@tjrobertson52

Automations are quickly becoming much easier to set up. I made a video a few weeks ago about how I think that most automations are a waste of time. com and while there are some great uses for those tools, I've generally see people waste more time setting up automations than they actually save.

However, a few weeks ago, Google released Opal. If you haven't heard of it, it makes it really easy to set up simple automations. You just give it a prompt and it builds out the whole automation for you and it's not gonna be the right choice for complex automations where you need a lot of granular control but if you just need to do something quickly, it's kind of amazing.

I've been using it to scrape and summarize the content of web pages or YouTube videos. This is something that could easily be automated with n8n but I'd probably spend 30 minutes setting up the automation and it wouldn't end up saving me enough time to justify it. I've used Opal to do about a dozen tasks and most of the automations only take about 30 seconds to set up.

You just tell Opal what you wanted to build and it creates the whole thing for you.

Now it's not always perfect and it does have some limitations but it's still in the experiment mode. You can only use it through Google Labs right now. I think it's super exciting that Google is investing in this, assuming they keep developing it.

I think there's huge potential here to help us automate things more quickly and to help less technical people automate things at all.