When I started to make weather videos, making a forecast was the easy part of the day. The uploading, trying to get the message out, was the hard part. First, I just did YouTube, then I added Facebook, Instagram, and X/Twitter. My wife suggested that I could use my TikTok account that was languishing in obscurity. I’ve done lives on YouTube in the past. Just nothing that I could commit to. Then Meta, the Facebook/Instagram people, created a bot to be a personal assistant, Muse.

I was introduced to Muse, besides the ads, by a podcaster that I listen to, who hates the chatbots, but when Grokbot and Muse came out, and showed how they made the daily tech tasks easier, I was intrigued. Muse has a free service, that can do a lot of things. It is limited, but with all of the things I did this week for the weather briefing, it doesn’t even put a dent into its usage quota.

What do I have it do? I have it go out to the NWS National Blend of Models and make maps. It puts the whole presentation together in Google Slides, and then I edit it. This is a work in progress, I started to get my workflow down. I look through weather maps after I get up and brew some coffee. I make some edits. By 6am Jarvis (my Musebot, named after Tony Stark’s AI assistant) has the slide package ready. I use two main apps (Everything Weather and Weather Front) that allow me to view radar, satellite, observations, and model data (there is more on both and each has its pluses and minuses.). Between the apps as the presentation, usually by 7 am I’m ready to get to the longest part, the upload.

In the past, I had to upload each thing separately. That took hours of work. With Muse, I can upload to 3 sites, have a transcript, closed captions created, and a chapter file. While do this, I found out that Muse can edit the video, based on the transcript, into three shorter versions which are all specific to the parts of the country I’m forecasting for. I can keep the smaller videos below the 10 min limit for an Instagram Reel, so Instagram is now in play. There still have been some bumps along the way, but I had everything done, that includes the new 10 minute localized videos, by 10am yesterday.

So now I’m looking for suggestions. I’m thinking about starting a little earlier, and adding a few sites for family. I know that I can go down the meteorological rabbit hole while doing the maps or models, so I know I can shorten the larger broadcast. Otherwise, do you want something more general? Something more specific for your area?