Gary [00:00:09]:

It's the Teh podcast. Episode number 205 with Leo Notenboom of askleo.com and Gary Rosensweg of Macmost.com. This week hyper personalization air tag tracking and zoom's AI assistant you.

Leo [00:00:26]:

Hey, Gary. How's it going?

Gary [00:00:28]:

Oh, pretty good.

Leo [00:00:29]:

Once again, Seattle is living up to its reputation. We had a very nice weekend, and it is now raining. So yeah, it's the end of summer for sure.

Gary [00:00:40]:

Yeah, definitely end of summer here. Leaves are changing. The only problem is, in Colorado, you've got a lot of evergreen trees. So I thought it would be fun to take the dog up into the mountains right now where it's like prime leaf changing season. And I just, oh, there's this trail, there's tons of trees. And we drive up there and we start walking down the trail, and I look around and I realize, oh, this is like, all right.

Leo [00:01:07]:

Right. It's funny. There are two major mountain passes from Seattle heading east, and one of them is basically just all evergreens. And yeah, you'll see some changing of the colors in this time of year. It's the other one that you want if you're really going, because for whatever reason, the trees are different up there and much more colorful.

Gary [00:01:29]:

Yeah.

Leo [00:01:31]:

We both ran across an interesting article this week. I published it in my seven takeaways, which comes out on Sundays. And you just ran across it. It's the hyper personalization of everything, which I thought was an interesting concept. What was your big takeaway from that one?

Gary [00:01:52]:

Well, just reading the headline and then I instantly had this idea what the article was about, and that's what it was about. We're so used to being able to go into, say, a place like a Chipotle or something like that and get all these little customizations and everything that we're just used to it. There's so much when you order things, things can be personalized when you use software, hardware, but products at the grocery store, all sorts of weird personalization that we expect now. And I really took it right away to apply to what you and I do, which is answer people's questions and help people out with things online. And a lot of the questions I get at least fit this hyper personalization everything, where people either ask me, why can't I change this on a Mac or an iPhone? Or why did Apple do it this way? Or why isn't done the way I want it to be done, right? And a lot of times I don't say this, but a lot of times if the person asking the question is Joe 1234, I want to reply it's because it's macOS, not Joe 1234 OS. It's for everybody. And also the customization. A lot of people think, oh, why can't there be just this one setting? It's like, well, you want the one setting, somebody else wants another setting, and there are millions of people using the operating system.

Gary [00:03:25]:

So what you're suggesting really is not that one setting you're suggesting there being, like 100,000 settings, and then I don't think you'd like that. I don't think you'd like going to the settings for an app or system settings for the whole system, and then it being 100 times the size that it is now and trying the next.

Leo [00:03:46]:

24 hours, spending the next 24 hours turning things off and on.

Gary [00:03:50]:

Yeah, and I get it all the time. I get people complaining about why it's not like this or not like or why do they remove this feature or change this feature or add this feature or another one, is why do they add this? Nobody uses this. Or who uses, like, Apple, one of the big things they talk about is stickers, right? They introduced this thing called stickers, and you could use them in text messages and other places you could put little graphics. Sometimes they're animated. Sometimes they're just a picture of you with a thumbs up or something like that. Tons of different things you can do with stickers. But of course, there is a large number of people that don't use stickers at all, and obviously there are a lot of people that do because Apple keeps improving it, and people keep getting excited about the improvements. But I get people saying it's like, why are they wasted? Why is one of the main new features, new capabilities on stickers? I never use this.

Gary [00:04:41]:

I don't know anybody uses this. Why are they wasting their time on it when my favorite bug here has been around for four years? And it's like, just because you don't use it doesn't mean other people don't believe me. Apple, the largest company in the world, by some measurements, is not just blindly saying, hey, we created stickers. I bet you everybody uses them, and we're not going to do any research at all to determine if they do or not. They know what people are using, and they know how to budget their time, but it's not always about you.

Leo [00:05:14]:

Right. Which basically brings it right back to the topic through the article we ran into. What I love about that article was how it started. It described a scenario on TikTok, of all things, where there's apparently a trend, as there apparently are trends on TikTok with people sharing bean recipes, bean whatever, bean this, bean that. And apparently there's a large number of people that feel the need to comment on what if I don't like beans? Which is just bizarre because the sheer concept of the fact that, okay, maybe this video isn't for you just never occurs to them. And you're right. It absolutely transpires in technology as well. Absolutely.

Leo [00:06:06]:

I have exactly the same kinds of things. People that gosh a couple of years ago, I had someone who was incensed that a particular way of displaying file sizes hadn't been implemented in the last 15 years. And he was absolutely convinced that that was the single biggest issue that Windows or in this case, Windows File Explorer had to overcome. I mean, he just couldn't understand how people could use it without this feature. Even though, of course, millions and millions of people are using it every day without the feature. It's kind of interesting. It's kind of frightening. I know that from your perspective and mine, it gets occasionally a little annoying.

Leo [00:06:48]:

Part of our job is to be annoyed in private and then be helpful in public. Try and explain. Okay, well, like you said, it's not necessarily the issue you think it is. I've got an article that I wrote, again a couple of years ago, I think it was, and it's literally called Why Ask Why? Because that's one of the very common questions. A lot of times, people don't necessarily want to fix a problem or solve a problem, although they would prefer that the problem be resolved to their liking. But they're desperately trying to understand or want an answer to why did they do it this way? Typically followed by some kind of an evaluatory statement that said, Why did they do it this way? It's so stupid. It's so useless. As you said, nobody does this.

Leo [00:07:42]:

And of course, why ask why? Well, they did it because they did it. They have reasons. The reasons may not involve you, but they absolutely have reasons. And yet the other subset of people, smaller subset thankfully, are the folks that are absolutely convinced that Microsoft and I would assume Apple are doing this explicitly to piss off their customers. Which, again, makes absolutely no sense. And yet that's how they feel. That is absolutely how they feel when things don't go the way they think they should.

Gary [00:08:20]:

Yeah, it's something that I don't know, I guess we're always looking at what we do from different angles. And this hyper personalization angle is a really interesting one where just a lot of people just aren't. And we just see the tech angle of it's everywhere. It's in politics where people are like, why doesn't the government fix this one thing right? It's like, because the government's got 1000 things right and there are issues with every one of them. And pluses and minuses it's with anything that you see. It's like, why aren't there there's people speeding down my street. Why don't they put speed bumps in? And other people saying, I need to get to work faster. Why is the speed limit so slow? Other people saying, There needs to be more bike lanes.

Gary [00:09:08]:

There need to be more pedestrian. There needs to be more parking. There needs to be more public transportation options. It's like, okay, so who do you listen to? Like, which one do you invest money in? And it's kind of the same thing with software, is no different software and hardware and all of that. And on top of it, you get a lot of people that are convinced that big companies can only do one thing at a know it's like, oh, Apple spent all this time bringing new features to stickers, but we still don't have this on the iPad. It's like, I don't think the iPad hardware team has anything to do with the people working on stickers.

Leo [00:09:44]:

Wasn't an either or decision.

Gary [00:09:45]:

Yeah, big companies can do lots. It's not Tim Cook sitting up there doing it all. He's got a big workshop and he's just building everything. So I don't know, it's a lot of that. And people it's not their job to think about these things or be in the industry or whatever. So people don't know how software is made, how hardware is made, how big companies make decisions. That's fine. I don't think the error is in not understanding.

Gary [00:10:20]:

The error is in not realizing. You don't understand. It's okay to be like, I don't know how software, like, huge, massive pieces of software are developed and maintained. So I'm not going to go and say that my feature is more important than somebody else's or that they're doing this intentionally to piss off users, like you said. I'm just going to admit that this is out of my area of expertise.

Leo [00:10:46]:

There's another subset of folks who have had experience writing software, and they're trying to map their experience, often from like 10, 15, 20 years ago on a much smaller project to something as massive as Windows or macOS or something like that.

Gary [00:11:03]:

Yeah, exactly.

Leo [00:11:05]:

As you know, it doesn't map directly. Sure, there are similarities. Of course there are similarities, but the complexity is enormous in comparison to even Windows from 20 years ago was significantly simpler than it is today. So yeah, the other thing I think that's happening, and I think this was mentioned in that article, is that we are getting more and more personalization. By that I mean things like our social media feeds, the ads we see as we traverse the web in various places, even the products that get recommended to us by sites like Amazon and so forth. If you go to Amazon.com and I go to Amazon.com, you and I are going to see different things. And that's because the experience is personalized based on, well, presumably our purchase history, but probably even more than that. So people have become more and more used to, and as a side effect, expecting it to be more and more personalized to their specific tastes and needs and opinions and whatever.

Leo [00:12:11]:

And yeah, ultimately it's making the scenario even worse in that sense. I mean, it's always been a thing, right? We've always wanted the pothole on our street to get fixed, but now we're just being more and more trained to expect this kind of hyper personalization.

Gary [00:12:30]:

Yeah, exactly. And I think companies do lean into it. I think we do have more options now than ever before. Like fast food. I do one of those meal services now, online meal services where they ship you all the fresh ingredients and recipe and you put it together and there are personalization options. You could substitute out things, right? So it's not just select this meal and that's what you get. It's like, I want this meal but with I want a vegetarian, or I want this with not this ingredient, but that ingredient. And there's a lot of it, so some of it's expected.

Gary [00:13:11]:

And of course, companies want their customers to be happy, so if they can provide some sort of personalization, they will. But it's the kind of thing like the beans. It's a dish that's based on beans. If you don't like it, eat something else.

Leo [00:13:29]:

Maybe you don't want beans.

Gary [00:13:30]:

Yeah, and that's fine. Video isn't for you, this dish isn't for you.

Leo [00:13:36]:

Hold the beans, please.

Gary [00:13:37]:

Yes, exactly.

Leo [00:13:42]:

Anyway, I do like this quote you threw in the notes that every setting in software is a design choice that a developer avoided.

Gary [00:13:49]:

Yeah, I tried to find a source for that. I definitely heard that for the first time in the way back then and I just don't remember what the exact thing was. But yeah, I've always thought about that. Because in my Clip Tools app, for instance, I've got settings, but every time I do a setting, it's like, okay, there was a design choice I could have made, and I could have said, this is the way it works. Or I could provide options and do I want to make that design choice and say, this is what my product is? Or do I want to go and say, okay, you can customize this?

Leo [00:14:26]:

Right? Yeah, it's an interesting statement. I mean, it implies some kind of failure on the developer's part, but in reality it's not that at all. These are hard decisions, what kinds of things to expose as choices versus what kinds of things to simply decide. And it's not always easy, especially when it is so much easier in software, to not have choices, to just code it up to work one specific way. So every option you add makes the code more complicated. And for those companies that are still doing testing, makes the testing scenario that much more difficult because it has to be tested both ways and the more options you have, it becomes exponential to test all the various combinations. So yeah, it's an interesting one. It's a design choice.

Leo [00:15:20]:

Having a setting or not having it a setting is itself a design choice.

Gary [00:15:28]:

Yeah, definitely. The whole startup thing, if you're building a startup product, one of the things you're supposed to do is not really have any settings. If you can avoid it, say this is the initial product, the minimum viable product has no settings. It works this way. And a lot of things we know nowadays, like social media sites and stuff, started off exactly that way. And that allows you to do two things. First of all, it's easier to get a product off the ground if you're not constantly going and saying, well, we're getting these results from our tests, but do the test take into account whether person at setting A or setting B? You don't have to worry about that. It's like everybody's got the same settings, but it also then allows you, if it's successful, to have these features, you could roll out, say, hey, now you can customize this part of the software and everybody cheers and upgrades to the next version because they want that, right?

Leo [00:16:20]:

So moving on to something else, I encountered a scenario, I was asked about this yesterday, and an air tag might be a solution to a problem we have. But I wanted to run it by you in front of the audience in case we all could learn something from it. Here's the scenario. I volunteer for a nonprofit. We have some equipment, and by equipment I mean like a van, a truck, that kind of stuff. And one of the places where that equipment is stored has had a higher than average theft issue experience. So we're concerned that basically somebody's going to run off of the vehicle. Somebody suggested, what if we just put an air tag in it and we then find it? It's basically vehicle tracking.

Leo [00:17:18]:

And the reason I found it interesting, because there are many solutions to this problem, the old lowjack. I have something on my car called Carlock. They use the cellular network and GPS and all that kind of stuff to locate the vehicle at any point in time, but their services, whereas an air tag, if I understand it correctly, is just a one time pick it up. In fact, I was told that Costco has four packs of AirTags, which would feel like perfect for our scenario. But I'm sort of curious what you think about that as one approach to potentially being able to recover a vehicle after it's been stolen.

Gary [00:17:59]:

I mean, it's certainly a low cost approach. It has problems when being used, like for anti theft. It's one of the reason Apple never pitches that as one of the things you should be doing with them. Of course, it's not sending out any signals and figuring out where it is on its own. Right. It's relying on people with iPhones being nearby. Right, but that happens a lot of the time, but people have tracked their lost or stolen cars, really, and it works pretty well, except that it doesn't help you. Like, okay, so you found your car.

Gary [00:18:42]:

So somebody steals a truck and it has an air tag in it and you get a ping on it that it's in a parking lot somewhere. What do you do then? Right? Maybe if you're lucky, if you're in some area where you've got police force that'll respond to stuff like that, you can call somebody up and say, our truck was stolen and we know exactly where it is right now. Right? And they'll be like, we're on it. Right. And maybe you get it back. Unfortunately, that's not the way it is around the country. Right? It's like, oh, is anybody in danger? No, it's just our property was stolen. Okay, well, we'll get around to it.

Gary [00:19:19]:

It's like, but I know where it is right now. And it's like, well, we're not going to be able to do anything with that. That's one problem is, like, what do you do? Or if it's something where, okay, the police are going to do anything, we can go to the parking lot and there it is. There are some individuals with our truck. What do we do now? Right. How much is the truck worth to us? Because it could not be good if you confront people that are breaking along on your own without police. So there's that. It doesn't really solve that.

Gary [00:19:52]:

It's like the better way to solve is something that maybe prevents the theft either right up front or, of course, insurance, which you're paying some amount of money. And if, say, that does actually become it does get stolen, then you just go and kind of shrug and say, well, this is why we have insurance. Plus, of course, the fact that with stolen vehicles in particular, you have the issue of, like, sometimes police do find your car, like a week later, we found your car. Great. Oh, it's completely trash stripped. It was in two accidents at least. And there's quite a mess in the backseat too, that kind of thing. And you're like, oh, God, I wish they didn't find the car.

Gary [00:20:35]:

Would have been much better off. It's a marginal thing. It certainly does give you something to do if there's a theft. It's like those I've talked before about the doorbell cameras and stuff. It's like, oh, somebody stole our package off our porch, and we have video of them. Great. So instead of a package that's stolen and nothing, we have a package that's stolen and a video because you don't end up getting it back, or if you do, it's destroyed or opened or damaged or whatever. So it's marginal.

Gary [00:21:08]:

But then again, the other side of it is it's $25, right? Yeah.

Leo [00:21:13]:

That's the big thing for us, is once again being a nonprofit. Signing up for yet another subscription is kind of questionable, and basically it leads us down the same path. Right? We know where it is.

Gary [00:21:26]:

What do we do?

Leo [00:21:27]:

Right. It is definitely not theft prevention.

Gary [00:21:32]:

No.

Leo [00:21:32]:

It's more theft recovery, hopefully.

Gary [00:21:38]:

Yeah.

Leo [00:21:38]:

So I had a couple of questions about the air tag physically, and that is, for example, if it's inside a vehicle, it's not quite a Faraday cage, but it's a metal box. Does it still work?

Gary [00:21:57]:

It will still work. Its range will be limited, so you definitely want to find a place to put it where it may get less of that. Like a lot of cars, of course, today, some of the paneling is metal and some is not right. So finding a good spot where it gets a good signal happens to be behind. Or like people putting it in the taillight assembly, that kind of thing, where it's not actually in the you can't see it in the taillight, but maybe it's, like, at the bottom there or something. And it's like okay, so there's a lot of plastic around it, and it's not as much metal. Stuff like that can help. Sometimes you have to just look like on a car by car basis kind of find a good spot for it.

Gary [00:22:39]:

So yeah, with trucks and stuff gets harder because there's more metal but yeah, that is a concern.

Leo [00:22:46]:

Yeah, there's still taillights in that a lot of times.

Gary [00:22:48]:

A lot of the cases, the articles I've read, the actual phone that has reported the location has belonged to the thief, right?

Leo [00:22:59]:

Right.

Gary [00:22:59]:

A thief steals a car, gets in the car and drives off and the location is being reported. And that is just the air tag going to the thief's iPhone and then the thief's iPhone snitching on them right. And showing where the location of that air tag is. So in that case, if you put it like in the center console or in the glove box even, it may not be have great range outside the car, but it's got the range inside the car. Another thing to consider is of course that since there's anti stalking measures in there, you get the indication that an air tag is following you around. So in some situations you've got where the person is if they have it long enough or whatever, it may start beeping or their phone, if they have an iPhone may start telling them that an air tag has been following you.

Leo [00:24:01]:

Right.

Gary [00:24:01]:

So you've got that. Another thing is I'm not sure how it works in terms of like if the truck is located at nobody's address, right. If your organization has some sort of shed or something like that, then you see register it to kind of like this is my air tag and I live here and then if the air tag is home, it doesn't bother you about it. Right. So I have say an air tag in my backpack and if I leave all the time and leave my backpack here and I never get anything saying you left your backpack behind because it's been left behind at home.

Leo [00:24:39]:

Right.

Gary [00:24:39]:

But if I take that backpack and I go somewhere and I leave it there, then it says, oh, it's not with you and it's not at home. So it keeps notifying me. Hey, you left this behind. Interesting. So I'm not sure how that will work. I mean, if it's the kind of thing where the vehicle stored somewhere that nobody lives because it's not your home address, whoever you've set it up for, I'm not exactly sure how it works in that scenario.

Leo [00:25:12]:

And of course it's going to have to be associated with an Apple account of some. We have basically we have two, three, four locations, but that account would have a home, but vehicles would not necessarily be there.

Gary [00:25:29]:

Yeah, I don't know if you could add it. Maybe there's add that as a second address because you can add in your contact that you've got multiple addresses, and you could put that as a second address for the person with that account who owns the air tag, and then that might solve that. So it may take a little work because, again, it's using it for something that it's not exactly designed for. I've got mine in my I've got one in my luggage, one in a backpack, and one around my dog's neck.

Leo [00:25:59]:

I was going to say, I think I mentioned that when we were talking about this yesterday, that you were using it for your dog.

Gary [00:26:04]:

Yeah. So it works fine most of the time because my dog is either with me or home. Most of the time it's both. But if I do travel, then if my dog has to stay with somebody, then what happens is I get notified that I left my dog behind. It just knows that it left the air tag, the name of the air tag behind.

Leo [00:26:34]:

You forgot your dog.

Gary [00:26:35]:

And then a day or two later, it starts beeping, or the person who's watching the dog. So saying that, hey, there's an air tag here, and it's kind of been with you, and it's not in its owner's home. So all of that, that has been a problem. So I just remember to take the air tag out, which is a shame, because that's the time when I most want the air tag to be around my dog's neck. Of course somebody else is watching the.

Leo [00:27:05]:

You know, and they lose.

Gary [00:27:08]:

But I have to take the AirTag out and leave it at home or so it's going to start beeping because of but again, Apple does not say this is what it's for. It's not it's supposed to be in your backpack. It's supposed to be in, your know, that kind of thing. It's tracking your items and such or even in your home, tracking something in your home because some use of it isn't so much the left behind or it's not with you anymore, but it's just, oh, I don't know where it is, let me use my iPhone. And it does a thing where it points an arrow and says it's 15ft in this direction, and you can kind of figure out where you left your car keys or whatever.

Leo [00:27:45]:

Make it beep remotely.

Gary [00:27:47]:

Yes.

Leo [00:27:48]:

Okay.

Gary [00:27:49]:

And yeah, I'm pretty sure you can, but you don't really need to because it'll tell you it'll be like it's one feet away. It's right here. So you can just find things pretty easily. I don't use any of them like that. I just have them on those devices and of course, other devices in the Apple product line do it like iPads and iPhones and such. So, like, when I travel with my iPad and I leave the hotel room, I'm not taking the iPad with me to go to dinner. And as soon as I get so many feet away from the hotel room, I always get a little alert of my phone. You've left your iPad behind and your backpack and your suitcase, all three? Yeah, because they're all in the hotel room.

Gary [00:28:35]:

It's fine. Calm down.

Leo [00:28:40]:

All right, well, that's some interesting information. I mean, it's good stuff to think about a couple of scenarios. So I appreciate that. We'll see where we end up taking it.

Gary [00:28:49]:

Yeah. So I want you to do so we use Zoom to record this podcast, and we did it before it was cool. We started using Zoom when we started the podcast well before the pandemic, right? And when Zoom was very new and we weren't even thinking, like, the video part. We were like, oh, this is a way to have a teleconference, whether it's video or audio. And you could hit a record button so we could easily record a podcast this way. And I know there are a bunch of services that specifically are for podcasts now, but back then, there really wasn't that much, and we've just been using Zoom ever since. Now, Zoom, of course, has expanded and grown in leaps and bounds and all of that, and it's mostly used for people for video stuff. But one new thing they added in the last week or so has been something called the AI companion.

Gary [00:29:41]:

And we both enabled it before we started talking. And now I want you to do this with me here, Leo. I want you to click on AI companion, and then it comes up on the side. And then you could type, catch me up and then return.

Leo [00:30:00]:

Okay.

Gary [00:30:01]:

And then it is going to generate something. And this is what it says. During the meeting, Gary Rosensweig and Leo Notenboom discussed the use of AirTags and their limitations. They talked about the range and placement of AirTags on vehicles, potential for false location reporting, and the issue of the Air tag beeping when left behind. They also briefly mentioned using Zoom for recording their podcast and the new AI companion feature in Zoom. So it actually didn't mention about the beginning.

Leo [00:30:29]:

Yeah, it jumped to the end of the mine's different.

Gary [00:30:32]:

Okay.

Leo [00:30:32]:

It says, let's see. In the meeting so far, gary and Leo discuss a technical issue with an AI companion that caused the meeting to be cut off. They then talk about the concept of hyper personalization and how it affects people's expectations in technology. They also mentioned the challenges of adding options and settings in software design. Towards the end, they discussed the idea of using an Air tag for tracking a vehicle.

Gary [00:30:57]:

Yeah, so yours got much better than mine. That's interesting. Well, I was doing this in. A Zoom meeting, a video Zoom meeting the other day. And we all remarked, hey, do you all see the AI companion at the bottom? Yeah, I was the first one to type Catch me up. And I shared with everybody what it said, and we were all like, wow, that's incredible. And then we got quiet and I said, I'm afraid to talk now because it's like, hey, right now I know this is a podcast we're recording and then anybody can listen to it. But right now, at the moment, we're recording this.

Gary [00:31:34]:

This is a private conversation between you and me. But then as soon as you type Catch me up, Zoom is like, yeah, so about that, I've been listening the entire time. I mean, all it's doing is generating a transcript, keeping that in mind. And then when you say catch me up, it's the same thing as Chat GPT saying, summarize this. That's all it's doing. You can also do some other stuff. One of them was you can ask if you've been mentioned and it will tell you. So think of 30 people in a meeting, you come sneak in a little late, or maybe you've had it on mute for a bit and you can ask if you've been mentioned and it will tell you.

Gary [00:32:15]:

So. You've got that. And I think there's a bunch of other things that you can do. Let's see. Oh, was my name mentioned? What are the action items? So, thinking in terms of a meeting and what topics were discussed, I'm going to do the what topics were discussed? I wonder if it generates a list. Include a technical issue with AI companion, hyper personalization and its impact on technology, challenges of adding options and settings and software design, and the use of an air tag for tracking a vehicle. I mean, perfect. Except the beginning, it's like we weren't really talking about a technical issue with the AI companion because it was a technical issue with us that we restarted Zoom.

Gary [00:32:58]:

But the rest of it gets right.

Leo [00:33:02]:

One of the other interesting things about this two interesting things about this one is I'm assuming that it's enabled regardless of whether or not we're recording the.

Gary [00:33:12]:

Yeah, I don't think it has anything to do with you have to turn on AI companion.

Leo [00:33:16]:

Right?

Gary [00:33:18]:

Because when we did, we should mention that at the beginning of the meeting, you click AI companion and it asks, would you like it to turn it on? And you'd say yes. So it wasn't doing it automatically.

Leo [00:33:28]:

Right.

Gary [00:33:28]:

But of course, if you're in a meeting with 30 people and one person says, yes, I want this on, then that person has it on.

Leo [00:33:36]:

Yeah, the other thing is gosh, I forgot the other thing.

Gary [00:33:43]:

Ask it.

Leo [00:33:46]:

Oh, that's what it was. It was that we obviously it's not clear, of course, from the published podcast, but we actually hit the record button before we actually start the formal podcast, which implies that they've been listening to everything, whether we publish it publicly or not.

Gary [00:34:07]:

Yeah.

Leo [00:34:09]:

Interesting. This reminded me of a scenario that happened to me. Now, I've mentioned before that I use something called crisp. It is essentially audio enhancement. For example, you did not hear the leaf blower outside my office here about a few minutes ago. And should my dogs bark, theoretically, you won't hear them. It's funny, I was recording one of my videos and I had to sneeze in the middle of it. And I record with Crisp on as well.

Leo [00:34:41]:

So I've got this wonderful video of me sneezing silently because Crisp just removed it. I didn't do anything to remove it. I didn't mute myself. It just said, oh, this is not somebody talking, so I'm just going to remove it. It was very cool. Anyway, one of the other things that Crisp has done is they have added yeah, oh, same thing. They're doing more or less what Zoom is doing, except they haven't thrown the AI Q A at it, but they're just automatically if you turn it on automatically recording a transcript. Now, I did not realize that it was on when I ended up making a phone call to a friend of the family who was discussing some personal stuff.

Leo [00:35:34]:

And this person has a bit of an accent. It was just me, but it was a case where I wanted to be able to describe what had been said to my wife later. You saw it just a few minutes ago. My memory is not necessarily something that is to be relied on and I suck at taking notes, especially in real time. So I just happened to, after the conversation, fire up Crisp and lo and behold, I had a complete transcript of this phone call. That a did an amazing job with this person's accent. It's clearly a foreign national for whom English is a second language. So there's definitely a lot of things about the way it was spoken that would make it difficult.

Leo [00:36:32]:

Heck, it makes it difficult for me to understand sometimes. Crisp did a fine, fine job and it turned out to be perfect. I just said, okay, here Kathy, have a look at this. And sure enough, she was able to read the conversation, make complete sense of it, and then I took it to the next level. I copy pasted the entire transcript into Chat GPT and I asked Chat GPT to summarize the conversation and it gave me a summary that was so good. I mean, I can't go into the details, but it was one of those things where both my wife and I were shocked at from this transcript, which, of course, had some broken English in it, but it was well recognized. Chat GPT came out with a very good and accurate summary of the entire conversation. It just blew us both away.

Leo [00:37:32]:

It was very impressive. But, yeah, there's more and more of this stuff going on for sure.

Gary [00:37:38]:

Yeah. No, I saw that they had that transcript thing with Crisp as well. So I was using Crisp for a while, particularly not to do the stuff on zoom and stuff, but to do my show, to cut down the noise and echo room echo, all sorts of stuff. I actually left crisp. It worked, but I had some annoyances. One of those being that it was very centered and obviously it only really been tested with one user account. And when you do tutorials like we do, I don't know about you, but I switch user accounts. So I have a user account that's like very vanilla.

Gary [00:38:22]:

It's called Macmost, and it's got like instead of my face, there's the Macmost logo and all of that. And I leave stuff as I want to do during tutorials. And you don't see my personal stuff. Like if I go to enter a password in the password manager, you're not going to see, like, here's all my accounts to my banks and stuff. So it's what I record all of my regular stuff on. But sometimes I use my regular account to do things, particularly if I'm doing like an iPhone or iPad one. So I'm not really recording my screen or if I need to just record a bit of audio or something like that, and I would just switch between them. Well, Chris made it very difficult.

Gary [00:39:02]:

I set it up and had it going on my demo account and then I wanted to actually use it on my regular account. It would fight with me. It would just be so hard to convince Crisp to get it to work. And then if I did get it to work, then I'd find if I went back to the demo account, I have to fight to get it to work on the demo account again, usually logging out, logging back in, relaunching the demon, everything. So I was like, there's got to be an alternative. And I did find another one that's very similar to Crisp. It is called Crystal Sound and very suspiciously similar to Crisp. The way it works, like the options and everything, making me think, number one, it's probably not the kind of thing where one copy the other.

Gary [00:39:58]:

It's probably the kind of thing where there are certain APIs available to build these things and neither of them are reinventing the whole wheel. They're not putting all this together from.

Leo [00:40:09]:

Scratch, thinking that maybe they're using a common back end service, a common back.

Gary [00:40:13]:

End service that makes them say, oh, we should have options A, B and C, because that's what goes into this service. So it was very similar and it's not as far from perfect. There's still some little struggles using the multiple counts, but it did do better. And it was also just there's a couple of other little things I struggle with Crisp that this Crystal Sound doesn't seem to have. So it's like, okay, slightly better than Crisp for my needs. So I switched. But I'm using Crystal sound right now and you're using Crisp right now, right? Yeah, there's that. But yeah, I'm pretty happy with it.

Gary [00:40:55]:

I still wish there were more options. Both of them have this thing where they put themselves up in the menu bar so you could see that you're actually running them, which is kind of annoying. It's annoying for apps to do that when it's like, well, you should know that you're being used when people are recording their screens. And maybe give me the option to hide you because it's like, in particular for your type of app, I should be able to go and say, oh, I just want it to be invisible and have a keyboard shortcut or something that brings it up in Windows.

Leo [00:41:28]:

It shows up in the lower notification area. I do things a little bit differently so I don't run into that whole fighting scenario that you were describing. I don't use two user accounts. I actually use different machines.

Gary [00:41:40]:

Different machines?

Leo [00:41:41]:

Yeah, in the sense that I have actually several virtual machines that I fire up to do my videos. So they are the same as you. Closer to what a normal user's machine would look like than mine because mine's a mess. But that means though, that I'm running Crisp and doing all of my audio recording in the one machine, my machine. And all I'm doing is really recording the screen and mouse and so forth on the virtual machine. So that kind of sidesteps that problem.

Gary [00:42:15]:

I know I wish either one of those really would offer the ability to just apply the filter to audio after the fact because it's like for our use. I don't need it to be live. I mean, I appreciate it. Right now it's great, it's live, but I'd love to be able to just have the raw recording from the microphone, which I'm doing anyway, and then say afterwards, oh, here's a little feature where I can run this through it. One of the things I do is I do record two audio tracks. I record straight from the mic and I record the well, first it was Crisp, now it's Crystal Sound. That input as well. So I have two parallel audio tracks and I did that with Crisp because sometimes it would drop the first syllable after some silence.

Gary [00:43:15]:

Interesting, particularly at the beginning of the video where I would say, this is Gary from Macmost.com. Sometimes they would just be, this is Gary from Macmost.com. And I'll be like so I'd be able to take the original audio and just do a little tweaking just to get like overlay it on top of that first word and it would sound right. And other times it would do it if I stopped and I had to change my screen, do something and there was like 20 seconds of silence in the video, it would do the same thing again. It was like it wasn't ready for like is this a noise or is this actual speech? And I wasn't sure. There have been other times when there's just minor little things. I haven't run into it as much with Crystal Sound, but with both of them, they both filter out my clapboard noise. So that's really annoying because it's like I'm using the clapboard to pinpoint exactly and make sure my audio and video are synced up perfectly because there is, I think of 100 millisecond delay or like 200 millisecond delay from the microphone to the recording.

Gary [00:44:26]:

So I want to do that. Now. Strangely, I don't have that much of a delay. It's like half the delay coming from both Crisp or Crystal Sound. I think it must be happening in the opposite direction or something where it's like the regular audio is say 200 milliseconds behind and then for some reason the filtered sound is being pushed forward like 100 milliseconds. Weird, I don't know. But either way, I would love to be able to sync them up. I can't because the clapboard is completely silent with both of those because it's filtered out of its noise.

Gary [00:45:03]:

That really sucks. So I do things like I start each show, I do the clapboard and I say be good. Because I went through all sorts of sounds, things that you could say. And the word be really seems to be something like almost like a visual clapboard. If I look, if I zero in on my mouth, I could really tell the exact frame where you should hear that beginning of the b come out. And it's amazing how many things I rejected before I came up with b. And then I was like, well, be what? And it's weird if I clap and say b. I don't know, it just felt weird.

Gary [00:45:44]:

So I thought, well, I'll encourage myself, I'll say be good. And so every video I'd start off with that and then I'd synchronize with me saying b. I don't know, it's not perfect. They seem to have a lot of features in both Crisp and Crystal Sound and I would love it if they would keep going and maybe do things like clapboard allowing clapboards or even hey, 1st 3 seconds, don't filter and then I can get the clapboard in there.

Leo [00:46:17]:

I know that with Crisp, if I wanted to do what you described, I could. And it's actually one of the good reasons to have the icon in the taskbar and right click on it and I can temporarily turn off audio processing, do the clapboard and then turn it back on without starting.

Gary [00:46:36]:

And I suppose I could I wonder if that would still keep everything in. Also, I don't know if Chris has this, but Crystal Sound has a My voice only feature. So I'm not using that because there's nobody else here. But I could actually record my voice, go through some process and then it would actually filter out other voices as well as noise, and only have mine, so I don't know how well that works. They also have a room reverb filter, which was like one of the main things that I want to get rid of the echo in the room. Sure, so that's really cool. But all these things I would love to have after the fact, just give me the raw let me record with the raw audio from the microphone and then let me apply this all afterwards. So, yeah, I don't know, maybe at one point somebody will offer that.

Gary [00:47:29]:

Interesting. To be fair, there is that none of it works. The software I've got has an actual noise filtering thing, and you could set it to a percentage. And either it's so low of a percentage that it doesn't help, or it's too high of a percentage. And my voice? Begins to sound bad and words get.

Leo [00:47:51]:

Really that what you're describing is more of sort of a mathematical transform that's applied across the entire audio. Whereas things like crisp and crystal sound are doing things more fluidly. I reluctant to say AI, but nonetheless they are AI. They're doing something that is much more context aware of the sound through.

Gary [00:48:17]:

Yeah, I know it's some form of AI. It's not thinking about what we're saying or anything like that, but it is doing something with the audio on a dynamic basis, depending upon what's going on. It's not the same filter applied uniformly. So, yeah, I'd love to see that in some more advanced after the fact form.

Leo [00:48:40]:

But speaking of audio, you've got something else here interesting that I haven't played with yet.

Gary [00:48:45]:

Oh, yeah, so this is really cool because we talked about this many months ago when we first started talking about Chat GPT. We said it's kind of neat, it's like you can talk to the computer now, except you're not talking, you're typing and you're not hearing, you're reading. Right? But why doesn't somebody just go to the next step, right? And now Chat GPT itself, not somebody else, does have that. You have to have the app. So the phone app. So I've got Chat GPT app on the iPhone, which is a free app, the official one, I'm not talking about anything from anybody else. The official Chat GPT app that has now a mode that you have to go into the settings, you have to enable new features, you have to go and enable this, and you have to have a paid subscription in order to even use it. And once you enable it, though, your phone just changes the look at app completely and it's just listening to you.

Gary [00:49:41]:

And then you just talk and you ask a question and you don't have to touch the screen at all. You can put the phone down, you ask a question and it will respond with a chat GPT answer, and then you can continue to converse. So I did. What my main thing is with this is like, I used to try to learn something. There was a mention of a historical event in a book. I meant to look it up on Wikipedia or something, but I didn't get around to it. So I just turned this voice mode on and I said, tell me about this, and then I'd listen to the response. And then I asked a question about the response and it gave me more information.

Gary [00:50:18]:

And I went back and forth and I was like, this is great. This could replace podcasts for me. Just a conversation. I learned all this stuff without having to type. Look, I could have closed my eyes completely and just conversed with Chat GPT now. I could also do the same thing with any other thing that Chat GPT does, like playing games. Like I've talked about doing role playing games or therapy or anything you want to do, but it does work fluidly. There isn't a press to speak, press to listen, that kind of stuff.

Gary [00:50:53]:

It is just talk, hands off. So it's kind of neat. It's like, okay, this feels a little bit more like the future now stuff together.

Leo [00:51:07]:

I just turned it on on my phone and interesting, I'm going to have to play with this offline. So I've been looking forward to this. I actually updated the app a couple of weeks ago with the expectation that it would show up and hadn't showed up yet. The other thing that's interesting about this is that this seems like what everybody was expecting of Alexa.

Gary [00:51:29]:

Yeah.

Leo [00:51:30]:

And I have heard rumblings that the Echo team is in fact working on turning on that kind of feature in all of the devices we all have scattered through our homes. That too will be interesting to suddenly start having a rather than a simple Q A session with the Echo, an actual conversation or whatever is, yeah, interesting stuff. Going to start playing with that. I've been using Chat GPT as an idea generator. I think you were saying that too. For example, I suck at coming up with concepts, visual concepts for thumbnails, for video thumbnails. So I've been asking Chat GPT, okay, give me ten ideas for clickable video thumbnails four, and then give it the article title. And not all of them are good.

Leo [00:52:34]:

I mean, absolutely not. But it's almost always that I can come up with something that, oh, yeah, that kind of sort of makes sense, and it gives me something useful.

Gary [00:52:45]:

Good use for that. I also noticed that we're seeing this stuff crop up more and more when you post something to YouTube. I don't know if it's everybody's account now, but when I post something new to YouTube under my title, when I assign the video a title, there's a suggestion button now, and YouTube will give me suggestions. I assume generated by some sort of AI for other titles that I could use for this video.

Leo [00:53:14]:

Either of the add ons installed vidIQ.

Gary [00:53:17]:

Or yeah, this is definitely not those. This is real YouTube.

Leo [00:53:21]:

Real YouTube. Okay.

Gary [00:53:22]:

Yeah. So that's kind of interesting. And I think we're going to start the two directions this is going is one is of course, improvements to the main body of Chat bots, so Chat GBT and Bard and all of that. But the other way it's going is seeing it crop up in little places where it's just this one little thing. Here's some title suggestions, here are some extra information. And doing that could really be the way that the companies, especially like Apple, go, because Apple, of course, is really shy about oh, they could just add this to Siri, and then you could talk with Siri until you get Siri to admit to some historical atrocity or something like and and then people get all up in arms. You wouldn't believe what Siri told know, because you coerced know, by leading it down a path. So Apple's going to be really reluctant to just let it run loose, but something where it can make a very narrow suggestion using AI.

Gary [00:54:30]:

And actually there's kind of evidence that Apple already has this built kind of into things like maps and such, where there are little suggestions that are sometimes given. And what's happening there is there some sort of small, limited AI large language model going on that just can do this one little thing. I guess that's the thing a lot of people weren't talking about. It was almost a year ago, it was like ten months ago when this all appeared was everybody was thinking chat, GPT, everything. But what about the leaking into the rest of society, like into social media, into just in a very limited, small way, little devices, little tiny devices that do things, but now have suggestions for you on how to use them or what to do at various times, that kind of deal.

Leo [00:55:28]:

It's all interesting and very cool. Yeah, see, I set up the transition there.

Gary [00:55:34]:

Yes, nice.

Leo [00:55:35]:

Speaking of cool speaking of cool, so my item for Ain't It Cool this week, we finally got around to watching Guardians of the Galaxy Three last night.

Gary [00:55:47]:

Okay. Yeah.

Leo [00:55:48]:

And thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a little on the long side, but it kept our attention the entire time. It was a lot of fun. Highly recommended. I was thinking about it earlier today. There are folks who are, I don't know, religious fans. Religious fandoms. They're either Star Trek or Star Wars.

Leo [00:56:07]:

They're either Marvel, DC, that kind of stuff. And I'm like I'm all of them. Marvel, DC, star Trek, star wars, fireflies. Stargate I mean, everything. It's all great. And so this definitely fell into the category of really enjoying.

Gary [00:56:23]:

That cool. As listeners know, I love reading books about historical adventures and such. And I just finished reading a good one called The Wager Tale of Shipwreck Mutiny and Murder and the Wager was a famous shipwreck that happened in the 18th century off the western coast of South America. And it's just one of those amazing tales that not only was amazing from the viewpoint of all the different things that happened, how the shipwreck, the journey to where they got shipwrecked, what happened after the shipwreck, what happened to the group, how some of them found their way home, all that kind of stuff. But it happens in an interesting time when journaling really took off among seafarers. So you end up with different people with different viewpoints of what happened, getting home over the course of many years in various ways, and lots of journals and lots of books being written, lots of tales being told with lots of contradictions. And there have been many books written since then, from right at the get go. And then every couple of generations, new books come out about it and there's a new one out, fairly new out now, which again, tries to look at it all and piece together the whole story of everything that happened.

Gary [00:57:55]:

It's a fascinating story. That one of those things when you read it, it's like, who needs fiction when this nonfiction stuff like this happens? That really happened, right? You could read about it if you like that kind of stuff. It's a good book.

Leo [00:58:15]:

So in terms of blatant self promotion, it's interesting. The article I'm going to point you to is, should I turn my computer off at night? It's askleo.com 2968. And the reason I'm chuckling a little bit is this is one of those articles that's actually controversial. People have differing and strong opinions about exactly what you should and or shouldn't do with your computers. Whether turning them off is the right thing to do, leaving them running is the right thing to do. I mean, it's crazy. So I share my opinion, which as with most things, boils down to, well, it depends. But if you also read through some of the comments, or even better, some of the comments on the YouTube video that goes with it, you'll see that, like I said, there is a wide diversity of opinions.

Gary [00:59:06]:

Yep. That's also a big topic for Mac users, particularly that people think they should shut down their machines, when in fact, then they're missing out on certain maintenance and updates and things that are going on while it's sleeping, thus leading the Mac to actually run slower during the day. Because it's basically saying, well, I really need to catch up with this maintenance. I tried to do it while you weren't using me, but you kept shutting me down, so now I'm going to do it while you're using me. I've done various videos on that as well. But for this week, I want to point to a video on a new feature in macOS Sonoma, which is the Safari Web apps. Web apps are not a new thing. Other browsers have had them for a while.

Gary [00:59:55]:

But the idea is that you could take a website and say, I want a web app of this, and it appears to be a separate app. And you run it and it opens a window up and you're browsing that site, but you're in fact using the code from your browser, but the system sees it as a separate application from the browser. And the cool thing about that is all the website data is separate. So if you, say, aren't logged into a social media site in Safari, you can be logged in in the web app that you made for the social media site. Or maybe you can make three web apps for the social media site and each one can be logged into a separate account.

Leo [01:00:37]:

Interesting. I like that.

Gary [01:00:38]:

So it's a privacy thing, but also for people that have to if you find yourself logging in and logging out of stuff like even like YouTube, it's like, oh, I maintain a YouTube channel using this account, but I watch YouTube using this account. Well, you can create a web app to maintain your YouTube channel and then your regular browser isn't logged in as that user. So that's like the main point of it as well as convenience. And it's kind of really nice to be able to have something that goes know, you launch it and you're right there on that site and doing that thing.

Leo [01:01:11]:

Funny.

Gary [01:01:12]:

Yeah.

Leo [01:01:16]:

It'S a common thing. I have multiple accounts and it's why I have currently three different browsers running.

Gary [01:01:24]:

Yeah, this eliminates there are two features actually of macOS Sonoma that deal with that. One is profiles. So you can do the same thing inside the browser and have two windows open in two different profiles. And the other way to deal with that is web apps and have the web app for especially if you work for a company and there's a portal you're supposed to log into that has all the company stuff on it. You create a web app for that and now that's just like a separate thing and you're logged into your company's portal in that app only and then your browser is something else.

Leo [01:02:01]:

I like it. The other solution that somebody pointed me at is a plugin for firefox that it sounds like it sets up exactly what you just described in terms of profiles in the sense that you can assign your tabs to different tab groups, but each tab group has its own data store, essentially its own cookies, its own whatevers. So you can have multiple and different separate sign ins that way. Like I said, it sounds almost exactly like what you just described for profiles.

Gary [01:02:32]:

Yes.

Leo [01:02:33]:

Very cool. Well, I think that pretty much does us for yet another week. The show notes for this week are@tehpodcast.com Teh 20 five. If you've got a comment or a question for us, absolutely. Leave it there. We read them, we see them. Trust me. We really do.

Leo [01:02:51]:

As always, thanks for listening and we will see you here again real soon. Take care everyone. Bye.