make sure you're providing enough specificity in your task context and references for example if you wrote give me five blog post ideas a

generative AI tool might respond better if you adjusted your prompt to include the Persona and format for example you are an expert on Sports Nutrition

provide five blog post headlines that summarize the biggest Trends happening in the industry for an audience of physical therapists working with professional basketball players the

second method is to separate your prompt into shorter sentences start by taking a long input and breaking it down into smaller tasks this is the long input summarize the key data points and

information in this report then create visual graphs from the data and shorten the key information into bullets you can break this up into shorter sentences and input them as separate prompts you'll

input each prompt receive an output and then follow up with a new prompt until all of your tasks have been submitted first summarize the key data points and

information in this report then follow that up with create visual graphs with the data you summarized and finally shorten the key information you

summarized into bullets sometimes shorter sentences can yield more precise results because the Gen tool can parse one small task at a time instead of identifying the relationships between

all of them at once you can also try using different phrasing or switching to an analogous task which is a task that is very similar to the one you're trying

to complete but different enough to trigger a new response for example if you're asking a gen tool to help write a marketing plan plan for a product or

service you could instead ask it to write a story about how this product fits into the lives of our Target customer demographic by moving from

write a marketing plan to write a story you're asking the Gen tool to approach the task differently which might lead you closer to a useful output finally

introducing constraints might also help focus a gen tools outputs maybe you want to make a playlist for an upcoming road trip and you're trying to figure out what artists you want to include you've

added some context about your favorite genre but the results are kind of boring you've heard all these songs a million times before to get better output and something more unexpected you could

start adding constraints like specifying you only want artists from a certain region or artists that have released music in The Last 5 Years adding constraints to your prompt will help the

Gen tool narrow down its outputs and give you something more helpful or unique the better you can evaluate and

iterate the better your output will

[Music] be images and visuals can be as

important as words when you want to communicate ideas in this lesson I'm going to teach you how to use generative AI tools to create visuals

so far we've asked gen tools to produce responses in what's called a text based modality modalities are the different

formats in which gen tools receive or produce information whether that's text images video audio or code different gen

tools are better at working in certain modalities be sure to check the Gen tool you're using to find out which modalities it's capable of using or producing let's start with image

generation some gen AI tools can create images a sunrise a bouquet of flowers or even a crab right into a dolphin but those same tools can also make images

for a business or a professional presentation maybe you're a musician playing a gig in New Orleans and you want to promote your concert so you use

a gen tool to help you create a poster to advertise the show let's prompt Gemini to to create both text and images so we can discuss the subtle differences

between prompting for each modality we'll start with the text first remember to keep the thoughtfully create really

excellent inputs framework in mind text based prompts work best when we specify our task and add some clear context so

we could prompt generate headlines for a poster promoting a rock concert in New Orleans and to add a little more context about

the task we could write the concert is one night only and the headlines should encourage the audience not to miss

out by specifying our task and adding context we're guiding the Gen tool to the text based output we want and just like that Gemini came up

with a few catchy headlines for the poster and this is a good one right here Nola this is it Unforgettable Rock one night

only it's catchy and it gets to the point now in order to prompt the Gen tool for an image we'll need to tweak our language we'll still use the prompting framework but we'll need to

provide more vivid descriptions that help the Gen tool determine the type of image it needs to create this means specifying the size color and position

of things in the image and the overall aesthetic we want so first we'll specify our task and

format generate an image of an electric guitar for a poster it should be a photographic

style and how about some vivid descriptions the guitar should be glittery or sparkly and create a sense

of excitement the guitar should be in the foreground and give a sense that it's floating in the

sky great Gemini created four different images that you can use on your poster so how can we make these images even better let's break down how to

iterate and refine a prompt for images we're still going to use the prompting framework but with a few little tweaks for the concert poster maybe you liked the appearance of the guitar but you

want to make it even more exciting by adding a storm with lightning striking the guitar we could refine it by

writing now make the sky Stormy with lightning hitting the guitar there we go you could keep this

image or keep evaluating and iterating again and again adding relevant details from each new output until you get one that works

[Music] okay we just used text to create an image but we can also use an image as

part of our prompt to create a different type of output let me introduce you to multimodal prompting the essence of multimodal prompting is using different

types of media to prompt a gener ative AI tool like inputting image and text or audio and text this can be especially

useful in the workplace you can take a picture of a chart and ask a gen tool to explain the data in plain language you could upload different logo options for

your company's Rebrand as a set of references and then prompt the Gen tool to give you more choices based on each direction or you could capture audio of

another language and ask for a transcrip destion in the language you understand here's an example where we'll prompt with both image and text to receive a text based output from Gemini let's

imagine you're an entrepreneur who needs help creating social media captions for a new design of nail art you're selling you can take a picture of your nail art

and ask for help writing a caption here's a photo of the nail art and we'll input this into Gemini and prompt write

a social media post featuring this this image the post should be fun short and

focus on the fact it's a collection of new designs I'm selling note that in addition to including a reference photo of the nail art we still used the other

elements of our prompting framework we specified our task added some context and included the format besides the image itself we didn't provide other

reference ref es but if we have a specific tone or voice we want the Gen tool to match we could always input a

few captions from previous posts to reference this is great Gemini analyzed the image and created a fun caption you can use to market the nail art notice

how it uses emojis to break up the text and how it engages followers by asking a question about their favorite design the cool thing about multimodal prompting is that it reflects the way you experience

the world you don't just discuss the words or images in a work presentation you build connections between them to get a fuller understanding of the topic

in question a mix of text images and other modalities can open up new ways of solving problems or saving time you could use a gen tool to turn a picture

of a city map into a list of notable landmarks find key insights within an audio file or quickly extract a list of

room names from an office floor plan here's another example you go to a conference and receive a schedule of events and you want your team to focus

on a few of the events in particular I want to send a reminder to my colleagues about certain events from a conference

schedule extract the times of the keynote speaker and two panel discussions from this schedule into a

table again we specified our task provided helpful context and included the format before inputting the picture of the schedule let's check it

out great the table makes it really easy to see where your team needs to go and when you can even take it a step further and prompt Gemini to draft an email about these events we'll get into

prompting for email drafts later in the course just remember to keep the prompting framework in mind no matter what modality you are prompting in to achieve the best results how might you

leverage different modalities in your prompts to help you at [Music] work generative AI tools are powerful

but like any tool it's important you use them responsibly especially at work first consider the problem you're using gen to help you solve does it align with your goals and your obligations to your

clients and co-workers what about your organization's policies and local laws about using gen to perform this type of task if it doesn't align then you should

rethink your process and whether or not a gen tool is right for the job second consult your company's rules or policies before entering confidential or sensitive data into gen tools you can

also check if your company has an Enterprise version of a gen tool that is okay for other types of use and remember if you're using geni tools for personal

use avoid entering personal or confidential information about yourself into publicly available tools and always check how the data you enter might be

used finally being a responsible gen user means evaluating outputs for potential bias and errors and disclosing any use of gen when sharing content with

others while it's okay to enlist the help of geni you'll still need to evaluate the outputs for accuracy the way you would for any output the same

goes for hallucinations which is when a gen tool provides outputs that are inconsistent incorrect or even nonsensical hallucinations most often

happen when someone gives a gen tool vague or unclear instructions or when a tool guesses at an answer to something it didn't quite understand

hallucinations can be hard to recognize that's why it's so crucial to fact check and cross reference outputs to confirm if a fact or statement in an output is

true remember gen tools aren't thinking critically the way humans can it's important to keep what we call a human in the loop approach meaning a human

should verify gen outputs before using them I recently generated an image for a presentation I wanted to have a bunch of cats on a

rocket going to the moon now instead the output was a little bit off the cats were on top of the rocket rather than inside it and that's not exactly safe

for cats is it while I did write in my prompt that cats needed to be on a rocket I didn't mean that literally but the tool didn't know that so I iterated

and specified that the cats should appear safe and sound inside the rocket instead of on top of it some gen tools such as Gemini have a built-in fact Checker that allows you to cross

reference the outputs using Google search comparing outputs side by side makes it easier to determine how accurate your initial output is and to

find any discrepancies so how can you avoid these issues before they become a problem try to recognize biases and outputs and the negative consequences they can have they may appear as

stereotypes or unfair represent presentations of a group of people avoiding biased to negative outputs starts with inputting specific detailed

prompts and iterating as needed another key part of this is using language that includes people of all backgrounds genders and ethnicities and avoid

stereotypes and generalizations in your inputs for example if you were using a gen tool to help you write the description for a job posting you should

avoid the gendered terms like serviceman or Workman instead use service person or worker so the tool doesn't write a description that only speaks to someone

who identifies as male remember gen tools are only tools they don't think critically and can't understand Nuance the way humans can it's your job to

bring that human perspective every time you use a gen tool [Music]