Grading Apple Intelligence with Adam Jones

Transcript

Intro

Tom Anderson (0s)

Hello, Jeff's mom again, tell Jeff to get to work.

Jeff Battersby (0s)

She's going to be texting us again telling us this.

Jeff Battersby (6s)

Exactly.

Tom Anderson (9s)

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Basic AF. Tom Anderson joined as always by my co-host Jeff Battersby.

Tom Anderson (17s)

Happy New Year, Jeff. Good to see you, sir.

Jeff Battersby (19s)

Good to see you too, Tom.

Jeff Battersby (21s)

Yes, happy new year.

Jeff Battersby (22s)

By the way, just to break your heart,

Jeff Battersby (26s)

or to show you how impressive and well remembered I am.

Jeff Battersby (30s)

I was in New York City yesterday and I was looking at cameras,

Jeff Battersby (36s)

Fujifilm cameras to be exact,

Tom Anderson (39s)

I wonder why.

Jeff Battersby (39s)

pointing out that Chris Freitag has maybe ruined my pocketbook.

Jeff Battersby (45s)

But I was, I was in B&H.

Tom Anderson (49s)

I was going to ask if that's where you were.

Jeff Battersby (49s)

You know, yeah, I was at B&H.

Jeff Battersby (52s)

That's when I took a picture of the soundboard that you use.

Jeff Battersby (56s)

Not exactly the same one.

Jeff Battersby (57s)

And so I wanted to see which models Chris was using,

Jeff Battersby (1m 1s)

so I texted him, and I got the equivalent.

Jeff Battersby (1m 5s)

I even said my name.

Jeff Battersby (1m 7s)

Chris, this is Jeff Battersby.

Jeff Battersby (1m 11s)

And I got the equivalent of new phone, who dis?

Jeff Battersby (1m 16s)

It was pretty funny.

Jeff Battersby (1m 19s)

Then I said, "It's Jeff from Basic AF."

Jeff Battersby (1m 21s)

Oh, yes!

Tom Anderson (1m 23s)

You! Okay.

Jeff Battersby (1m 24s)

So, yeah, we are, at least I am,

Jeff Battersby (1m 28s)

sticking in the minds and hearts of everybody,

Jeff Battersby (1m 31s)

including our guests.

Tom Anderson (1m 33s)

Well, it's just, it's...

Jeff Battersby (1m 36s)

And speaking of guests,

Tom Anderson (1m 38s)

Well done.

Tom Anderson (1m 39s)

It was, it was nice, yeah.

Jeff Battersby (1m 39s)

that was a good segue, wasn't it?

Jeff Battersby (1m 41s)

We have a guest today, Adam Jones, you're back.

Hello Again, Adam Jones!

Jeff Battersby (1m 45s)

How are you, buddy?

Adam Jones (1m 45s)

Yeah, thanks for having me guys really excited to talk about Apple intelligence today.

Jeff Battersby (1m 49s)

Yeah, who am I?

Adam Jones (1m 52s)

Jeff, I got it.

Jeff Battersby (1m 52s)

What's my name?

Tom Anderson (1m 55s)

Depends. Is it Jeff Battersby? No, I don't know that guy.

Tom Anderson (1m 58s)

Is it Jeff Basingame? Oh, you! Yeah, yeah!

Jeff Battersby (2m 1s)

Basic A. Jeff, all right.

Jeff Battersby (2m 5s)

Anyway, so welcome aboard.

Jeff Battersby (2m 6s)

Yeah, we're happy to have you too, Adam,

Tom Anderson (2m 8s)

Yeah.

Jeff Battersby (2m 8s)

and good to see you.

Jeff Battersby (2m 10s)

How were your holidays?

Adam Jones (2m 11s)

They were awesome. You know I've got young kids, so it's really magical when you have kids around the holidays a little bit of stress, but

Adam Jones (2m 20s)

more more joy than than not

Jeff Battersby (2m 23s)

Yeah, always, always a little crazy.

Jeff Battersby (2m 26s)

I was texting a friend of mine, and she has a new granddaughter, and she, I asked how it was, and she said, "It's great, nice to have the kids and the dog around."

Jeff Battersby (2m 39s)

I guess they have a dog, you know, a kid's dog, too.

Jeff Battersby (2m 42s)

She says, "Makes things a little crazy."

Jeff Battersby (2m 46s)

So there you have it.

Jeff Battersby (2m 48s)

That's the nature of the beast.

Jeff Battersby (2m 49s)

It was your old, single, and childless.

Jeff Battersby (2m 53s)

You're going to have that kind of drama.

Tom Anderson (2m 56s)

Some quick housekeeping. This is episode 52, so if you would like to see show notes for this episode, basicafshow.com/52. That's right. We did. Yeah, thanks so much. Yeah, love to hear that.

Jeff Battersby (3m)

Sure.

Jeff Battersby (3m 3s)

Woo hoo.

Jeff Battersby (3m 8s)

In weeks of full years worth of episodes, which we got a nice message from, from a new listener who, uh, so they just found our show, listened to a couple of episodes and are now going through the back catalog, which we.

Tom Anderson (3m 24s)

All right, Adam, so you joined us.

Tom Anderson (3m 26s)

Back in episode 40 in July, which right around the time the public betas were coming out.

Tom Anderson (3m 31s)

But why don't you, when we were, well, I don't know about that.

Jeff Battersby (3m 31s)

Back when we were young.

Tom Anderson (3m 35s)

It's been a long time since I've been that.

Tom Anderson (3m 38s)

But for folks who may not have caught that show or more recent listeners, why don't you take a minute and introduce yourself and then we'll jump into.

Adam Jones (3m 48s)

Absolutely. Well, thanks again for having me. I can't believe the last time we spoke was in July.

Adam Jones (3m 53s)

It seems like it wasn't that long ago. But so I'm Adam. I'm a former high school teacher and administrator. I've always had a passion for technology. I worked for an education technology company briefly. But in 2021, I founded a company called Skybound Education. And we're a consultancy of four people that serves 18 school districts or charter schools in Indiana. And so that's my

Adam Jones (4m 18s)

day job, if you will. But in my spare time, I love talking about tech and making some YouTube videos

Adam Jones (4m 26s)

about different topics. And you can find me at adamjonesink, like the ink you write with.

Adam Jones (4m 32s)

So thanks for having me back.

Jeff Battersby (4m 34s)

Awesome. Thanks for coming back.

Tom Anderson (4m 35s)

Yeah, glad you are. Exactly. Yeah, we didn't run you off. That's good. We're happy with that. Yep.

Jeff Battersby (4m 39s)

We haven't chased you away.

Jeff Battersby (4m 41s)

It's shocking, but true.

Tom Anderson (4m 42s)

All right. So for today's show, what we intend to do is spend a little bit of time kind of taking a look at the Apple intelligence features thus far that we've picked up in the last couple of months.

Tom Anderson (4m 58s)

I think they first rolled out, if you're not counting the betas, it was what, October of this year?

Tom Anderson (5m 5s)

Because the iPhone 16 lineup came out that Apple promoted is all about Apple intelligence and Apple intelligence wasn't quite ready when they were released.

Tom Anderson (5m 14s)

It was a little bit of a lull there, but it is out now, at least some of it.

Tom Anderson (5m 18s)

And so we're going to talk about that and give some thoughts and kind of maybe give it a grade and see how Apple's doing so far.

Tom Anderson (5m 29s)

So see how it's working. Yep.

Jeff Battersby (5m 29s)

See how it's working and as we all know, I'm a little AI-less.

Jeff Battersby (5m 33s)

That's not entirely true, but I'm not an all-in.

Jeff Battersby (5m 37s)

So Adam and Tom will be taking most of the reins here and I'll just be asking stupid questions or, you know, inserting my opinion about things.

Jeff Battersby (5m 46s)

But one thing that we did say that came up earlier, actually maybe in the last couple of days, The Verge had an article

Privacy Concerns with Photos App?

Jeff Battersby (5m 54s)

out. Yeah, this is your phone sharing photo data with photos

Jeff Battersby (6m)

by default. And the answer to that is yes. The the the article itself. I don't have permission to view this story. I love Apple News sometimes. Since I posted this, I still don't have

Jeff Battersby (6m 19s)

to do it. There's a feature and you should know about this.

Jeff Battersby (6m 22s)

There's a feature in your phone. That's part of and actually part

Jeff Battersby (6m 29s)

that is Apple is turning on by default, which I think we all agree Adam Tom that, you know, sharing your data should not be on by default. But it's important to note that this feature called enhanced visual search is what allows you to take a picture say of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and have your phone come back with information saying that St. Patrick's Cathedral. Apple if you read their their privacy information.

Jeff Battersby (6m 59s)

Very, very clear about the fact that

Jeff Battersby (7m 4s)

this is mostly on-device machine learning.

Jeff Battersby (7m 8s)

So what it says in the notes about their searching photos,

Jeff Battersby (7m 13s)

says the process starts with an on-device ML model,

Jeff Battersby (7m 17s)

which is machine language model,

Jeff Battersby (7m 19s)

that analyzes a given photo to determine if there is a, quote, region of interest,

Jeff Battersby (7m 25s)

and then in parentheses, ROI,

Jeff Battersby (7m 29s)

may contain a landmark if the model detects an ROI and the landmark domain of vector embedding is calculated for that region of the image.

Jeff Battersby (7m 36s)

So basically, you know, it's looking at a picture,

Jeff Battersby (7m 40s)

sending information privately to Apple to say,

Jeff Battersby (7m 43s)

"Hey, this might be St. Patrick's Cathedral."

Jeff Battersby (7m 46s)

And then it links your photo and that information to back-end information.

Jeff Battersby (7m 51s)

The point that The Verge was making in the person that actually,

Jeff Battersby (7m 57s)

originally.

Jeff Battersby (7m 59s)

Posted this with the kind of salacious.

Jeff Battersby (8m 3s)

Apple occasionally makes choices that tarnish it strong privacy for reputation like when it was quote secretly collecting Siri user data true.

Jeff Battersby (8m 12s)

It's not a it's not a lie.

Jeff Battersby (8m 15s)

There was a developer Jeff Johnson that pointed out that these kinds of things if Apple's going to do them should be opt-in not opt-out.

Jeff Battersby (8m 23s)

So if you look under your photos settings in the settings app and scroll down.

Jeff Battersby (8m 29s)

you will find that there is a setting that says Enhanced Visual Search.

Jeff Battersby (8m 36s)

If you do not want this feature,

Jeff Battersby (8m 38s)

you need to go and turn it off on your own.

Jeff Battersby (8m 41s)

And that's a fair statement, you know, a little,

Jeff Battersby (8m 43s)

a little janky in terms of the, you know, click baited,

Jeff Battersby (8m 47s)

click baited. Click baity title.

Jeff Battersby (8m 51s)

Is your iPhone sharing photos data with Apple by default? The answer is yes.

Jeff Battersby (8m 56s)

we can affirm that it is on by default.

Jeff Battersby (8m 59s)

And if you do not want that information sent to Apple,

Jeff Battersby (9m 2s)

which is what allows you to see that you're looking at as if you didn't know St. Patrick's Cathedral,

Jeff Battersby (9m 8s)

you can turn that off.

Jeff Battersby (9m 11s)

So that is one of the AI feature as features,

Jeff Battersby (9m 15s)

Apple intelligence features that Apple has on board your devices.

Jeff Battersby (9m 20s)

But this goes a step further than say,

Jeff Battersby (9m 23s)

taking a picture of a flower, a leaf in the wild and having it come back.

Jeff Battersby (9m 26s)

This is using some of your information,

Jeff Battersby (9m 29s)

and then coming back with historical information

Jeff Battersby (9m 34s)

or object information that is being cleaned from other sources as well.

Jeff Battersby (9m 42s)

There we go.

Jeff Battersby (9m 43s)

I think I covered it.

Jeff Battersby (9m 44s)

Now I've said everything I know about Apple intelligence.

Tom Anderson (9m 45s)

I think you did.

Tom Anderson (9m 46s)

Either one of you care too much about them doing that?

Adam Jones (9m 47s)

I don't.

Adam Jones (9m 53s)

I think it probably should have been opt-in, but to me this highlights something going on in AI in general, which is it's dependent on massive amounts of data, publicly available data, and to deliver really good user experiences, companies need to surface as much of that data as possible, as quickly as possible.

Adam Jones (10m 14s)

You know, just a quick side note, I was reading recently.

Adam Jones (10m 17s)

that back in the early days of the internet,

Adam Jones (10m 20s)

people were studying how long people would stay on a web page before they would lose focus or not complete a shopping experience or a search query.

Adam Jones (10m 28s)

And I think we're reaching that with AI.

Adam Jones (10m 30s)

If the tools aren't really fast, if they don't give us information intuitively rapidly, then people might think, this isn't worth my time.

Adam Jones (10m 37s)

It's not adding value.

Adam Jones (10m 39s)

And so Apple, I think, made a choice here that they're going to send that data right away.

Adam Jones (10m 43s)

They know the majority of users won't turn it off.

Adam Jones (10m 45s)

and they're just trying to.

Adam Jones (10m 47s)

a great value. Now I'll say I'm more comfortable with Apple doing it than a lot of companies out there because Apple is so

Adam Jones (10m 54s)

Privacy forward that's a big part of their messaging. They've got that great ad

Adam Jones (10m 59s)

Where they're like shooting down the drones that are looking at your search history. Have you all seen that one?

Jeff Battersby (11m 3s)

Yeah, it's a, and it is a great app.

Tom Anderson (11m 4s)

I haven't seen that one.

Adam Jones (11m 6s)

Yeah, I think they're drones I may be misremembering but I

Adam Jones (11m 10s)

just feel like Apple has been a leader on encrypting iMessage and

Adam Jones (11m 16s)

Even when they talked about

Adam Jones (11m 17s)

Apple intelligence and the way that queries would hit your device first and then go out to this secure cloud structure I think they really want to be the key player that's delivering it in as private a way as possible and so for that reason it doesn't bother me but it is a

Jeff Battersby (11m 37s)

Opt-in always a better choice. I think it doesn't bother me either. I like that feature. Actually. I like the fact that

Jeff Battersby (11m 44s)

You know if I'm looking at something

Jeff Battersby (11m 47s)

Particularly for me, you know

Jeff Battersby (11m 49s)

Plants animals things of that nature

Jeff Battersby (11m 51s)

That I can get that information quickly, but you know again anytime your information is being

Jeff Battersby (11m 58s)

Used essentially as crowdsourcing, you know, your your information is is being used elsewhere I think it's important to know.

Jeff Battersby (12m 7s)

that by the way, um, back in the old, old, olden days of the original iPhone,

Jeff Battersby (12m 14s)

um, Apple had initially, you know, they initially bought geolocation information and your iPhone is providing and has been providing geolocation information, you know, based on, uh, different, uh, cell towers and wifi and all that kind of stuff for ages.

Jeff Battersby (12m 32s)

And you probably opted into that a bazillion years ago.

Jeff Battersby (12m 34s)

So this is not new, this kind of crowdsourcing that.

Jeff Battersby (12m 37s)

Apple's doing. To Adam's point. Yeah, this information is

Jeff Battersby (12m 44s)

fortunately for us at present, God knows what, you know, future holds for for Apple, you know, somebody else takes over. All right, I'm going to show my stripes here. If Elon Musk buys Apple, you know, we might end up with a slightly different situation. But presently, I like Adam, I trust the trust the machine.

Jeff Battersby (13m 7s)

Um, so there we go.

Jeff Battersby (13m 10s)

That's my feelings.

Tom Anderson (13m 11s)

Okay. I do too, just for the record. Not that anybody cares, but yeah. Okay. No, you really don't. You don't.

Jeff Battersby (13m 15s)

No, I care.

Jeff Battersby (13m 17s)

I care Tom.

Jeff Battersby (13m 18s)

Tom, I do.

Tom Anderson (13m 19s)

No. Um, I mean, they've got all my photos anyway. I mean, they're all up in iCloud, so what difference does it make? I don't care.

Jeff Battersby (13m 20s)

You were cheating on me today with

Jeff Battersby (13m 27s)

right.

Tom Anderson (13m 27s)

Help yourself. Um, alright. So, uh, that's why I don't do any selfies. They're all—they're—I don't want to look at me.

Jeff Battersby (13m 31s)

Nobody wants to look at you.

Jeff Battersby (13m 32s)

Anyway, I mean, did I say that?

Jeff Battersby (13m 37s)

Same, same.

Tom Anderson (13m 39s)

It's like so

Tom Anderson (13m 41s)

I get it. Okay. So on the Apple intelligence front, we have had some features roll out over the last

AI Features in Recent Updates

Tom Anderson (13m 52s)

couple of updates, starting with the dot one updates for iOS, iPadOS and MacOS. So 18.1 for iOS and iPadOS 15.1 for MacOS Sequoia and of course dot twos come out as well. We've got dot three in beta, when it came out just before.

Tom Anderson (14m 11s)

But that, uh, I think we'll pick up more now that everyone's going back to work here in the next, he did, he walked down, he had enough, um, but that's okay.

Jeff Battersby (14m 17s)

Adam left us, Tom.

Adam Jones (14m 21s)

I'm here, I was scaring you at dog bark.

Tom Anderson (14m 25s)

Mine do it too.

Tom Anderson (14m 26s)

Um, so let's look at a couple of those features and in the note that we're using here, I don't have them in any sort of order, really.

Tom Anderson (14m 36s)

They're not in chronological order or anything like that.

Tom Anderson (14m 39s)

Um, so let's just run down the list.

Tom Anderson (14m 41s)

Really quickly.

Tom Anderson (14m 41s)

And then we can dig into a couple of that are of interest and, uh, go from there.

Tom Anderson (14m 45s)

But so we've got writing tools, um, on the image creation side of things, which

Tom Anderson (14m 51s)

can be a sensitive subject in some ways, but I think Apple has done an okay job with making it fairly obvious that these are AI images and they're

Tom Anderson (15m)

kind of cartoonish and everything.

Tom Anderson (15m 1s)

We've got image playground.

Tom Anderson (15m 3s)

Uh, we have the image wand on iOS and iPad.

Tom Anderson (15m 8s)

OS we have Genmoji.

Tom Anderson (15m 11s)

Um, and I think for image creation, that is about it.

Tom Anderson (15m 16s)

Um, we got summaries for mail notifications and webpages, uh, photos got some, uh, some features in it clean up, which we'll talk about.

Tom Anderson (15m 24s)

I'm sure a little bit memory movies, search using natural language.

Tom Anderson (15m 29s)

Um, and then chat GPT is available and it sounds like Gemini and maybe some others will be forthcoming as the updates continue to roll out.

Tom Anderson (15m 38s)

So with chatGBT, you can use.

Tom Anderson (15m 41s)

your own account, if you have one with chatGBT, you can sign in with that account, or you can use it without an account.

Tom Anderson (15m 46s)

Some features do require chatGBT.

Tom Anderson (15m 50s)

So visual intelligence on the iPhone 16 lineup, if you use that and want to use the Ask feature, you need a chatGBT account for that.

Tom Anderson (16m)

So there's kind of the list.

Tom Anderson (16m 3s)

Adam, out of that list, which ones have you spent the most time with, in particular, you'd like to dig into a

Adam Jones (16m 12s)

Yeah, I have played with most of these.

Writing Tools

Adam Jones (16m 14s)

The one I have not played with at all is the Image Wand,

Adam Jones (16m 17s)

where you can create images like within Notes,

Adam Jones (16m 19s)

but I have integrated my paid chat GPT account,

Adam Jones (16m 23s)

so I'd be happy to talk about that a little bit,

Adam Jones (16m 25s)

using that on the phone as well as Mac OS.

Adam Jones (16m 30s)

And then I've played with the writing tools a little bit.

Adam Jones (16m 34s)

So maybe with the writing tools, I'll start there.

Adam Jones (16m 36s)

I'm a big fan of Apple Notes,

Adam Jones (16m 38s)

and that's where I just will draft an email or I'll gather--

Adam Jones (16m 42s)

data.

Adam Jones (16m 44s)

What I've found, you know, a lot in my work, I'll create a lot of tables or ask a different AI tool to

Adam Jones (16m 52s)

look at a set of survey data or quantitative information and then create a table from that, but it doesn't always

Adam Jones (16m 59s)

format very well to copy into like a Google Doc. It's not

Adam Jones (17m 3s)

easily copied over. It'll be like an original markdown, which doesn't get transferred into whatever

Adam Jones (17m 9s)

writing document I'm using. So if I copy that into notes,

Adam Jones (17m 12s)

presumably in pages or another tool as well,

Adam Jones (17m 14s)

and then I highlight that markdown table and I go to writing tools and I say create a table,

Adam Jones (17m 20s)

it will format it in a way that can be then easily copied into a word processor.

Adam Jones (17m 26s)

So I've used it for that and that's really helpful. I've used it to play around with tones of

Adam Jones (17m 31s)

writing, you know, I've purposely written something that's just kind of like quick and direct and here's what I want to say.

Adam Jones (17m 36s)

And then I've said, "Hey, make it friendly."

Adam Jones (17m 38s)

And that can be helpful.

Adam Jones (17m 42s)

I am someone who loves to write and that's an area of my life that I, you know,

Adam Jones (17m 47s)

I was an English major in college and I kind of prided myself in trying to learn as much about

Adam Jones (17m 52s)

tone and grammar and just how you get the written word across. So I find myself

Adam Jones (17m 58s)

wanting to own the words that I send out to people. So I've mostly used it for things that are more

Adam Jones (18m 4s)

informative text or something for work. I'm not going to use it to send a message to my parents or my wife or, you know,

Adam Jones (18m 12s)

draft a Christmas card. That's just not me. I'm not judging people who do, but I could see it being helpful for some of those

Adam Jones (18m 20s)

day-to-day work tasks. Can I make a quick point though? Is that okay?

Tom Anderson (18m 24s)

Please?

Jeff Battersby (18m 24s)

No, no, absolutely no points.

Adam Jones (18m 25s)

No, get off the podcast.

Tom Anderson (18m 26s)

Awww.

Adam Jones (18m 28s)

I have been really shocked and this is not my insight.

Adam Jones (18m 31s)

I saw someone else say this and I should credit them, but I don't remember, but some of the Apple Intelligence commercials

Adam Jones (18m 36s)

highlighting the writing tools have really surprised me because it doesn't, they don't seem very Apple.

Adam Jones (18m 43s)

So there's this one of a guy in an office who's sending an email, I think to his boss, and he's just clearly not

Adam Jones (18m 50s)

very organized. He's not intentional. It doesn't seem like a good employee and

Adam Jones (18m 56s)

he uses Apple Intelligence to write something and send it to his boss and it really impresses his boss.

Adam Jones (19m 3s)

At the end of the commercial, I think the tagline is something like "genius". You know, there's like this musical cue and

Adam Jones (19m 10s)

And Apple, in my mind, has been about...

Adam Jones (19m 12s)

...enabling creativity, and synthesizing ideas, and making something beautiful or new.

Adam Jones (19m 18s)

And this seems to just be about enabling laziness, and mediocrity.

Adam Jones (19m 24s)

And I just don't know if that's the right spin.

Adam Jones (19m 26s)

I don't know if you all have a thought on that.

Jeff Battersby (19m 29s)

feel exactly the same way as you.

Jeff Battersby (19m 32s)

And there have been a couple of those.

Jeff Battersby (19m 33s)

And I know exactly the particular Apple Intelligence ad that you're speaking of.

Jeff Battersby (19m 38s)

It's very funny.

Jeff Battersby (19m 40s)

It's very clever.

Jeff Battersby (19m 41s)

But yeah, unfortunately, I think it speaks to the problem we may all have with some people that we work with,

Jeff Battersby (19m 51s)

that somehow they find a way to get elevated beyond what they should.

Tom Anderson (19m 55s)

"Don't hate the player Jeff." That's what it is. Tale as old as time.

Jeff Battersby (19m 57s)

Is that what the story is?

Jeff Battersby (19m 59s)

OK.

Jeff Battersby (20m 5s)

Anyway, yeah, I'm with you, Adam, 100% on that.

Jeff Battersby (20m 10s)

It's not even so much that I--

Jeff Battersby (20m 13s)

the idea of laziness to me isn't just not being smart enough to do something more easily and more quickly than others.

Jeff Battersby (20m 21s)

And mom, I'm looking at you.

Jeff Battersby (20m 22s)

When I used to take out three bags of garbage at once,

Jeff Battersby (20m 25s)

you used to call it a lazy man's load.

Tom Anderson (20m 27s)

Hello, Jeff's mom again.

Jeff Battersby (20m 27s)

But I got it done in one run.

Jeff Battersby (20m 29s)

No, it's-- she's going to be texting us again telling us.

Tom Anderson (20m 36s)

Tell Jeff to get to work.

Jeff Battersby (20m 38s)

Exactly.

Tom Anderson (20m 40s)

That's what she said.

Jeff Battersby (20m 40s)

But there is definitely a point to taking your native intelligence and your native desire and finding a way to be more efficient with that,

Jeff Battersby (20m 49s)

and efficient for purposes, to my mind, of making it so you have more time for yourself.

Jeff Battersby (21m)

I know that sounds ridiculous to some people's minds.

Jeff Battersby (21m 3s)

Productivity, productivity, productivity is a thing that I don't believe in.

Jeff Battersby (21m 10s)

But the idea-- my intent is always to try to get things done as quickly as possible so that--

Jeff Battersby (21m 17s)

not I have time to do more of that kind of junk,

Jeff Battersby (21m 19s)

but so I have more time to do reading, or watching movies,

Jeff Battersby (21m 25s)

or writing, or--

Jeff Battersby (21m 27s)

Right, that's really what it comes down to.

Jeff Battersby (21m 29s)

For me, it's something creative or something that is, you know, filling myself with somebody else's creativity.

Jeff Battersby (21m 36s)

And so the spin on that ad, it really seems like, you know, you could be a dumbass at work and not have to worry about anything because you got Apple intelligence to be intelligent

Adam Jones (21m 50s)

Yeah, and really, that's not the only one. There was one with Bella Ramsey, the actress,

Adam Jones (21m 54s)

looking at, you know, a screenplay, or not reading the screenplay and having a meeting with,

Adam Jones (21m 59s)

you know, that's just being unprepared. And I get it's a funny commercial. But at a time when people are worried about AI replacing them, and making people obsolete,

Adam Jones (22m 8s)

I think showing the tools being used in a context where you don't have to do work,

Adam Jones (22m 13s)

or what the step up for that employee, that bad office employee, the next step in evolution is he doesn't exist.

Adam Jones (22m 20s)

and the AI just generates that email on his behalf.

Adam Jones (22m 24s)

Is that the world we want to live in?

Adam Jones (22m 25s)

I think it should be about augmenting us, not replacing us.

Jeff Battersby (22m 26s)

Yeah, yeah, and the next step, obvious step up is that the schmuck is the one that gets elevated above everybody else and because he's able to use these dumb tools, he's able to get rid of anybody below him.

Tom Anderson (22m 43s)

Jeff, so I think I know the answer, but maybe have you kicked the tires on the writing tools at all just to look at it? I know you're not going to be a big user of it, but.

Jeff Battersby (22m 43s)

There are real people that do that regularly.

Jeff Battersby (22m 47s)

What's the answer?

Jeff Battersby (22m 49s)

Nope, nope, don't use the writing tools.

Adam Jones (22m 52s)

How about you, Tom?

Tom Anderson (22m 55s)

Okay, I, I've done a little bit of testing with it. I'm just doing some research on it. Um, I don't particularly like the user interface for it.

Jeff Battersby (22m 56s)

And that ... what's that?

Adam Jones (22m 57s)

Sorry, I was just curious if Tom's used writing tools.

Tom Anderson (23m 10s)

I think the little.

Tom Anderson (23m 13s)

Pop-ups look fine but when you try to do something it gets a little bit weird I think for it part of it just could be the way that I've worked right because it's it's a new way to work and I haven't done it but the one of the things I notice like is if you're so with the writing tools a lot of times kind of the thing that I've fallen into is.

Tom Anderson (23m 40s)

I'll do my writing, and then I take it.

Tom Anderson (23m 44s)

and I throw it into the web app.

Tom Anderson (23m 46s)

I don't use the Grammarly app to track every little single thing,

Tom Anderson (23m 49s)

and to be honest, that kind of creeps me out a little bit.

Tom Anderson (23m 51s)

Although I don't know why,

Tom Anderson (23m 52s)

because I paste it right into the web thing.

Tom Anderson (23m 53s)

But if you've got the app running, though,

Tom Anderson (23m 56s)

it captures everything, because it's always, right?

Tom Anderson (23m 59s)

It's always looking at what you're typing,

Tom Anderson (24m 1s)

and to give suggestions and all that,

Tom Anderson (24m 2s)

and I don't really want that.

Tom Anderson (24m 3s)

I just want it to take what I've written,

Tom Anderson (24m 5s)

kind of be the first kind of look at it to be like, okay.

Tom Anderson (24m 10s)

'Cause I know I make a lot of mistakes in it,

Tom Anderson (24m 11s)

I'm banging it out pretty quick.

Tom Anderson (24m 13s)

And so I'll do that, um, And I've, I think I've just gotten used to that workflow where you paste that, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 paragraphs, whatever it is into Grammarly. It kind of evaluates. Everything gives you the split view. So you can see like the grade that it assigns based off of the criteria that you've chosen inside of Grammarly. Right? So you can say I want it to be informal, casual, whatever those are three or four things. Uh, and then.

Tom Anderson (24m 43s)

I can look at the suggestions on the whole page and see how it's all gonna flow together.

Tom Anderson (24m 51s)

The writing tools I've noticed if I'm on it,

Tom Anderson (24m 53s)

and they may have changed since I did this,

Tom Anderson (24m 55s)

it's been a little while ago,

Tom Anderson (24m 56s)

but if I'm in the writing tools and then I switch out to a different app,

Tom Anderson (25m 1s)

when I come back, say, to the app that I'm using the writing tools in, they've disappeared.

Tom Anderson (25m 6s)

Because the prompt comes up in this little box.

Tom Anderson (25m 9s)

and also think just the way it presents itself.

Tom Anderson (25m 13s)

some of the changes.

Tom Anderson (25m 14s)

I haven't, maybe it's just I'm not used to it yet,

Tom Anderson (25m 17s)

but I still use Grammarly.

Tom Anderson (25m 20s)

I've got the Pro account.

Tom Anderson (25m 21s)

I just have continued to use that.

Jeff Battersby (25m 24s)

Does that have AI built into it too? I mean it's always done kind of some reader-y stuff in the background.

Tom Anderson (25m 31s)

Right yeah so it does that and then they do have where you can choose a block of text and say improve this for me or rewrite stuff like that which I don't do too much of that but I do like looking at the suggestions some of them are good some of them are like no that's not really how I want that to be and I just reject it but yeah so for now I'm using that still.

Adam Jones (25m 54s)

Yeah, and I think you could use writing tools.

Adam Jones (25m 55s)

I haven't done it to like just clean up my writing, but that could be a good use case.

Adam Jones (25m 59s)

I mean, it sounds like Grammarly is meeting that need for you.

Tom Anderson (26m 1s)

Mm-hmm.

Adam Jones (26m 3s)

So the other one I've played with is the chat GPT integration a little bit.

ChatGPT Integration

Adam Jones (26m 6s)

Um, did you all catch any of OpenAI's 12 days of shipmas where they announced big and small releases for 12 business days in a row?

Tom Anderson (26m 17s)

I did not. I think I saw one or two in passing and don't remember what they are,

Tom Anderson (26m 22s)

but if you have those and you want to give us an overview, feel free.

Adam Jones (26m 25s)

Well, I just wanted to highlight, they did one that was about integrating with Apple intelligence.

Adam Jones (26m 29s)

That was one of their highlights. And one thing I thought was really neat is,

Adam Jones (26m 35s)

and if people haven't tried this yet, on your Mac OS running the latest version,

Adam Jones (26m 40s)

you can double tap the command button to activate Siri and you can ask a question.

Adam Jones (26m 45s)

And if you do that, and you have like a PDF up or a web page up,

Adam Jones (26m 49s)

you can ask a question about the content on your screen. And you can and--

Adam Jones (26m 55s)

actually say either ask a question about the screenshot of what's on your screen or the whole document There's a little drop down and so if you've pulled up a big PDF and you're just trying to get bullet points of what?

Adam Jones (27m 6s)

Was this about that's a really nice quick way to have that built right in at the systems level

Adam Jones (27m 13s)

And it does a really nice job because it's going out to chat GPT and and using that

Adam Jones (27m 18s)

Technology to pull it so I found that to be pretty cool, and then we were talking about

Adam Jones (27m 23s)

toggles, you know

Adam Jones (27m 26s)

So by default on your iPhone now when you want to when you ask Siri a question and it determines it needs to go out to chat GPT It will ask you every time by default Do you you know are you have to confirm or authorize it to go out to chat GPT?

Adam Jones (27m 40s)

I turn that off because I found that really irritating to have to authorize that every time so just

Adam Jones (27m 47s)

Public service announcement if you just wanted to do it Anyway, if you're comfortable with sending that question out to chat GPT You can turn that off and then it will

Adam Jones (27m 55s)

automatically do so if it determines that that would be helpful and I do have a paid account and so I can see any searches

Adam Jones (28m 3s)

That I've asked on the desktop app or in the browser, so I think that's smart I would like to see them add other tools. It'll be interesting I don't know. I have no idea what business deals have been made, but I've become a big fan of

Adam Jones (28m 17s)

Claude's anthropic excuse me anthropics Claude model particularly 3.5 sonnet

Adam Jones (28m 22s)

You know Jim and I had some big announcements

Adam Jones (28m 25s)

over the last couple weeks, Google's tool.

Adam Jones (28m 27s)

It would be neat to see if you could pick your tool of choice if you're more invested in one than the other.

Tom Anderson (28m 34s)

Yeah, that would be nice. And Claude is one that I was just talking to somebody about the other day that I want to spend some more time with. I think, Jeff, you've used that one a little bit.

Tom Anderson (28m 42s)

You've mentioned it before.

Jeff Battersby (28m 43s)

Yeah, I have used Claude and I've used it to play with it it's really that's really been the reason

Jeff Battersby (28m 51s)

basically the guiding situation behind that for me, it's just to kind of have an understanding of what it does. And Claude's okay. I have used it. What I will occasionally do if there's some subject, you know, particularly scientific or otherwise that I'm not incredibly aware of,

Jeff Battersby (29m 11s)

I will use it to ask questions about.

Jeff Battersby (29m 14s)

That is useful in the way that Wikipedia is useful.

Jeff Battersby (29m 17s)

That's how I find that to be.

Jeff Battersby (29m 24s)

So that, I think, is valuable for being able to gather or garner information.

Jeff Battersby (29m 30s)

The problem that I'll have with it is that that information may or may not always be correct.

Jeff Battersby (29m 36s)

You know, it may not be exactly in line with any kind of research that I'm doing.

Tom Anderson (29m 36s)

Right.

Jeff Battersby (29m 44s)

So, you know, you know me.

Tom Anderson (29m 45s)

Yeah, yeah, so I turned on the chat GPT integration as well, so I've got, I do have a paid account,

Tom Anderson (29m 52s)

so I chose to use that.

Tom Anderson (29m 55s)

You don't have to use your account if you don't want to, but I did choose to do that.

Tom Anderson (29m 59s)

And you mentioned there, Adam, using the double press of the command bar or double tapping the home bar on iOS and iPadOS to kind of talk to Siri and stuff.

Tom Anderson (30m 9s)

I've actually used that more than I thought I would.

Tom Anderson (30m 13s)

just for normal theory stuff.

Tom Anderson (30m 16s)

Which I know you could type to Siri before,

Tom Anderson (30m 19s)

but sometimes if I'm at the office,

Tom Anderson (30m 21s)

you know, I just think,

Tom Anderson (30m 22s)

"Oh, I need to remember to do something."

Tom Anderson (30m 24s)

I'll just do that because it's quick, right?

Tom Anderson (30m 25s)

You just, and it's a lot faster than going into reminders or whatever to type it out and choose all that stuff.

Tom Anderson (30m 31s)

Somebody say, "Remind me to do such and such at two o'clock."

Tom Anderson (30m 33s)

And so I've used that.

Tom Anderson (30m 35s)

I've used it a little bit with Siri,

Tom Anderson (30m 38s)

but to be honest, not a whole lot.

Tom Anderson (30m 39s)

And again, I think Siri has been such a dog for so long that I don't have.

Tom Anderson (30m 45s)

Yeah.

Tom Anderson (30m 46s)

Yeah.

Tom Anderson (30m 47s)

And so I think that's going to be like a habit change if I just ever get to that point to actually benefit from it.

Tom Anderson (30m 59s)

Now, perhaps all of that gets turned on its head when we get into springtime and the new Siri comes out that has the personal context and awareness of what's on the screen and the data on your phone.

Tom Anderson (31m 12s)

And I think that's the real test to see if Sirius...

Tom Anderson (31m 15s)

ever going to be worth much more than it is now.

Tom Anderson (31m 18s)

And I mean, there's, I think there's a, there's a lot at stake, I think,

Tom Anderson (31m 21s)

for Apple for that new Siri that's supposed to be coming out in springtime.

Tom Anderson (31m 25s)

But, um, uh, until then, I still just don't think to go to Siri to do much.

Tom Anderson (31m 30s)

And especially like if.

Adam Jones (31m 31s)

Yeah, I'm the same way. And I like to use Apple Notes as my second brain. So if I meet someone new for work, and I want to remember their name and the conversation we had, maybe they told me about an interest or their kid's name and what grade they're in, you know,

Adam Jones (31m 46s)

things that just the next time I have a conversation with them, I want to try to make that connection and be personal. If I just jot that down in a quick Apple Note, then it's off my brain,

Adam Jones (31m 56s)

It's in my second brain and it would be so awesome, you know as I'm driving someplace to say

Adam Jones (32m 1s)

And I don't want to trigger my home devices, but as you know ask Siri to hey remind me what Jeff's

Adam Jones (32m 9s)

favorite hobby is right, you know

Jeff Battersby (32m 9s)

Last name is [cough] sorry.

Adam Jones (32m 12s)

You know and just give me a quick 30-second overview of the last conversation we had and

Adam Jones (32m 18s)

That would be really helpful to me. I could see using it for that or you know

Adam Jones (32m 25s)

if you track data around your health or your finances and you put that in Apple Notes and

Adam Jones (32m 31s)

Ask some questions around that that would be pretty cool too and have it sort of synthesize across

Adam Jones (32m 36s)

Multiple notes and maybe an email from your doctor or whatever it is And and I know that's getting into personally identifiable information, but if this is happening on device using Apple silicon

Adam Jones (32m 46s)

And some new power. I think that that that begins to really add value to like the human experience you're bringing

Adam Jones (32m 53s)

contextual information to the surface a lot faster

Tom Anderson (32m 57s)

Yeah, that, well, I'm looking forward to seeing it. I hope they nail it. I do. Yeah.

Adam Jones (33m 3s)

I do too.

Adam Jones (33m 3s)

Have you all played with Image Playground at all?

Image Generation Tools

Jeff Battersby (33m 6s)

I have a little bit fun for five minutes.

Tom Anderson (33m 7s)

Yep. Yep.

Adam Jones (33m 7s)

What'd you think?

Jeff Battersby (33m 11s)

I was just, I was just doing it right now for a second.

Jeff Battersby (33m 14s)

Just to kind of be goofy and remind myself.

Jeff Battersby (33m 17s)

I've done a few of those and it's nothing I'll ever use more than.

Jeff Battersby (33m 21s)

I showed it to two of my nephews on Christmas Eve to make caricatures of them.

Jeff Battersby (33m 28s)

So, that was about the size of it.

Tom Anderson (33m 29s)

Right, it's a little party trick and then after that you put it away.

Jeff Battersby (33m 32s)

Yeah, that's it.

Jeff Battersby (33m 33s)

That's it, although I will say the genmojis.

Jeff Battersby (33m 36s)

have used I have. And that's that's been kind of, you know,

Jeff Battersby (33m 40s)

a nice, nice feature. I created a couple of genmojis that were

Jeff Battersby (33m 46s)

that were kind of Christmas related. So candy canes wrapped in a bow and that kind of stuff, which, you know, weren't by default in the, in the emojis. It does, though, what's interesting is you send to somebody has an Apple device, it shows up as an emoji, if you send it to somebody that is on Android. They...

Jeff Battersby (34m 6s)

just get a picture. They get the yeah, they get it. They get it separately. It stands alone. So it doesn't show up as an emoji for them, which is not surprising because there's no emoji for that, right? It really is. Yeah, yeah, you have the wrong phone. So that I have used, you know, to some extent

Adam Jones (34m 8s)

Oh really?

Tom Anderson (34m 15s)

Right, which is better than I thought.

Tom Anderson (34m 17s)

I'm surprised it didn't say, "Get an iPhone to use this feature."

Jeff Battersby (34m 30s)

with a little bit of fun because you can do you can create a couple of a couple of interesting things with that. One

Jeff Battersby (34m 36s)

noticed about Image Playground is and I think I can't remember Tom, if I sent you a screenshot of this or not. But, you know,

Jeff Battersby (34m 47s)

nothing not safe for work, but I was asking it to, you know, to

Jeff Battersby (34m 52s)

make some, some images. And it basically said I that that had

Jeff Battersby (34m 59s)

maybe less than family friendly content. And it would, it

Tom Anderson (35m 6s)

No, no, definitely guard rails in place and probably way, way concerned.

Jeff Battersby (35m 7s)

it keeps you from doing. Yeah, for for that kind of stuff. And that's for good reason. Otherwise, yeah, I don't mind that. And I wasn't like I said, I wasn't

Jeff Battersby (35m 22s)

apple tattoo on my forehead or something like that and it you know wouldn't let me actually say I'm sorry I don't understand what you're asking which is typical Siri so I took it to be

Tom Anderson (35m 33s)

Mm-hmm

Adam Jones (35m 36s)

Yeah.

Tom Anderson (35m 38s)

Having trouble connecting to the internet

Jeff Battersby (35m 41s)

that's what I haven't heard for a while

Tom Anderson (35m 43s)

Yeah Yeah, I did when that first came out I did a whole bunch of family members and send them around and since then not really anything

Tom Anderson (35m 52s)

image wand to be honest, I had forgotten about

Tom Anderson (35m 55s)

and so in prep of this episode I did go into notes and sketched out a Christmas tree and circled it with

Tom Anderson (36m 3s)

the image wand tool selected in the Apple Pencil tools inside of notes.

Tom Anderson (36m 13s)

And so I made a tree kind of based on the sketch that I made and then once you've started then it very much mirrors image playground where you can add additional prompts and have it add tinsel to the tree and lights and ornaments and a star up top.

Tom Anderson (36m 29s)

Something I did notice was, and this is in

Tom Anderson (36m 33s)

the only AI tool I've noticed this in, I went back and had it,

Tom Anderson (36m 37s)

this was a few minutes later,

Tom Anderson (36m 39s)

I went back and had it add some GIFs under the tree on the ground.

Tom Anderson (36m 43s)

And it regenerated like an entirely new version of the tree,

Tom Anderson (36m 48s)

like the original art was completely discarded.

Jeff Battersby (36m 51s)

Oh, interesting.

Tom Anderson (36m 51s)

And then it came up with a new one.

Tom Anderson (36m 53s)

It was very similar, but it definitely wasn't the same one. Yeah.

Tom Anderson (36m 57s)

Summaries, you guys using the summaries at all?

Usefulness of Summaries

Jeff Battersby (37m 1s)

Yeah, for jokes.

Jeff Battersby (37m 6s)

We've had a couple of interesting situations with that.

Jeff Battersby (37m 12s)

I have used summaries.

Jeff Battersby (37m 13s)

I think they're kind of useful, really useful if you're getting long messages in CarPlay because it'll give you a summary of what the conversation is.

Jeff Battersby (37m 24s)

I have seen online and in my own experience situations where the summary and...

Jeff Battersby (37m 31s)

ends up being way more salacious than the actual text messages.

Jeff Battersby (37m 39s)

I think I said...

Jeff Battersby (37m 40s)

We talked about this one a few episodes back about a friend who was having a medical issue and sent a message about changes to what their OB/GYN was doing.

Jeff Battersby (37m 57s)

But the text summary was, what it said was...

Jeff Battersby (38m 1s)

the birth control didn't work.

Adam Jones (38m 3s)

Oh my God, oh my goodness.

Jeff Battersby (38m 6s)

And that's a slightly much, much different meaning than what it was that was being said,

Adam Jones (38m 11s)

Different message.

Tom Anderson (38m 12s)

Hmm.

Jeff Battersby (38m 14s)

you know, and taken out of context or read in the car could mean a totally different thing.

Tom Anderson (38m 18s)

Mm-hmm.

Jeff Battersby (38m 23s)

And there have been a couple of those, you know, that perhaps were accurate,

Jeff Battersby (38m 27s)

it, but not exactly what was being said.

Jeff Battersby (38m 29s)

So, you know, I.

Jeff Battersby (38m 31s)

I'm using that I think one of the other features is the breakout of email messages in an iOS into you know various various groupings that for the most part, I think work fine.

Jeff Battersby (38m 45s)

I've been using that pretty regularly and it kind of hides the garbage for the most part, which I really like.

Jeff Battersby (38m 53s)

So summaries I have used and enjoy.

Jeff Battersby (38m 56s)

How about you?

Jeff Battersby (38m 57s)

What?

Jeff Battersby (38m 58s)

What?

Adam Jones (38m 59s)

Are you asking me or telling both I

Jeff Battersby (38m 59s)

What?

Tom Anderson (39m 1s)

Which you.

Jeff Battersby (39m 1s)

You or Tom?

Tom Anderson (39m 3s)

Okay, Adam, go ahead.

Adam Jones (39m 4s)

Have really mixed feelings on summaries at first I thought man, this is really cool

Adam Jones (39m 10s)

But also just don't know if I need it on 99% of messages

Adam Jones (39m 16s)

Do I need a summary of my wife sending me? Hey pick this up at the grocery like I don't know

Adam Jones (39m 23s)

On the mail app specifically. I did check that out and as you both may recall

Adam Jones (39m 29s)

I don't use Apple mail. I'm a huge fan of hey email

Adam Jones (39m 32s)

I still think hey is the app for me, but it was cool to see

Adam Jones (39m 37s)

Apple mail trying to sort

Adam Jones (39m 40s)

Intelligently some messages and I'm glad to hear Jeff you're finding it keeps some of the unwanted messages to the side

Tom Anderson (39m 50s)

Yeah, and I've got that turned on, I still don't know if I like it.

Tom Anderson (39m 53s)

I mean, it's been in Gmail for ages, but it's one of those things, I still have to go to those sections to look to, you know, either I need to clear the junk out of it, or, you know, like, oh, that shouldn't have been there.

Tom Anderson (40m 8s)

And so I'm like, I don't know that it's saving me much.

Jeff Battersby (40m 12s)

you do know you can make those adjustments, right?

Tom Anderson (40m 12s)

I left it on.

Tom Anderson (40m 14s)

Mm-hmm.

Jeff Battersby (40m 14s)

You can adjust where that.

Tom Anderson (40m 15s)

Yep.

Tom Anderson (40m 16s)

Yup. Yeah, and so I have it on, but honestly, most of the time.

Tom Anderson (40m 20s)

I go all the way over to the right hand side of the categories at the top and just leave it on all male so I might as well turn it off, but.

Jeff Battersby (40m 26s)

Let me let me just teach you a shortcut pal since since we are the basic AF show and

Jeff Battersby (40m 32s)

Apparently you're pretty basic at the moment if you tap if you tap the one that you're on it will take you to all of Them you don't have to slide

Tom Anderson (40m 41s)

What do you mean?

Jeff Battersby (40m 41s)

So if you you know how it has the tabs at the top

Jeff Battersby (40m 44s)

So if if highlighted I can't remember what the main one is but if you tap that

Jeff Battersby (40m 49s)

It will take you to all of them so it by default whatever the you know whatever one you're on

Tom Anderson (40m 54s)

Oh, I see what you're saying, yeah.

Jeff Battersby (40m 56s)

You don't have to do the slide thing. Just tell me the electric slide over to the right

Tom Anderson (40m 58s)

Gotcha.

Tom Anderson (41m)

Yeah, I'll probably turn that crap off.

Tom Anderson (41m 2s)

It's like, yeah.

Adam Jones (41m 5s)

And, Tom, there's one more on your list that I have used recently with great success.

Audio Transcriptions

Adam Jones (41m 10s)

I love this feature, which is the audio recording in notes with a transcript and summary.

Tom Anderson (41m 14s)

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Adam Jones (41m 15s)

Love it.

Adam Jones (41m 16s)

So I do a lot of focus groups for work.

Adam Jones (41m 18s)

I'll meet with teachers or parents and community members of the schools that we're serving.

Adam Jones (41m 25s)

And previously, I would type, right,

Adam Jones (41m 26s)

like as fast as I could and try to get quotes from people.

Adam Jones (41m 30s)

And I started just.

Adam Jones (41m 33s)

Recently opening up either my iPhone or my laptop, opening a note, starting that recording,

Adam Jones (41m 38s)

make sure it can hear it well.

Adam Jones (41m 40s)

And then I can be fully present in the conversation and the questions and follow up.

Adam Jones (41m 44s)

It records all of it.

Adam Jones (41m 46s)

The summary, not that great, like for my use case, but the transcript is amazing.

Adam Jones (41m 51s)

It's it's so good.

Adam Jones (41m 53s)

And then you can copy that transcript what I've been doing and go to chat GPT or Claude or Gemini and say, "Identify the key themes."

Adam Jones (42m 3s)

from this transcript and provide quotes that support each key theme.

Adam Jones (42m 7s)

And so then I am getting evidence that substantiates the themes with quotes from the transcript.

Adam Jones (42m 13s)

It's just, that's really a beautiful use case for my work.

Adam Jones (42m 17s)

And I'm really glad to see that that's there.

Adam Jones (42m 19s)

And there are devices out there you can buy that just do that.

Adam Jones (42m 22s)

And so it's really neat that that's been built into the Apple ecosystem.

Tom Anderson (42m 27s)

Yeah, so when you do that, if you have, say, three people that are part of the discussion, does it identify Speaker 1, 2, and 3, or is it all jumbled together?

Adam Jones (42m 37s)

That's a great question. It does not, and there are tools out there like Otter.ai

Tom Anderson (42m 39s)

Okay.

Adam Jones (42m 42s)

that you can say, "Hey, Tom's speaking, Jeff's speaking, Adam's speaking," and you can label it,

Adam Jones (42m 47s)

and then it will label all the audio correctly. It doesn't do that yet. That would be really cool if they add that eventually, but no, not today. Yeah. Yeah, that would be really cool.

Tom Anderson (42m 57s)

Yeah, it feels like that's coming in an update probably like it probably even if it's not names if they just identify like the speaker Right speaker 1 2 3 and then you can go and name them and then it would update throughout the transcript

Jeff Battersby (43m 8s)

Yeah, what's interesting is Apple's podcast app has transcriptions built into it as well.

Jeff Battersby (43m 14s)

That doesn't do that either.

Jeff Battersby (43m 16s)

It doesn't differentiate between speakers.

Tom Anderson (43m 16s)

Right.

Jeff Battersby (43m 18s)

You just get kind of stream of consciousness.

Jeff Battersby (43m 21s)

It would be nice to have that as a breakout, though.

Jeff Battersby (43m 24s)

And once it's differentiated between the voices, if there's a way that you can go in and just say voice 1, Tom, voice 2, Adam, voice 3, Jeff, and then have it handled.

Tom Anderson (43m 35s)

Yeah, and that's the primary reason why I still...so when we, I edit this show in Faright on the iPad and one of the kind of companion apps that you can get to go with it is an app called Transcriptionist and so I edit the show and then I export out a version for transcription but what's smart that the developer did is it has names for each track that it exports out for transcription, so when you...

Tom Anderson (44m 5s)

it up in the transcriptionist app, you can just put the names there. It's, you know, it's Jeff, it's Tom, it's Adam, so on, and then as it processes through all of the audio, because the tracks themselves are labeled, it knows that's Jeff, that's Tom, and so it ends up being really accurate, and it just takes a little while to run, but it doesn't matter, I just click start and it does this thing, but yeah, so...

Jeff Battersby (44m 27s)

You're telling me that that's in our transcripts if I look at these?

Tom Anderson (44m 29s)

Mm-hmm.

Adam Jones (44m 30s)

[LAUGHS] You pull them out.

Jeff Battersby (44m 31s)

Cool.

Jeff Battersby (44m 32s)

I might have to check that out.

Tom Anderson (44m 33s)

Yeah, and...

Tom Anderson (44m 35s)

I never went into... there's a setting in the podcast connect app that Apple has where you manage your podcast and you can say, use your own transcription or use the one in the podcast app.

Tom Anderson (44m 47s)

And I think I just left it on the podcast app.

Tom Anderson (44m 49s)

So podcast is probably just that jumbled mess of texts, but if you're in a different one, you probably see it split out.

Tom Anderson (44m 55s)

It's definitely split out if you look on the website, but, um, and I've been thinking about using that.

Tom Anderson (44m 59s)

So, you know, I do the newsletter that I send out a couple of times a month.

Tom Anderson (45m 2s)

And I don't.

Tom Anderson (45m 5s)

I don't really do well with typing out ideas, like just sitting down and banging them out, uh, and so I'm working on a better way to do that.

Tom Anderson (45m 14s)

And I've started mind mapping those things out.

Tom Anderson (45m 16s)

And I was telling a friend earlier when I met with him that I'm thinking about then taking that mind map, which is basically just an outline.

Tom Anderson (45m 24s)

And then doing an audio recording in notes or any other app that supports that, I guess, just notes at this point, maybe, but, uh, and then letting it, transcribe it, and then...

Tom Anderson (45m 35s)

that kind of becomes the article, and then I just clean it up a little bit.

Tom Anderson (45m 38s)

Um, I think it'll save me some time, but...

Tom Anderson (45m 41s)

All right, Adam, which phone do you have again?

Tom Anderson (45m 42s)

Remind me, you have this, you have a 16?

Visual Intelligence

Adam Jones (45m 45s)

16 Pro, yep.

Tom Anderson (45m 46s)

Okay.

Tom Anderson (45m 46s)

You've got 16 Pro.

Tom Anderson (45m 48s)

Have you played with the visual intelligence with the camera control button at all yet?

Adam Jones (45m 53s)

little bit very sparingly yeah what are your thoughts

Tom Anderson (45m 58s)

So, I tried that out the other day, and a little bit today, because I'm going to put a little piece in the newsletter about it here in the next week or so.

Tom Anderson (46m 8s)

It's not too bad. So, for the people that don't know, if you press and hold the camera control button on the 16 series phones, it will come up into...

Tom Anderson (46m 20s)

Basically, it's a camera view, but if you press the circular button or if you just hold it on the subject long enough, it'll eventually will just take it.

Tom Anderson (46m 29s)

You just take a picture, and then you get two buttons that say "ask" or "search" just to the left and right of the circle.

Tom Anderson (46m 39s)

Now, if you're going to use the "ask" feature, that requires ChatGPT, so you've got to enable that if you haven't already.

Tom Anderson (46m 45s)

If you do a search, it's just a Google search, but I sent Jeff some screenshots the other day when I was playing around with it.

Tom Anderson (46m 53s)

garage and I took photos of my weight rack out there with it and I said and I

Tom Anderson (46m 58s)

did both and what I wanted to see was how it compared to like just using the chat GPT app because you can go right into chat GPT and take a picture too and it'll tell you things and so I kind of went back and forth between the two and very similar results for them I think Apple is doing a fair bit of condensing on the for the message that it comes back from chat GPT to keep it short and relatively brief, whereas if you go into the chat GPT--

Tom Anderson (47m 28s)

app and send the picture of the rack. I mean, it came back with, "Oh, this looks like a rogue such and such rack. There's a barbell attached on the end. There's a TRX strap hooked up top. There are adjustable dumbbells on the floor. There's some home pods on the wall." I was like, "Whoa, that's a lot." But it seems pretty good, and it depends on what you're doing with it. So you can do that kind of thing for objects. And then you can also do text. I tested that this morning. I took a book,

Tom Anderson (47m 57s)

I took a picture of the page.

Tom Anderson (47m 59s)

And you can have it read aloud.

Tom Anderson (48m 1s)

You can have it translate.

Tom Anderson (48m 3s)

It's a neat little trick.

Tom Anderson (48m 4s)

I don't, I'm struggling to see where I would find benefit and having it read aloud the page when I'm looking at the page myself, unless I just wanted to listen to it in the background, maybe.

Tom Anderson (48m 13s)

Uh, so that one was, that was okay.

Tom Anderson (48m 16s)

And then when I went out earlier to meet a friend, I took a picture of the front of the coffee shop that we stopped at, because for businesses, it will recognize the business and then show you the hours.

Tom Anderson (48m 27s)

you can order food, see the--

Tom Anderson (48m 28s)

menu, call, that sort of thing.

Adam Jones (48m 30s)

That's pretty cool. I have not tried that, like, with a business.

Tom Anderson (48m 30s)

And it did all of those things.

Tom Anderson (48m 33s)

Yeah, but like he said, he's like,

Tom Anderson (48m 35s)

or you could just walk in and see the menu.

Adam Jones (48m 37s)

Ask the human, or look at the sign.

Tom Anderson (48m 37s)

I was like, yeah.

Tom Anderson (48m 40s)

You could do that too.

Tom Anderson (48m 42s)

But yeah, I mean, I thought it was pretty good.

Tom Anderson (48m 44s)

I think if you were traveling, probably could be helpful,

Tom Anderson (48m 48s)

especially if it's someplace where you do need translations.

Tom Anderson (48m 50s)

Like it may, I don't know, it's Vietnamese or something,

Tom Anderson (48m 53s)

you want to translate it to English.

Tom Anderson (48m 56s)

I could see that being useful, perhaps.

Tom Anderson (48m 58s)

But for those types of situations.

Adam Jones (49m 1s)

Yeah I think everything you said makes so much sense. I've only played with it a little bit. I also feel like it gives a really short summary when you use it whereas some other tools give you a lot more context and I think that is by design. I think that's totally a choice.

Adam Jones (49m 16s)

We'll see how they build on that. What I'm excited about is being able to maybe take action on something you see. So I think did they show, I don't want to misspeak so confirm this guys,

Adam Jones (49m 27s)

I think that they showed like pointing at a concert poster

Adam Jones (49m 31s)

and it had the date and in one of their keynotes and it could tell you you could like set a calendar event with it or is that coming?

Tom Anderson (49m 39s)

Yep, I think some of that is out now.

Adam Jones (49m 42s)

Okay so I have not tried that obviously or I would know if it works but that's kind of interesting. I'm also intrigued by let's say you're out and about and you see something or you're at a friend's house and you want to snap a picture and say add that to my Amazon cart or where can I buy this and it

Adam Jones (50m 1s)

to another app and like take an action for you that sort of agentic behavior I think that could be pretty cool.

Tom Anderson (50m 7s)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and something I noticed with it just like we were talking about the writing tools how they tend to if you switch out Come back. They've disengaged

Tom Anderson (50m 16s)

This is conversational So if I'm taking a picture of the I don't know the weightlifting rack or a car dog, whatever it is I can ask follow-up questions, you know through chat GPT

Tom Anderson (50m 26s)

Problem is if I touch anywhere on the photo it

Tom Anderson (50m 31s)

Disappears and it just so it's they're almost like just these little

Tom Anderson (50m 37s)

Thought bubbles and then that lost my thought then they're gone and there's no way to get back to it and and for me and

Tom Anderson (50m 44s)

Adam I want to see what you think

Tom Anderson (50m 47s)

One of the kind of the key things with chat GPT when I use that is that conversational piece of I?

Tom Anderson (50m 54s)

Ask it something. It gives me some information. I

Tom Anderson (50m 58s)

Follow up and say well, what about you know?

Tom Anderson (51m)

What am I missing here and it comes back with some more and I don't want to lose that

Tom Anderson (51m 5s)

that contact.

Tom Anderson (51m 7s)

It goes back to ChatGPT and it puts it in a new chat rather than it all being in one long chat.

Tom Anderson (51m 30s)

So, that you can just go right back to that.

Tom Anderson (51m 32s)

So some usability things I think that they've got to work through, but.

Tom Anderson (51m 37s)

Right.

Jeff Battersby (51m 37s)

It kind of needs a feature like the Shazam built into the OS, iOS has, where you've got the ability both in Apple Music and if you open up Shazam on your iOS device, it shows you all the stuff that you've tried to collect.

Jeff Battersby (51m 52s)

It's got that history and it needs that little piece of backend.

Jeff Battersby (51m 55s)

I don't see anything in looking at it while you guys were talking, I was trying to look and see if there's any way to collect that history.

Jeff Battersby (52m 2s)

Not that I've used it that much, because you know me.

Jeff Battersby (52m 7s)

That seems like a required use case, you know that that's a thing that really needs to be a part of

Jeff Battersby (52m 15s)

Of this so you have the ability to even

Jeff Battersby (52m 19s)

Two or three days later pick it back up and continue the thought which you do have

Jeff Battersby (52m 23s)

That's one of the things I like about Claude is that in the app and probably it's true the others But in Claude you have the ability to pick up that

Tom Anderson (52m 30s)

Yeah, yeah, and it feels like it.

Jeff Battersby (52m 31s)

that old search and

Tom Anderson (52m 33s)

Yeah.

Tom Anderson (52m 33s)

At some point, this feels like it's going to just be an app where you can go in and then you'll see the history, right?

Tom Anderson (52m 38s)

So if you want to go back to it a couple of days later, it'd be like, oh yeah,

Tom Anderson (52m 40s)

there it is.

Tom Anderson (52m 41s)

And then I can do something additionally with it at that point.

Tom Anderson (52m 46s)

Right now it's just through the button, but.

Tom Anderson (52m 49s)

All right.

Tom Anderson (52m 49s)

Any closing thoughts, Adam, if you had to and Jeff, I'll get your opinion too.

Our Overall Grades

Tom Anderson (52m 54s)

Of course, um, if we had to grade this stuff, uh, Adam,

Tom Anderson (53m)

for Apple intelligence as a whole, we don't have to go individually, but I feature we'd be here another hour, but, um, and nobody wants that.

Jeff Battersby (53m 5s)

Yeah, nobody wants the first hour.

Tom Anderson (53m 6s)

So, uh, overall, what would you think?

Tom Anderson (53m 11s)

Like, how are you feeling about it so far?

Tom Anderson (53m 13s)

Yeah.

Adam Jones (53m 14s)

That's so tough.

Tom Anderson (53m 14s)

Yeah.

Tom Anderson (53m 14s)

Bye bye.

Adam Jones (53m 15s)

I appreciate the question though.

Adam Jones (53m 16s)

You put me on the spot.

Adam Jones (53m 17s)

I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say a B minus.

Adam Jones (53m 21s)

I want the personal context.

Adam Jones (53m 22s)

I want deeper integration with all the things I can do with my phone.

Adam Jones (53m 28s)

That's gonna really add value.

Adam Jones (53m 30s)

Right now, I can get a lot of this with the Chat GPT app or Perplexity or Gemini.

Adam Jones (53m 38s)

I wanna see Apple go to the next level and integrate a lot of this contextual information and personalization.

Tom Anderson (53m 46s)

Yep. Mr. Battersby.

Jeff Battersby (53m 49s)

Yeah My opinion is not any different than it has been with with some of the others. It's a

Jeff Battersby (53m 56s)

It's a Presently for me an interesting parlor trick. I'm not sure how much I like it There are places that I like it like I do like although it's still a little jank I haven't used it since I sent you that picture of being able to move or remove something from a

Jeff Battersby (54m 10s)

From a picture to make it make that photo better. So those those kinds of things I can see the benefit of

Jeff Battersby (54m 19s)

But You know I'm not all in on this yet and probably won't be you know, that's just the nature of moi

Jeff Battersby (54m 27s)

the artisanal tech guy

Adam Jones (54m 30s)

Artisanal tech, I like that.

Tom Anderson (54m 32s)

Oh, Jeff, did you give us a grade other than me?

Adam Jones (54m 32s)

Tom, what's your grade?

Jeff Battersby (54m 38s)

Yeah, that's my grade, you know, yeah

Tom Anderson (54m 39s)

Okay, see teacher after class, I, I think I'm going to go with like a C minus, um, parts of it I think are fun and are promising.

Adam Jones (54m 40s)

See the teacher.

Adam Jones (54m 41s)

Teacher.

Jeff Battersby (54m 42s)

Yeah, I see the teacher right I got a lot of those by the way

Jeff Battersby (54m 47s)

Yeah, yeah

Tom Anderson (55m 2s)

Summaries in some instances, I like.

Tom Anderson (55m 5s)

I think in mail, especially for thread,

Tom Anderson (55m 7s)

like thread messages where there's eight, 10, right?

Tom Anderson (55m 10s)

I think they can be okay.

Tom Anderson (55m 11s)

Sometimes though, the message itself is so short,

Tom Anderson (55m 13s)

if it just showed you the preview,

Tom Anderson (55m 15s)

you'd know exactly what was said instead of the incorrect summary that it gives you.

Tom Anderson (55m 19s)

So little things like that.

Jeff Battersby (55m 20s)

I'm pregnant.

Tom Anderson (55m 21s)

Yeah, by the way, and I do think, you know,

Tom Anderson (55m 28s)

before they announced this stuff,

Tom Anderson (55m 29s)

they're like, "Well, Apple's probably a couple years behind."

Tom Anderson (55m 32s)

I think that was very much the case because, honestly, if we take out the chat GPT integration,

Tom Anderson (55m 39s)

it ain't much.

Tom Anderson (55m 40s)

I mean, you get some summaries, you get some image tools that are for entertainment purposes only, we'll say.

Jeff Battersby (55m 49s)

and Genmoji, don't forget about the Genmoji.

Tom Anderson (55m 50s)

And Jeff's Genmoji, yeah, which of all things has our artisanal tech in his Genmoji tips.

Tom Anderson (55m 59s)

So yeah, I think C-minus, like I said, that...

Tom Anderson (56m 2s)

That could change a lot though, if, you know, depends on what they do with Siri and the context that you alluded to there, Adam, a couple of minutes ago, in the spring.

Tom Anderson (56m 10s)

But for right now, I think that's...

Jeff Battersby (56m 12s)

And to that end, let me just say that I appreciate the slow build as opposed to the let's burn down the world and then figure out what we've done after the fact.

Jeff Battersby (56m 27s)

So I don't mind that.

Jeff Battersby (56m 29s)

The world may already be burning, but, you know.

Tom Anderson (56m 34s)

Or we'll say, "Well, you did that when you turned on ChatGPT.

Tom Anderson (56m 37s)

We didn't do that."

Adam Jones (56m 38s)

Yes. Yes.

Tom Anderson (56m 40s)

We'll give you the gas and the match.

Tom Anderson (56m 42s)

You lit the fire, man.

Jeff Battersby (56m 43s)

Yeah, right.

Tom Anderson (56m 47s)

All right, Jeff, you want to take us home, sir?

Jeff Battersby (56m 49s)

Sure, as always, feedback at basicafshow.com,

Jeff Battersby (56m 54s)

and we do like to get your feedback.

Jeff Battersby (56m 56s)

You have the ability also on various social platforms.

Jeff Battersby (57m)

Where are we now, Tom?

Jeff Battersby (57m 1s)

Are we on threads?

Jeff Battersby (57m 3s)

Are we still on that X thing?

Tom Anderson (57m 3s)

Grading Apple Intelligence with Adam Jones

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