AI-Enabled Signage
Bring your own AI provider and let it write copy, generate background images, describe images for accessibility, and put together a starter playlist from one line about your business.
Connect OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — LiteLLM, Azure via a compatible gateway, Groq, OpenRouter, Google Gemini’s own OpenAI-compat endpoint, self-hosted Ollama-compatible servers — and TheiaCast uses it across the app: writing copy, generating background images, describing images for accessibility, and assembling a starter playlist from a one-line description of your business.
⚠️ Admin role required to configure. Every AI feature stays completely hidden — not shown-but-disabled, genuinely absent from the UI — until a provider is configured. No content is ever sent to any AI provider unless you’ve explicitly set one up.
Why bring your own key
TheiaCast never ships a shared or metered AI key. There is no “AI credits” balance, no per-call billing from TheiaCast, and no fallback shared key if you haven’t configured your own — under this design, there never will be. You pay your own AI provider directly, at their prices, and your content only ever reaches the provider you chose, using the key you supplied.
Configuring a provider
Go to Settings → AI.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI, Anthropic, or Generic (OpenAI-compatible endpoint) |
| Base URL | Generic only — the endpoint’s base URL, e.g. a LiteLLM proxy or Gemini’s OpenAI-compat endpoint (https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/openai) |
| Model | The chat model used for text generation and image descriptions. Leave blank for a sensible current default on OpenAI/Anthropic; required for a generic endpoint |
| Image model | The model for background-image generation. Leave blank for a sensible current default on OpenAI; required for a generic endpoint; not used for Anthropic (no image API) |
| API key | Your provider’s API key, encrypted at rest — the form only re-sends it if you retype it |
Click Test connection to verify the key and endpoint work before relying on them. Removing the saved key (or clearing the provider) immediately hides every AI feature again, everywhere in the app.
💡 Anthropic has no image generation. Claude is fully supported for copy assistance, alt-text descriptions, and the starter-playlist wizard’s planning step — but it has no first-party image-generation API at all, so “Generate with AI” for backgrounds simply doesn’t appear when Anthropic is the configured provider. Everything else works normally.
Write with AI
Every text field across the content templates (Welcome Screen, Promo, Announcement, Quote, Menu, Testimonials, Event, and more) and Canvas text elements gets a small Write with AI button next to its label — Improve with AI instead, once the field already has text in it.
- Click the button. A small popover opens asking either what you want to say (empty field) or how it should change (existing text — e.g. “make it more urgent”, “shorten it”).
- Click Generate. Up to three alternatives come back.
- Click one to drop it straight into the field — nothing is ever applied automatically, and you can keep editing after picking one.
Generate with AI (background images)
Any template with a Custom image background style gets a Generate with AI tab alongside the usual upload / choose-from-content options. Describe the image you want, click Generate, and the generated image is uploaded into your content library and applied as the background — indistinguishable from any other library image from that point on (it shows up in “choose from content” for other templates too).
Suggest with AI (image alt text)
Every image upload — and editing an already-uploaded image’s metadata later — has an Alt Text field with a Suggest with AI button next to it. This sends the actual image to the AI provider (a real image-description call, not a guess from the filename) and fills the field with a suggested description for you to review and edit before saving. Alt text is used by screen readers and other assistive technology — it’s entirely optional and never set automatically without your review.
AI Starter Playlist wizard
On the Content page, click AI Starter Playlist, describe your business in a sentence or two (“independent coffee shop on the high street, warm and cozy, known for pastries”), pick landscape or portrait, and click Generate Playlist. TheiaCast:
- Plans a small playlist (3–4 items) from a handful of template kinds — a Welcome Screen, a Promo banner, an Announcement, and/or a Quote — writing on-topic copy for each based on your description.
- Generates a background image for one or two of the items where a photo makes sense (skipped for Anthropic — those items just use a bundled background style instead).
- Creates each item as ordinary content, exactly as if you’d built it by hand through the template editor.
- Assembles everything into a new playlist, filed into whichever folder you were browsing.
💡 If one image or item fails partway through, the wizard keeps going with the rest rather than losing the whole run. Every item the wizard creates is a completely normal, fully editable piece of content afterward — there’s nothing special about it being AI-generated once it exists.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause / fix |
|---|---|
| No AI buttons appear anywhere | No provider configured, or the saved key was removed — go to Settings → AI and configure one |
| “Generate with AI” doesn’t appear for backgrounds, but “Write with AI” does | Expected — the configured provider is Anthropic, which has no image-generation API |
| Test connection fails with a provider-returned error | Re-check the API key, base URL, and model name against your provider’s own docs — Test connection surfaces the provider’s own error text |
| Alt-text or image generation fails | The configured model doesn’t support that capability — pick a current multimodal (vision-capable) model for text-based providers, or a dedicated image model for image generation |
Need Help?
Email [email protected] for help.
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