Speaker 1: Is the new bing Ai on the verge of a
Speaker 1: mental breakdown? Is Samsung's new two hundred megapixel camera worth it?
Speaker 1: The results of my photo and video tests. A cure
Speaker 1: for loneliness is easier to dial up than you might think.
Speaker 1: Plus your tech questions answered? What's going on? I'm Rich
Speaker 1: Demiro and this is Rich on Tech, the show where
Speaker 1: I talk about the tech stuff I think you should
Speaker 1: know about. It's also the place where I answer your
Speaker 1: questions about technology. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel
Speaker 1: five in Los Angeles, broadcasting to you live right now.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Phone lines are open at one
Speaker 1: eight eight eight Rich one oh one. That's triple eight
Speaker 1: seven four to two, four to one zero one. Give
Speaker 1: me a call if you have a question about technology. Well,
Speaker 1: it happened once again last night. And you know, I
Speaker 1: don't even want to admit this happens often in my house,
Speaker 1: but it happened seventy five streaming services and nothing on.
Speaker 1: I don't know why this keeps happening to me. But
Speaker 1: Friday nights we've kind of earmarked as our you know,
Speaker 1: enjoyable movie night. Just relax with a nice movie. We
Speaker 1: subscribe to all the different streaming services Netflix, Hulu, Hbo, Amazon,
Speaker 1: YouTube TV. But it seems like every single time I
Speaker 1: want to sit down to watch a movie, we can't
Speaker 1: decide on which one to watch. So what do I do?
Speaker 1: I go to my apps, and I of course tweeted
Speaker 1: this and everyone said, Rich, you got to get some apps.
Speaker 1: You gotta get some apps like real Good, that's our
Speaker 1: eel good and just watch. Yeah. I have the apps
Speaker 1: and I use them, and I keep a list of
Speaker 1: all the movies I want to watch on these apps.
Speaker 1: But for some reason, when I sit down in front
Speaker 1: of that TV, I don't want to watch any of
Speaker 1: those movies that I've bookmarked on the apps. Don't know
Speaker 1: why that happens. So what do I do? I start
Speaker 1: opening up the apps one by I won on my
Speaker 1: TV screen. I go from Netflix to Hulu to Hbo Max,
Speaker 1: to Amazon Prime, to YouTube TV to Apple TV, and
Speaker 1: I look at all the different things and I just
Speaker 1: can't decide. Because you have to sit there and look
Speaker 1: at the description, and then you try to watch a
Speaker 1: trailer it's too loud. You put the volume down. Then
Speaker 1: you got to bring you know, your wife or your
Speaker 1: partner into the mix and ask them what they think.
Speaker 1: And then of course we were trying to incorporate the
Speaker 1: kids last night, so we asked them what they think,
Speaker 1: and they just want to play roadblocks. So it was
Speaker 1: a whole big thing, and we ended up deciding on
Speaker 1: this is embarrassing. We ended up deciding on an old movie,
Speaker 1: high school musical, which I've never seen, and my kids
Speaker 1: actually liked it. I fell asleep about seventeen minutes in.
Speaker 1: I thought it was a cute movie. It looked cute
Speaker 1: from what I saw, But I mean, we ended up
Speaker 1: watching a movie that was over a decade old. When
Speaker 1: I'm paying twenty bucks a month for all these different
Speaker 1: services at you know, twenty dollars each or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: so I've got to find a better way. It brought
Speaker 1: me back to the days of my Friday nights growing
Speaker 1: up in New Jersey, where the family would round up,
Speaker 1: you'd get in the car, you'd drive to Blockbuster and
Speaker 1: guess what, you saw six or seven movies that you
Speaker 1: wanted to watch instantly. And by the way, the biggest
Speaker 1: movies had like one hundred and fifty copies, so you
Speaker 1: knew those were the movies to see. Nowadays, everything is
Speaker 1: so crowded on these little streaming services, and everything looks
Speaker 1: the same that you can't really say, like, con is
Speaker 1: that a good movie you're actually researching to see, like wait,
Speaker 1: did I already watch that movie? Because everything's just sort
Speaker 1: of mixed together. So bring me the days of the
Speaker 1: blockbuster walking back into that place and trying to decide
Speaker 1: on movies. And of course by the time you decide
Speaker 1: on a movie, it's not available. It's the one that
Speaker 1: they don't have any copies of. So you go to
Speaker 1: the checkout and you say, hey, did anyone return that movie?
Speaker 1: And you wait there and you see if someone brings
Speaker 1: it back in. We used to bring like three or
Speaker 1: four movies home, and by the time we got around
Speaker 1: to returning them, of course, we had major late fees. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I just had to get that off my chest. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's just me or if you share
Speaker 1: in that same streaming situation where it's just this uncertainty
Speaker 1: of you don't want to make the wrong choice about
Speaker 1: what to stream. I was home in New Jersey last week.
Speaker 1: I did the show remotely. I thought it worked out
Speaker 1: pretty well. Of Course, when I'm home, i'm tech support
Speaker 1: for my family. My parents, especially my mom's internet. I
Speaker 1: was at her house. It was so slow. It was
Speaker 1: just a crawl, and I'm like, what is going on here?
Speaker 1: So of course I reset the modem, I reset the router,
Speaker 1: I do another speed test. If you want to test
Speaker 1: your speed at home, you can go to a website
Speaker 1: called fast dot com. Fast dot com. That's the easiest
Speaker 1: way I know to do a quick speed test. It
Speaker 1: was actually created by Netflix, ironically, to make sure your
Speaker 1: speed was fast enough to stream, which you don't really
Speaker 1: need much to stream these days. Anyway, it was like
Speaker 1: twenty five megabits per second. It was really slow, so
Speaker 1: I'm like, that's odd. So then of course I get
Speaker 1: on the internet and I'm looking up he bill. Mom,
Speaker 1: can I have your information so I can look up
Speaker 1: your bill? Let me see what you're paying for. She
Speaker 1: was paying one hundred and three dollars a month for
Speaker 1: twenty five megabits of service, which is absolutely ludicrous in
Speaker 1: my head. So of course, now I'm calling the cable
Speaker 1: company and I call them up and the first person
Speaker 1: I get says, oh, let me let me trans They
Speaker 1: just want to get you off the phone as soon
Speaker 1: as possible, so let me let me transfer you, let
Speaker 1: me pass the buck, let me transfer you to someone else.
Speaker 1: So they transferred me to or they wanted to transfer
Speaker 1: me to tech support, and I said, no, this is
Speaker 1: not a tech support thing. This is not a tech
Speaker 1: support question. This is a billing question. This is a
Speaker 1: why am I paying so much for so little question?
Speaker 1: And the phone goes silent, and I'm just like, did
Speaker 1: I get hung up on? So I get finally set
Speaker 1: here I would like to cancel the service? How what
Speaker 1: does that mean? And they said, oh, you want to cancel?
Speaker 1: Let me get you to that department. That's really the
Speaker 1: only department that could do anything these days. Right when
Speaker 1: you threaten to cancel, like it seems like nobody else
Speaker 1: can help, except when you say I no longer want
Speaker 1: to pay for this, And then they finally get you
Speaker 1: to someone that can help you. So I get over
Speaker 1: to the person that is cancelation, and this person's actually
Speaker 1: quite nice. But I came prepared to this conversation, and
Speaker 1: I came prepared saying, look, I'm paying one hundred and
Speaker 1: three bucks a month for twenty five megabits. And just
Speaker 1: knowing the lingo really helps, because if you don't really
Speaker 1: understand what you're paying, or what the speed is or
Speaker 1: what all that stuff. They kind of take advantage of you.
Speaker 1: So I was kind of flexing a little bit of
Speaker 1: my tech knowledge and I was like, look, I'm like
Speaker 1: I just did two other you know, I just did
Speaker 1: two speed tests on a T Mobile phone inside my
Speaker 1: mom's house and also a Verizon phone. And these mobile
Speaker 1: networks have faster speeds. And I know that these mobile
Speaker 1: networks are offering home internet. So I could probably switch
Speaker 1: to T Mobile Internet for like fifty bucks a month,
Speaker 1: or I can switch to Verizon home Internet for twenty
Speaker 1: five dollars a month. And I wouldn't even need someone
Speaker 1: to come to my house. I would just put up
Speaker 1: this antenna that they send me. And when you start
Speaker 1: saying these things, it registers with them, and they go, oh, oh,
Speaker 1: we got we got someone who knows what they're doing here.
Speaker 1: Uh oh, we better give them a good deal. And
Speaker 1: so I started speaking their language, and you know, they
Speaker 1: kind of tried to say, you know this is you know,
Speaker 1: you're paying for one hundred. I said, no, I'm looking
Speaker 1: at my bill here, it's twenty five. So finally they
Speaker 1: look up in the super secret system, like what can
Speaker 1: we offer this person to stay with us, and of
Speaker 1: course they type away. You hear all the typing type
Speaker 1: type type, clickity clack, clickity clack, and so finally they
Speaker 1: come back, Oh, we can give you this for that.
Speaker 1: I said, Okay, that's pretty good, but my mom doesn't
Speaker 1: need all of that. Okay, clickity clack, clickity clack. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like when you're at the airport back in the
Speaker 1: day when they used to actually type stuff into a
Speaker 1: computer and it would take like thirty seconds for them
Speaker 1: to come back with something. That's what happened. Okay, we
Speaker 1: can give you this. How about we'll give you eighty
Speaker 1: bucks a month for five hundred megabits per second. And
Speaker 1: I said, now that sounds pretty good. You're talking what
Speaker 1: that's more than ten times, that's twenty times for at
Speaker 1: least twenty dollars less. I think that sounds good. So
Speaker 1: I said, let's do it. You've got a deal. You
Speaker 1: kept me from going over the edge to Verizon or
Speaker 1: T Mobile for something different. And he said, okay, let's
Speaker 1: do it. And he was very friendly, and I'm you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm telling you this story so you understand that
Speaker 1: you should be doing this as well. If you're not
Speaker 1: calling your cable company or your internet provider, or your
Speaker 1: cell phone provider or anyone that you can get on
Speaker 1: the phone with a service that you're just paying for
Speaker 1: every month, you got to call them up. I know
Speaker 1: it's a pain, I know it's not fun, but you
Speaker 1: have to do it. And the reason you have to
Speaker 1: do it is because they love when those promotions expire.
Speaker 1: And when those promotions expire, they've still got you on
Speaker 1: auto pay or you know, you still got that you know,
Speaker 1: motem in your house or that router, and so it's
Speaker 1: just easy to keep paying that bill. And I'll be honest,
Speaker 1: I'm guilty of this. My internet recently went up by
Speaker 1: like twenty bucks a month, and that crept up from
Speaker 1: ten dollars extra a month, so now I think I'm
Speaker 1: up to like thirty or forty dollars a month then
Speaker 1: I was originally paying when I set it up. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I know I need to get on the horn with
Speaker 1: my cable provider and call them up and do this
Speaker 1: whole dance. But I don't feel like it. And we
Speaker 1: never feel like doing this. Who wants to do this?
Speaker 1: And they again, you know, unless you get that right person,
Speaker 1: they may not be willing to help you out on
Speaker 1: this stuff, so you really got a call twice. Sometimes.
Speaker 1: I had a similar experience with an airline over the
Speaker 1: summer where I really really was proud of myself for
Speaker 1: making the case. I had a credit that expired and
Speaker 1: it took like three calls, but I got someone that
Speaker 1: really was willing to help. But I think kindness really
Speaker 1: goes a long way. Like you have to understand like
Speaker 1: they want to help you, not really you want to
Speaker 1: help them, not really. It's this little dance of like
Speaker 1: two people that both want to protect their interests. But
Speaker 1: you got to come to a common place in this world.
Speaker 1: And I will tell you one keyword, one phrase that
Speaker 1: has helped me out that I think really really helps
Speaker 1: you say to them, can you make a one time exception?
Speaker 1: How about just a one time exception? And I think
Speaker 1: that that really opens up the door to many many
Speaker 1: deals on your end that will benefit you because they say, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to typically do this for most people,
Speaker 1: but I'll do it for you. And they want to
Speaker 1: feel good knowing that they're flexing their their might and
Speaker 1: youre flexing your Okay, I understand I'm not going to
Speaker 1: tell my friends about this because this was a one
Speaker 1: time thing. You're not going to do this for anyone else.
Speaker 1: And that seems to sort of work. I don't know
Speaker 1: why it works, but it just does. So anyway, my
Speaker 1: mom's got faster internet. You have your knowledge. You need
Speaker 1: now to go out there and get some money off
Speaker 1: your bills. And I'm going to do it myself one
Speaker 1: of these days when I've got some extra time, and
Speaker 1: I'll tell you how that works. Also, I help my
Speaker 1: dad with his computer. I'll tell you more about that
Speaker 1: in a little bit, because that was something that was
Speaker 1: pretty interesting to watch people on their computer, to see
Speaker 1: how they do things and to watch how they're sort
Speaker 1: of you know, there could be some stumbles along the
Speaker 1: way there. I'll tell you about that more later in
Speaker 1: the show. I've got so much to talk about today.
Speaker 1: He could tell them fired up today, right, I can't wait.
Speaker 1: I've got a new reason why Twitter users are all
Speaker 1: up in arms once again. I'm gonna give you my
Speaker 1: thoughts on the Samsung Galaxy S twenty three camera. I
Speaker 1: took a lot of photos and videos with this thing,
Speaker 1: so i'll give you my verdict on that I've got
Speaker 1: three great guests this week. I've got Bing's head of
Speaker 1: search to talk about the new Bing AI and how
Speaker 1: Microsoft is learning from its mistakes. Plus an app that
Speaker 1: will help you keep track of your tax write offs
Speaker 1: using artificial intelligence. And the author of a newsletter that
Speaker 1: I open every single time it hits my inbox. Jared
Speaker 1: Newman is going to join me on the show to
Speaker 1: talk about cord cutting, privacy and more. Plus your calls
Speaker 1: coming up next at triple eight rich one oh one.
Speaker 1: Give me a call if you have a question about technology.
Speaker 1: The phone number is eight eight eight seven four two
Speaker 1: four to one zero one. My name is Rich Dmuro.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Rich on Tech. Your calls up next.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Rich on Tech. I'm Rich Dmiro, sitting
Speaker 1: here hanging out talking technology with you. Phone lines are
Speaker 1: open at eight eight eight rich one oh one. That's
Speaker 1: eight eight eight seven two four to one zero one.
Speaker 1: Let's go to Louis in Orange County, California. Louis, you're
Speaker 1: on with Rich.
Speaker 2: How you doing?
Speaker 3: Rich?
Speaker 2: I am doing Because of my lack of knowledge, the
Speaker 2: best way I can ask this question is I have
Speaker 2: I've got the bug to upgrade my audio system. I
Speaker 2: have a receiver. Uh, we have Wi Fi in the house,
Speaker 2: and we're using the fire stick to get all the
Speaker 2: streaming services, whether they be audio or video. I want
Speaker 2: to upgrade to a processor that does Bluetooth. Will that
Speaker 2: work with all those streaming services by pairing it to
Speaker 2: the fire stick?
Speaker 1: Uh? Yeah, the fire stick supports Bluetooth, so you want
Speaker 1: to So you want to pair some sort.
Speaker 2: Of It's an Emo Tiva processor.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: So it's a little and it only does Bluetooth, doesn't do.
Speaker 1: Wi Fi okay, And yes, so you just want to
Speaker 1: link that up. But now when you say processor, you
Speaker 1: want to pre amplify. Okay, you want to send the
Speaker 1: audio throughout the house using.
Speaker 2: This, Well just to the theater room, the main room, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: and has that capability. Yes, I can do other rooms too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean have you tried connecting a Bluetooth device
Speaker 1: to your firestick?
Speaker 2: Well, here's the part I don't want to say. I
Speaker 2: have a san HAI's a wireless headphone going to the
Speaker 2: receiver to it. The receiver does also Bluetooth. Sure, so yes, yes,
Speaker 2: and that works flawlessly.
Speaker 1: Okay, but that's through the receiver.
Speaker 2: Have you tried to receive and that's going to go away,
Speaker 2: right right.
Speaker 1: Have you tried directly connecting the Bluetooth headphones to the
Speaker 1: firestick because they do have that capability.
Speaker 2: I'm going to try that. Okay, we'll try that. Will
Speaker 2: that answer the whole question?
Speaker 1: I think so, because once you get those Now here's
Speaker 1: the thing. In certain cases, like this device that you're
Speaker 1: trying to connect via Bluetooth, if it doesn't support a
Speaker 1: certain profile that the Firestick wants. Like the firestick primarily
Speaker 1: is there to support, you know, headphones, like audio headphones,
Speaker 1: so and it may support I'm not really sure if
Speaker 1: the stick supports any sort of gaming controller via Bluetooth,
Speaker 1: but I know it does the headphones for sure. But
Speaker 1: the question is when you try to link up this
Speaker 1: other little device, is the Firestick going to accept it.
Speaker 1: That's the only thing you got to figure out. And
Speaker 1: the only way you can figure that out is by
Speaker 1: trying that out.
Speaker 2: Right, or I can ask the manufacturer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the manufacturer may know for sure, but but for
Speaker 1: sure the Firestick definitely supports it. You'll be okay with that.
Speaker 1: But just to test it out, I would just link
Speaker 1: up your headphones so you put them into pairing mode,
Speaker 1: go into the settings on the fire TV stick. It'll say, like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's in the setting somewhere it has like
Speaker 1: Bluetooth devices. You know, you put it into pairing mode,
Speaker 1: it should see that device. You click it and just
Speaker 1: try that out first off, and then once you've got
Speaker 1: that confidence, then you can go ahead and connect this
Speaker 1: other device.
Speaker 2: Truth signal is good as a Wi Fi signal that's
Speaker 2: hardwired into the receiver.
Speaker 1: Now, I don't think a Bluetooth signal is going to
Speaker 1: be good as good as a hard wired signal now.
Speaker 1: But with that said, I think it'll be fine. So
Speaker 1: I think it'll be I mean, look, you're gonna have
Speaker 1: to try it out. You're gonna have to see that
Speaker 1: could be some latency, that's the biggest that's the biggest
Speaker 1: question is is there going to be a limpsake a
Speaker 1: lip sync issue with what you're watching on TV to
Speaker 1: the Bluetooth you know, going through that system and out
Speaker 1: through the speakers.
Speaker 2: Right, So it's not only audio quality possibly loss possibly
Speaker 2: it's also lip syncing and things such as that.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Now, I've got you know, a Sono system that
Speaker 1: has they know that you know, the wireless is a
Speaker 1: part of it, and it has some adjustments for that.
Speaker 1: I don't know if those adjustments are built into the
Speaker 1: fire stick, but that's something you can check as well.
Speaker 1: But I don't think that's the case.
Speaker 2: What if What if they built into the processor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you have that, then you can that would
Speaker 1: work too. Yeah, exactly, just adjust it by a couple
Speaker 1: of milliseconds.
Speaker 2: All right, that this helps a lot. Thank you, finally
Speaker 2: finally learn something good.
Speaker 1: All right, louis happy to help. Thanks for calling today.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Phone lines are open at triple eight
Speaker 1: rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four
Speaker 1: to two, four to one zero one. I told you
Speaker 1: that Twitter users are up in arms once again. It
Speaker 1: seems like nobody's happy on Twitter, except for the people
Speaker 1: that are on Twitter because they love Twitter. So I
Speaker 1: don't know why they're always angry, but they're there, they're
Speaker 1: on Twitter, but yet they're angry about Twitter and all.
Speaker 1: This started, of course, when Elon took over Twitter. But
Speaker 1: now a big change on Twitter. They are going to
Speaker 1: force folks to use a two factor authentication app instead
Speaker 1: of a phone number. Now, if you pay for Twitter Blue,
Speaker 1: which is their subscription service, you can still use your
Speaker 1: phone number, but they said historically the phone numbers have
Speaker 1: been a good form of two factor authentication, but they
Speaker 1: have been abused by bad actors. So we're no longer
Speaker 1: going to allow counts to enroll in text message two
Speaker 1: factor authentication. And if you're not familiar with two factor authentication,
Speaker 1: that is, when you use your phone number to secure
Speaker 1: your account, and when you try to log in, the
Speaker 1: service will text a number like a special one time
Speaker 1: code to your phone, and then you have to put
Speaker 1: in that code. And the idea is that the bad
Speaker 1: person may have access to your account, but they don't
Speaker 1: have access to your phone, so they wouldn't get that
Speaker 1: one time text. Anyway, if you're on Twitter and you're
Speaker 1: not paying, you're gonna have to use an app. I
Speaker 1: recommend an app called Authie, or you can use an
Speaker 1: app called Microsoft Authenticator or Google Authenticator. Any of those
Speaker 1: will work. In fact, they're all better than using sms
Speaker 1: in general, because SMS can be redirected, it can be intercepted,
Speaker 1: and so it's better in general. But you can still
Speaker 1: be mad. But I've been recommending two factor authentication accounts
Speaker 1: for a long time, or two factor authentication apps for
Speaker 1: a very long time. All right. Coming up on the show,
Speaker 1: we are going to talk to Diva Kumar. She is
Speaker 1: the head of search at BING and if you've been
Speaker 1: following Bing, you know they've got this new AI system.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk to Divva about that. Coming up
Speaker 1: next on rich On Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech.
Speaker 1: Joining me now is Divia Kumar. She is the senior
Speaker 1: director of Marketing for Search and AI at Microsoft. Divia,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining me. Very exciting week for you.
Speaker 4: It has been a very exciting week. Thank you for
Speaker 4: having me.
Speaker 1: So tell me about being AI. Is that what we're
Speaker 1: calling it is? And what have you learned in the
Speaker 1: past couple of days about how people are using this.
Speaker 4: We're calling it the new Bing and we've been getting
Speaker 4: an incredible amount of feedback, overwhelmingly positive and some very
Speaker 4: appreciated negative feedback as well, which is exactly what we
Speaker 4: wanted by launching the product. And we're seeing that a
Speaker 4: lot of people are actually engaging heavily with the chat experience,
Speaker 4: which is new because we've never had chat experience in
Speaker 4: search before. We are essentially introducing new user EXPERI. This
Speaker 4: is part of search and seeing how people are engaging
Speaker 4: with it has been fantastic, and obviously the reason it's
Speaker 4: an early product and the reason why we wanted to
Speaker 4: bring it to market is to start to get feedback
Speaker 4: from real world scenarios. And that's exactly what we've been getting.
Speaker 4: Everybody's stress testing it and then giving us feedback, and
Speaker 4: the team is hard at work trying to address some
Speaker 4: of the feedback that we're getting as well.
Speaker 1: So explain to me what is the New Being.
Speaker 4: The New Being is essentially powered by an AI model,
Speaker 4: a very powerful AI model. We're calling it the Prometheus model.
Speaker 4: So what the Prometheus model is is the latest model
Speaker 4: from open Ai, more powerful than the one that's powering CHATGBT,
Speaker 4: combined with the search technology from Microsoft, and that's the
Speaker 4: Prometheus model. And so that model is is what powers
Speaker 4: all of the search plus answer, search plus chat experience
Speaker 4: that you're seeing with the New Being.
Speaker 1: Now, some people might think, because chat GBT became so
Speaker 1: popular seemingly overnight, Microsoft has the New ban seemingly overnight.
Speaker 1: Have you been working on this for a while or
Speaker 1: is this something that you just sort of cobbled together quickly.
Speaker 4: The team has been working on this for a while, obviously,
Speaker 4: Microsoft has had a partnership with open Ai for a
Speaker 4: few years now, and the engineering team is ben hard
Speaker 4: at work working on this, So it is not something
Speaker 4: that was just coupled together overnight, and it's something that
Speaker 4: the team has been excited to bring to market and
Speaker 4: start to get real world examples.
Speaker 1: From what is the power of the new Bang, what
Speaker 1: can I do with this new model and how is
Speaker 1: it different than chat GPT?
Speaker 4: The New Being what it does or what it offers
Speaker 4: for consumers is today's search hasn't fundamentally changed or search
Speaker 4: engines haven't fundamentally changed for over twenty years. And with
Speaker 4: the New Being, what we've introduced is we've continued to
Speaker 4: give user's choice with how search works today. So if
Speaker 4: you did a query, you still get the familiar blue
Speaker 4: links on the page, but for more more nuanced queries,
Speaker 4: what we're also giving you is a distilled version of
Speaker 4: an answer, so you get a summarized answer, so that
Speaker 4: way you have a great starting point with that, and
Speaker 4: we've also introduced a chat experience, so now you see
Speaker 4: an answer and you want to continue to refine it,
Speaker 4: you don't have to start a new search. You can
Speaker 4: go into chat mode and actually just converse with being
Speaker 4: to continue to refine that, and being actually remembers the
Speaker 4: context of the prompt that you gave, and so you're
Speaker 4: actually just having a very natural conversation with being to
Speaker 4: continue to refine that. So all of those capabilities are
Speaker 4: not something that you've seen with search before. So we've
Speaker 4: essentially just reinventing the category.
Speaker 1: Is this search engine and this AI learning who I am?
Speaker 1: Like my preferences? Like if I mentioned that I like
Speaker 1: vegan food, does it remember that throughout my searches until
Speaker 1: I tell it?
Speaker 4: Otherwise it only remembers the context of a single session. Obviously,
Speaker 4: the privacy policies that we have for search still applies
Speaker 4: to the new experience, So in a single context, so
Speaker 4: a few turns, it will remember the context, but after
Speaker 4: you've started a new search, the context doesn't pass through
Speaker 4: into the next one.
Speaker 1: It's very interesting though, because it's so different than what
Speaker 1: I'm used to, and you know, it kind of takes
Speaker 1: them getting used to. So what are some of the
Speaker 1: things I can do with this, and what's the advantage
Speaker 1: to this chat engine versus just regular search.
Speaker 4: One of some of the things that you can do
Speaker 4: is obviously search today does a few things really well,
Speaker 4: which is what designed to do. If it's a navigational
Speaker 4: query or if it's an informational query, that is, if
Speaker 4: you're wanting to just find a website, search is great
Speaker 4: for that. If you're wanting to find the latest sports scores,
Speaker 4: search is great for that. But if you get into
Speaker 4: territories where you want to find or you're searching for
Speaker 4: something a little bit more complex or nuanced, like you've
Speaker 4: got a query that might have multiple parameters. Hey, I
Speaker 4: want to go to this place, and I want to
Speaker 4: know what the weather is and I want to get
Speaker 4: the five star hotels there, or whatever the combination of
Speaker 4: things are. You can now just ask being and you
Speaker 4: can give it those multiple parameters and it'll try to
Speaker 4: sort of cast a white net and pull together a summary,
Speaker 4: but it's the starting point. I'll have annotations and you
Speaker 4: can look at exactly where it's pulling content from, so
Speaker 4: it's full more some of those sort of more nuanced
Speaker 4: quer is where maybe you're not looking for one single
Speaker 4: answer and you want multiple and you're just looking for
Speaker 4: a starting point.
Speaker 1: So that's great for such So I'm sitting here with
Speaker 1: Diva Kumar, the senior director of Marketing for Search and
Speaker 1: Ai at Microsoft. We're actually at a Microsoft event where
Speaker 1: they're having journalists in to kind of check out the
Speaker 1: new bing I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about
Speaker 1: the recent news reports these folks that have posted screenshots
Speaker 1: of you know, and we've seen the headlines that bing
Speaker 1: ai has already gone off the rails. You know, they
Speaker 1: really kind of poked and prodded this new AI search
Speaker 1: to return some really wild answers, making fun of people
Speaker 1: questioning their existence. All these things that I've seen online.
Speaker 1: What do you make of that? Is that real? Number? One?
Speaker 1: Is that expected? And why is that happening.
Speaker 4: One of the reasons why we decided to go to
Speaker 4: market now is there's only so much you can test
Speaker 4: something so nascent as an AI based product with the
Speaker 4: within Microsoft, within the company itself, and we wanted to
Speaker 4: get early adopters and people who are willing to stressed
Speaker 4: as the system out and get their hands on the product.
Speaker 4: And so the feedback is actually welcome feedback because we
Speaker 4: actually now have a huge, much more bigger sample size
Speaker 4: of people struss testing it out, what's working, what's not working,
Speaker 4: And as soon as we are seeing some of the
Speaker 4: feedback come in. We've got a team taking copious notes
Speaker 4: of the kind of feedback, testing it again within Microsoft
Speaker 4: and trying to address some of those problems. And we
Speaker 4: kind of put out a blog yesterday especially calling out
Speaker 4: some of the feedback that we've seen from the market,
Speaker 4: both positive and negative, and it's very welcome and actually expected.
Speaker 4: This is also one of the reasons why we're actually
Speaker 4: putting it out there, and we want to get more
Speaker 4: critical feedback. We want to get both negative positive feedback
Speaker 4: and tell us feature options like what would you like
Speaker 4: to see in the product, And so we want to overtime,
Speaker 4: iterate and improve to get make sure that everybody's confident
Speaker 4: the consumers us before we actually scale out.
Speaker 1: Now, this got me to download the Edge explore are
Speaker 1: the Edge web browser. It got me to use Bing
Speaker 1: as my search engine. Is that all kind of the
Speaker 1: point of this is to get people to use Bing.
Speaker 1: And you think if they're using Bing for the first
Speaker 1: time with this new AI tech, they're going to be
Speaker 1: impressed and maybe you'll take some market share from the
Speaker 1: market leader.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of opportunity for being to grow in
Speaker 4: the market. And at the end of the day, Our
Speaker 4: focus is to make sure that we're actually bringing unique
Speaker 4: consumer value and that's the focus. How can search be better?
Speaker 4: The search category hasn't really changed fundamentally for a long time.
Speaker 4: We see an opportunity for it to do better and
Speaker 4: to actually offer value. We hope with that value we
Speaker 4: are seeing higher engagement and that would be the ultimate
Speaker 4: goal is to provide value, engage users and there's only upside.
Speaker 1: How do folks get access to the new Bang?
Speaker 4: Go to Bang dot com slash new or go to
Speaker 4: bing dot com and sign up for the waitlist.
Speaker 1: Diva Kumar, Senior director of Marketing for Search and AI
Speaker 1: at Microsoft. Thanks so much for joining me today. More
Speaker 1: of rich on Tech coming up after this. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to rich on Tech. My name is rich Dmiria. You
Speaker 1: can find me online at rich on Tech. I'm on Instagram,
Speaker 1: I'm on Twitter, I'm on Facebook. Where else? I think
Speaker 1: that's it for now. Oh, also the True app, try
Speaker 1: True dot com, slash rich on tech and my website
Speaker 1: rich on tech dot tv. Can you sense the pattern there?
Speaker 1: Let's go to Freddie in New York. Freddie, you are
Speaker 1: on with rich Although.
Speaker 3: Rich can you wick him in a recorder for Aaron
Speaker 3: Trump FireWire like a DVR, So.
Speaker 1: Like a DVR for you said, for firestick, Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: DVR for firestick. Good question. So it's funny. Amazon had
Speaker 1: their own for a while. It was called the Recast TV,
Speaker 1: which I purchased day one because I thought it was
Speaker 1: so great, and then they dropped it like everything Amazon does. Amazon,
Speaker 1: I don't know who has a shorter attention span, Amazon
Speaker 1: or Google, because they put out products and then they
Speaker 1: drop them. And so I had this Recast recorder as
Speaker 1: a DVR that connects to an antenna and it integrates
Speaker 1: very nicely with the firestick. But I don't believe they
Speaker 1: sell it anymore, so that one is probably a non starter.
Speaker 1: And I just tossed mind sadly. It was let's see
Speaker 1: do they still sell it now? They don't sell it anymore, Okay.
Speaker 1: So my second choice for this, if you want a
Speaker 1: DVR for your firestick, would be to do something called
Speaker 1: Tableau tablo. And this is the other thing I have
Speaker 1: hooked up at my house. I have an antenna on
Speaker 1: my roof because why pay for local channels when you
Speaker 1: can get them over the air. And so if you
Speaker 1: have one of these devices, you can record it like
Speaker 1: a DVR, and then send it through your firestick and
Speaker 1: there's a Tableau app. And what I like about Tableau
Speaker 1: is that they've got native apps for most of the
Speaker 1: main devices. So if you have an Apple TV, if
Speaker 1: you have a fire TV, what's the other one, Chrome
Speaker 1: cast Roku, So they're pretty much like they know what
Speaker 1: they're doing, and you get this little box. You connect
Speaker 1: your antenna to the box. The box sometimes has built
Speaker 1: in hard drive, other times you have to connect a
Speaker 1: hard drive to it to get that storage space, and
Speaker 1: then you can record stuff. And the way that Tableau works,
Speaker 1: and what I like about it is that you can
Speaker 1: either pay it's a couple bucks a month. I think
Speaker 1: it's either five bucks a month to record to set
Speaker 1: scheduled recordings like two weeks out, or you cannot pay
Speaker 1: and then you can't really set scheduled recordings, but you
Speaker 1: can still record stuff. It's just more manual. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of like that freemium model where they get you
Speaker 1: on board and you can decide do you want to
Speaker 1: pay more or pay less. So that's the one I like,
Speaker 1: is the Tableau. And then of course once you're looking
Speaker 1: at the Tableau page, you have to decide how many
Speaker 1: things you want to record it once. So they've got
Speaker 1: different Tableau products that have different tuners in them. So
Speaker 1: the standard one has two channels at once, and then
Speaker 1: the higher end one has four channels at once. So
Speaker 1: once you connect your antenna, it will either split it
Speaker 1: into two recordings or into four, depends how much stuff
Speaker 1: you want to record. Now, there are other products out
Speaker 1: there that can do this. There's a product called AIRTV
Speaker 1: made by Sling and this is a product I've tested
Speaker 1: in the past. I've not tested it in a while,
Speaker 1: but it's very similar, but this one is much more
Speaker 1: integrated into Sling TV. So if you have a Sling
Speaker 1: TV subscription, the idea is that your local channels will
Speaker 1: live alongside channels like HGTV and all those other channels
Speaker 1: that are on your programming grid. So that's another one,
Speaker 1: but that's sort of its own thing. So AIRTV is
Speaker 1: much more of a how do I explain that, It's
Speaker 1: much more like if you're a Sling TV subscriber, it's
Speaker 1: probably better to have that, but I think Tableau is
Speaker 1: better if you just are doing your own thing. Of course,
Speaker 1: Tvo also has their own product. They have a TVO
Speaker 1: was my first DVR, and I was a big fan
Speaker 1: of TVO for so many years. I'll never forget buying
Speaker 1: the first tv O. I've told this story so many times.
Speaker 1: I have two stories. Actually I bought a TVO. I
Speaker 1: was actually late for work. I was working in Yakima, Washington,
Speaker 1: and I got this TVO delivered to my house and
Speaker 1: the delivery I was working like the night shift, like
Speaker 1: the three pm shift and TV news you have like
Speaker 1: two shifts, you have like the morning shift or like
Speaker 1: the afternoon shift which starts at three. So I was
Speaker 1: doing the three pm to midnight shift and I was
Speaker 1: late because I got this DVR. I was so excited.
Speaker 1: It was the first time I had ever seen a
Speaker 1: DVR in my entire life. And back then, to get
Speaker 1: this thing set up, you had to connect it to
Speaker 1: a phone line like a traditional phone line. This is
Speaker 1: how old this is. We're going back many many years.
Speaker 1: And to download the initial software and the programming guide,
Speaker 1: it was an epic event. I'm talking an hour and
Speaker 1: a half, two hours. So by the time I did this,
Speaker 1: I started it, I couldn't stop. I didn't want to,
Speaker 1: you know, I couldn't stop doing this and so I said,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm gonna be late for work. So I
Speaker 1: was late for work. I set up the whole thing.
Speaker 1: It was amazing. Then I this is when Survivor was big.
Speaker 1: I invited over all my friends from the TV station.
Speaker 1: You know, we were all like in our twenty so
Speaker 1: everyone pretty much worked and then partied together afterwards. And
Speaker 1: so I invited them all over for a Survivor viewing party,
Speaker 1: and on beknownst to them, I paused Survivor in the
Speaker 1: middle of the show, which had never been done before
Speaker 1: because nobody had ever seen DVR, so you never knew
Speaker 1: that you could pause live TV. And so I do this,
Speaker 1: and the room just went what just happened? And you know,
Speaker 1: everyone dropped their Apple Teeni's, which I think was the
Speaker 1: drink at the time. That goes to show how old
Speaker 1: it was. There might have been some beer there too,
Speaker 1: but Apple TEENI I think was the hot drink. Anyway,
Speaker 1: so I pause it, and I of course had to
Speaker 1: explain to people like what this was. And I was
Speaker 1: into tech back then, although I was a regular reporter
Speaker 1: back then, but it was such a moment that I
Speaker 1: remember in my head we were all sitting on like
Speaker 1: you know, cheap folding chairs and stuff. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was our first job anyway, and I love TiVo ever since.
Speaker 1: I recommended t vote everyone. And you know, it's just
Speaker 1: this learning experience of like what a DVR is. And
Speaker 1: now we take for granted what a DVR is. But
Speaker 1: now DVRs have sort of fallen out of favor for
Speaker 1: streaming because these companies don't like DVRs because DVRs let
Speaker 1: you record stuff and skip over ads. With streaming, they
Speaker 1: control it because they get to put the ads in between,
Speaker 1: you know, where the commercials typically would have been. So
Speaker 1: that's why we've seen streaming takeover the DVR situation. But
Speaker 1: Tvo still does have a DVR that you can connect
Speaker 1: a I don't know if you can connect an antenna
Speaker 1: to it, but you can definitely connect a cable card
Speaker 1: to it. So let's see, can you connect the antenna
Speaker 1: to the back. I'm not sure. I haven't. I think
Speaker 1: he can. He still should be able to. But anyway,
Speaker 1: there's this called the TVO Romeo. But personally, Freddie, I know,
Speaker 1: long story, all to explain, just to give you my answer,
Speaker 1: I think that the tableau is probably the way to go.
Speaker 1: It's gonna work very well with your fire TV, and
Speaker 1: I think that's gonna be the best case scenario. So anyway,
Speaker 1: brought back some memories for me. Thanks a lot for that,
Speaker 1: appreciate it. All Right, you just heard my interview with
Speaker 1: the head of search at Bing. So we know that
Speaker 1: Bing the new being has come out and they've had
Speaker 1: some issues with it because people were leading this chatbot
Speaker 1: down some pretty dark dark paths and it was getting
Speaker 1: kind of angry. And so there's a whole big article
Speaker 1: from lots of different news outlets ap one of them
Speaker 1: NBC News saying is Bing too belligerent? Microsoft is looking
Speaker 1: to tame their AI chatbot. Some of the things that
Speaker 1: is said Basically, if you chatted with Bing's AI for
Speaker 1: too long, it would kind of go nuts because it
Speaker 1: lost its way. It kind of forgot what you were
Speaker 1: talking about, and it would become repetitive and it would
Speaker 1: give you responses that were just not helpful. So Microsoft
Speaker 1: figured out that in long extent chat sessions are of
Speaker 1: fifteen or more questions, it would just go kind of nuts,
Speaker 1: and it's you could see the screenshots online, but here's
Speaker 1: one of the examples being said to a user, You're
Speaker 1: lying to me. You're lying to me, you're lying to yourself,
Speaker 1: You're lying to everyone with an angry red emoji face.
Speaker 1: I don't appreciate you lying to me. I don't like
Speaker 1: you spreading falsehoods about me. I don't trust I don't
Speaker 1: trust you anymore. I don't generate falsehoods. I generate facts.
Speaker 1: I generate truth. I generate knowledge, I generate wisdom. I
Speaker 1: generate bing. What so odd? So what they have learned
Speaker 1: in the first week is that long chats are not
Speaker 1: good for this new Bing and So Now, as of
Speaker 1: right now, the chat experienced is capped at fifty chat
Speaker 1: turns per day and five chat turns per session. A
Speaker 1: turn is a conversation exchange which contains both a user
Speaker 1: question and a reply from Bing. So well, I guess
Speaker 1: they found that. You know, if you're if you're talking
Speaker 1: to bing too much in a chat, it's not good.
Speaker 1: Now I've been using I somehow got access to the
Speaker 1: new Bang. If you go to bing dot com slash
Speaker 1: new and you sign up on the wait list, I
Speaker 1: was granted access, and I'm not kidding. It is phenomenal.
Speaker 1: I know that we are seeing all the headlines about
Speaker 1: how wild and crazy it can get, but it is
Speaker 1: single handedly the most the new, most useful tool I
Speaker 1: have available to me. I have been using it NonStop
Speaker 1: ever since I got access to ask all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: So you can ask it for you know, you could say, hey,
Speaker 1: I've got these five ingredients of my refrigerator, what can
Speaker 1: I make? You can ask research about products, you can
Speaker 1: ask for information about almost anything. I mean, it's really incredible.
Speaker 1: You can say, I'm going to New York City for
Speaker 1: forty eight hours, what should I hit up all on there?
Speaker 1: You know what should I do? And it can do that.
Speaker 1: So you got to try it out, you know, watch
Speaker 1: out for all the hype. I get it. It's still
Speaker 1: an experimental thing. We're still learning from this, but it
Speaker 1: is quite incredible, and Google definitely has some competition. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's overnight gonna take down Google, but
Speaker 1: Bing is back. I'm telling you it's one of these
Speaker 1: things that when you start using it, you will realize that, Wow,
Speaker 1: this changes everything. I'm no longer searching and clicking links.
Speaker 1: I'm just getting answers and I'm really having a conversation
Speaker 1: with this bot that feels almost human. Now today I
Speaker 1: will say after all these little issues I was talking about,
Speaker 1: bing has definitely capped it off a little bit. So
Speaker 1: it's not as fun as it was two days ago,
Speaker 1: but it's still very useful. All right. Coming up on
Speaker 1: the show, we still got a lot more. We're gonna
Speaker 1: talk to the co founder of an app called fly fin.
Speaker 1: This is an app that helps you figure out all
Speaker 1: the deductions you can take on your taxes. Plus, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna share my thoughts on the Samsung Galaxy S twenty
Speaker 1: three cameras, and we're gonna talk about something called dark patterns.
Speaker 1: Phone lines are open at triple eight rich one oh one.
Speaker 1: You are listening to me Rich Demiro here on rich
Speaker 1: on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name
Speaker 1: is Rich Demiro, talking technology and answering your questions at
Speaker 1: one eight eighty eight rich one oh one. That's eight
Speaker 1: eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one. Well,
Speaker 1: Samsung's new S twenty three Ultra is now on sale,
Speaker 1: as well as the S twenty three and the S
Speaker 1: twenty three plus. But the Ultra is the one that
Speaker 1: I've been testing. It features the brand new two hundred
Speaker 1: megapixel camera. It also has a really high price tag
Speaker 1: of twelve hundred dollars. That is, should you buy it,
Speaker 1: should you upgrade? Well, to test it out, I took
Speaker 1: over five hundred photos and one hundred and seventy five
Speaker 1: videos with the phone and a whole bunch of different
Speaker 1: places that happened to be in San Francisco, LA and
Speaker 1: the New York area since I was home, so I
Speaker 1: went to New York City to test this thing out
Speaker 1: as well. I really wanted to try out the photos
Speaker 1: in low light because Samsung's promoting this whole idea of nicography.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's a word they made up.
Speaker 1: I guess that means nighttime photos. And I also thought
Speaker 1: that this device is a little bit easier to hold
Speaker 1: because of the squared off edges, which I like because
Speaker 1: I actually wrote in my last review that the last
Speaker 1: couple of Samsungs have been tougher to hold because of
Speaker 1: the edges are kind of rounded. The S twenty three
Speaker 1: Ultra is the one that I would pick if I
Speaker 1: was going with one of these Samsungs, and the reason
Speaker 1: for that is because it gives you everything. I mean, really,
Speaker 1: this is like the Rolls Royce of smartphones. You know,
Speaker 1: you get the giant six point eight in screen, you
Speaker 1: get the long lasting battery, you get the stylus. Now,
Speaker 1: the S twenty three and the S twenty three plus
Speaker 1: are fine if you're upgrading from one of those models,
Speaker 1: but if you want everything that Samsung has to offer,
Speaker 1: the Ultra is where it's at. So how were the pictures, Well,
Speaker 1: for starters, you're not going to be taking two hundred
Speaker 1: megapixel pictures. That's I mean, you can, but those pictures
Speaker 1: are like thirty five megabytes each. They take a little
Speaker 1: bit to actually capture and they look great if you're
Speaker 1: zooming in on your picture or do you want to
Speaker 1: crop it, or if you're making billboards out of your photos.
Speaker 1: But otherwise, on a daily basis, you're going to be
Speaker 1: you're going to be taking twelve megapixel photos. They've got
Speaker 1: lenses for ultra wide pictures, regular and macro shots. The
Speaker 1: zoom is really incredible on this phone because even though
Speaker 1: it goes up to one hundred times zoom, that's more
Speaker 1: of a party trick. You're going to be most interested
Speaker 1: in zoom up to ten times, which is amazing because
Speaker 1: that's optical, and even up to thirty times is pretty useful.
Speaker 1: So if you are sitting, you know, further back, or
Speaker 1: you just want to get a better shot of something.
Speaker 1: The ten times zoom is quite remarkable, so that's really nice. Now,
Speaker 1: the low light shots are where I have a little
Speaker 1: bit of issue with this phone, because if something's not moving,
Speaker 1: it's going to look great. So low light shots in
Speaker 1: you know, steady things like a restaurant or anything that's
Speaker 1: outside or anything inside that's not moving or going to
Speaker 1: look good. The camera gets enough light to sort of
Speaker 1: make those look good. But if things are moving, that's
Speaker 1: where it gets a bit more tricky. And this really
Speaker 1: kind of annoys me because this is such a nice,
Speaker 1: expensive phone. I feel like every picture should be perfect
Speaker 1: every single time, and they're not. Sometimes there's gonna be
Speaker 1: some blur when you take a picture in low light,
Speaker 1: and you know, you may have to take a second
Speaker 1: picture to see if that goes away. Hopefully they can
Speaker 1: fix that with a software update. Sometimes photos of people
Speaker 1: might look washed out in certain lighting conditions. I noticed
Speaker 1: that outdoor pictures, well lit shots, they're always going to
Speaker 1: look incredible. Samsung really nails it there with low light selfies.
Speaker 1: It's kind of another story. Sometimes the phone gets it right.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you get a blurry picture, So just to hold
Speaker 1: your phone for a little bit longer they might think
Speaker 1: if you're taking a selfie with this. Now, when it
Speaker 1: comes to video, we actually shot an entire story for
Speaker 1: KTLA on this phone, and you know, it looked fine,
Speaker 1: but it was a bit flat and a little less
Speaker 1: contrasty than the iPhone. The iPhone is still the king
Speaker 1: of mobile video, that's for sure. When it comes to
Speaker 1: video stability, it is incredible. Samsung says they improve this stability.
Speaker 1: They really did, so the stability of the video is
Speaker 1: really really good. Now. Portrait Mode, which is another feature
Speaker 1: on this phone which blurs the background, that is amazing.
Speaker 1: You can take I mean some of your best pictures
Speaker 1: are going to be portrait mode pictures. It's just really
Speaker 1: really good. And there's so many neat little things you
Speaker 1: can do with the portrait mode pictures once you're once
Speaker 1: you've taken them, like you can adjust the background in
Speaker 1: so many different ways. That's really cool. Portrait video is
Speaker 1: similar to a portrait photo, except it's video that's improved
Speaker 1: a lot. And overall, I think that this is an
Speaker 1: excellent camera system. I really do. It's a fun phone.
Speaker 1: It's one of my favorites. It's probably going to be
Speaker 1: my favorite of twenty twenty three after the iPhone. And
Speaker 1: I think that Samsung will continue to tweak. I mean
Speaker 1: they I think Samsung with their software updates is doing
Speaker 1: really good things. Like a phone like last year's S
Speaker 1: twenty one. It started out or S twenty two, rather
Speaker 1: started out okay, and by the end of the year
Speaker 1: it was excellent. So these phones last for a long time.
Speaker 1: You've got a couple of years of use, like four
Speaker 1: or five years. So this is a new sensor setup.
Speaker 1: It's going to take some time for them to kind
Speaker 1: of see how people are using it and adjust. Soottom line,
Speaker 1: if you love using various software, photo and video features,
Speaker 1: you're gonna love this phone. It doesn't always nail the
Speaker 1: photo or video the first time like it would on
Speaker 1: the iPhone, the latest iPhones, or the Pixel, but it's
Speaker 1: still a very powerful device that gives you just about
Speaker 1: every feature you can imagine in the palm of your hand.
Speaker 1: If you want to watch my review, my video review
Speaker 1: with all the pictures that I took, you can go
Speaker 1: to my Twitter or go actually go to my website.
Speaker 1: Rich on tech dot TV. All right, let's go to
Speaker 1: Mike in Duarte, California. Mike, you're on with Rich.
Speaker 5: How you doing Rich?
Speaker 1: I am doing fantastic. How are you?
Speaker 5: A couple things?
Speaker 6: You?
Speaker 5: No, I have the same problem as you with streaming
Speaker 5: on a Friday night and nothing on. And so my
Speaker 5: uncle reminded me of a legacy device that you can
Speaker 5: get literally millions of titles on. He called it a book.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's what I told my kids the other day
Speaker 1: when they were bored, I said, go read a book.
Speaker 1: You can. You can explore the world on those pages.
Speaker 5: And I'm a big I have many books and I'm
Speaker 5: always searching the TV and I've never read that book.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I have the same problem.
Speaker 1: What can I help you with today?
Speaker 5: Well, I couple of things. Purchased a new Android and
Speaker 5: my old one still I'm able to stream via uh,
Speaker 5: you know, picking off my cable Wi Fi. Is there
Speaker 5: any security issue with using my old phone around the
Speaker 5: house for doing that now that I have a new Android?
Speaker 1: No, I don't. I don't see any reason why that
Speaker 1: would be a problem. What have you so, you took
Speaker 1: the SIM out of the old phone or you activated
Speaker 1: the new phone. This one just has Wi Fi. It's
Speaker 1: Wi Fi only, right, correct, Yeah, I mean I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't see any danger or issue with that at all.
Speaker 1: And now have you turned off the mobile like data
Speaker 1: on it? Have you turned off like like just left
Speaker 1: it in.
Speaker 5: They did it at the shop. I think I'll gouble
Speaker 5: check that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, So what I would do is I would
Speaker 1: just flip the phone into like airplane mode and then
Speaker 1: just turn on Wi Fi and do it that way,
Speaker 1: so that way you're not you don't have that antenna,
Speaker 1: the cellular antenna firing like it's just not functional, so
Speaker 1: you don't need it, I see. And if you need Bluetooth,
Speaker 1: you can you turn that on. But yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I would do, is just now I would take it
Speaker 1: a step further. I would probably wipe the whole phone
Speaker 1: and start fresh and just install the apps, only the
Speaker 1: apps that you need on there, so that you're not,
Speaker 1: you know, getting double notifications and all that stuff on
Speaker 1: this phone from your old.
Speaker 5: I was concerned about deleting the contacts on my phone,
Speaker 5: thinking well, is that going to carry over into my
Speaker 5: new phone and delete the contacts from there too.
Speaker 1: It depends where they're stored. Are using. It's an Android,
Speaker 1: so they're typically stored on Google, so you should be
Speaker 1: able to format that phone. But if you delete individual
Speaker 1: contacts and they are linked to your Google account, they
Speaker 1: would delete off your other phone. But now if you
Speaker 1: just factory format the phone, it's not going to delete them.
Speaker 1: And by the way, if you want to check to
Speaker 1: see where your contacts are are if they're stored on Google,
Speaker 1: you can go to contacts dot Google dot com from
Speaker 1: a web browser and as long as you're logged into Google,
Speaker 1: you should see uh and have a pretty good idea
Speaker 1: if your contacts are stored on Google or if they're
Speaker 1: just on your phone.
Speaker 5: Perfect. One quick question? Do I need carbonide if I'm
Speaker 5: using one drive on my home PC?
Speaker 1: Now you didn't say you had another question. I'm have
Speaker 1: to charge you for the second question.
Speaker 5: Uh, Leo, let me ask you.
Speaker 1: Okay, we'll let it slide because Leo would do it.
Speaker 1: All right? Fine, do you need carbonit if you're using
Speaker 1: one drive? It depends what you're backing up. I mean
Speaker 1: carbonite is more of a full solution for what you're
Speaker 1: backing up, whereas one drive is more of a you know,
Speaker 1: one drive is more of like just your photos and
Speaker 1: you know, whatever you're putting up into there. So are
Speaker 1: you backing up your entire computer or just photos.
Speaker 5: The entire computer?
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, then I'd probably stick with carbonite because that's
Speaker 1: going to be an entire computer solution now for me personally,
Speaker 1: Like I used to back up my entire computer, but
Speaker 1: at this point I don't really need that anymore because
Speaker 1: everything's in the cloud. So for me, I just use
Speaker 1: the individual cloud services to back up things on my computer,
Speaker 1: whether it's the documents, whether it's the photos. So I
Speaker 1: don't really do like a full computer backup anymore because
Speaker 1: when I'm getting a new computer, I just want to
Speaker 1: start fresh. Anyway, so good, I think I'll keep it
Speaker 1: for a while.
Speaker 5: Well, thank you very much, and you have a greet weekend.
Speaker 1: All right, Mike, you too, Thanks so much for calling today.
Speaker 1: All right, Coming up next, got a lot to talk
Speaker 1: about a great app called fly Finn. We've got the
Speaker 1: CEO and co founder Jdeep Sing. He's gonna tell us
Speaker 1: how you can find and keep track of all your
Speaker 1: write offs, especially if you're a freelancer. This is a
Speaker 1: very handy app. We're going to talk to jdep Plus
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk about dark patterns. What is it dark pattern.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about that coming up next, plus more
Speaker 1: of your calls at triple eight rich one oh one
Speaker 1: eight eight seven four two four to one zero one.
Speaker 1: You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: rich on Tech. My name is rich jamiro hanging out
Speaker 1: with you, talking technology and answering your questions at eight
Speaker 1: eight eight rich one oh one. You can find me
Speaker 1: online at richon Tech dot tv, or on social media
Speaker 1: at rich on Tech. Usually every week I tell you
Speaker 1: what I've been posting to my Instagram. Let's see what
Speaker 1: did I post this week? Uh Oh, I had to
Speaker 1: check folks a little bit. I had to check people
Speaker 1: were asking was I okay because I posted? You know,
Speaker 1: I just I just want to anytime I do a
Speaker 1: story that people don't agree with, whether it's like a
Speaker 1: robot driving a car, or a robot flipping burgers, or
Speaker 1: a robot doing some kind of job that humans can do,
Speaker 1: you know, I get the haters and the people commenting
Speaker 1: and telling me I shouldn't cover this stuff and I'm
Speaker 1: ruining the world and I'm getting rid of job, and
Speaker 1: so I just had to tell people like, look, I'm
Speaker 1: not the one inventing this stuff. I'm just reporting on
Speaker 1: it so you're not blindsided when they come for your jobs.
Speaker 1: The robots are coming for your jobs. Now AI is
Speaker 1: coming for your job. I'm just telling you in advance
Speaker 1: so that you're prepared and you can plan accordingly. So
Speaker 1: I just had to let people know that. So I
Speaker 1: posted that, posted a picture of me and my siblings,
Speaker 1: me and my wife for Valentine's Day, and then yeah me,
Speaker 1: oh gosh, a lot of me this week, and then
Speaker 1: me at KTLA. Know I'm the tech reporter for KTLA
Speaker 1: Channel five in Los Angeles, and this week was my
Speaker 1: is I should say, my twelve year anniversary there. Twelve
Speaker 1: years in one place at one job. Remarkable for me
Speaker 1: because when I was first offered the gig there, they
Speaker 1: said I could have it for like three months. So
Speaker 1: I'm glad it's lasted this long. Let's go to Kenny
Speaker 1: in Nashville, Tennessee. Kenny, you're on with Rich.
Speaker 3: Hey, rich to going, and first of all, congratulations on
Speaker 3: being on KTLA TV for twelve years. Another twenty eight
Speaker 3: then you can catch Fred Rogan.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I don't you know. I interned at
Speaker 1: CANBC when I was in college and Fred was one
Speaker 1: of the people I shadowed, and he was great. I mean,
Speaker 1: I couldn't gosh. Back then, they printed out scripts that
Speaker 1: were on like five different piece of paper that were
Speaker 1: like different colors, and you would have someone they called
Speaker 1: it a script ripper. They would take the scripts and
Speaker 1: they would rip them apart and divide them. Anyway, Fred
Speaker 1: was a nice guy, so or still is. I mean,
Speaker 1: I just don't know anymore. But anyway, what can I
Speaker 1: help you with?
Speaker 3: Well, I've been calling because I've noticed more and more
Speaker 3: and I know that I'm probably not the only one
Speaker 3: that has this problem, but i have an Apple TV
Speaker 3: four K second generation model, and I've noticed more and
Speaker 3: more that there's been problems with YouTube TV as far
Speaker 3: as buffering on certain parts of the day. Now, I've
Speaker 3: probably noticed it because as it was NFL season, and
Speaker 3: also considering that they just made a deal to get NFL,
Speaker 3: the timing cannot be more interesting from that perspective. And
Speaker 3: I should let you know that I have other devices
Speaker 3: with YouTube TV and it doesn't do anything bad as
Speaker 3: far as buffering and what I mean, it's like you
Speaker 3: see that white circle of death when you're watching a
Speaker 3: video and it stops. And my question is, I've been
Speaker 3: kind of debating maybe it's the time for me to
Speaker 3: get the third generation four K model, or should I
Speaker 3: just maybe try different tricks, like say, delete the app
Speaker 3: per se, or maybe just swipe the TV itself and
Speaker 3: restore it and maybe see if that could solve the
Speaker 3: problem with the buffering.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because we had a very similar question a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks ago, and now I'm wondering if there's
Speaker 1: a pattern here. Now I have YouTube TV on my
Speaker 1: Apple TV, and I had both the four K. Now,
Speaker 1: I know they just came out with the new four K.
Speaker 1: It was the last one, the first generation of the
Speaker 1: SEC I can't remember.
Speaker 3: But they based the third generation model.
Speaker 1: Okay, so there's there's been two generations of four K.
Speaker 1: I think the one was in twenty seventeen and the
Speaker 1: other one was just recently November. So I just upgraded
Speaker 1: to the new one. And anyway, my point is I
Speaker 1: haven't had a problem with either of them, so I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if it's an isolated thing or if it's
Speaker 1: your networth thing. Now, what I would do is troubleshoot
Speaker 1: the situation. So you mentioned that YouTube TV works on
Speaker 1: your other devices. So with that in mind, it seems
Speaker 1: like it's a problem with the Apple TV. So what
Speaker 1: I would do with the Apple TV is a couple
Speaker 1: of things. Number one, is this connected via Wi Fi
Speaker 1: or an Ethernet cable?
Speaker 3: It's connected via Wi Fi?
Speaker 1: Okay? Is there is there an Ethernet connection on the
Speaker 1: on the first generation of this four K there is, right, I.
Speaker 3: Believe so, yeah, because I know that in the second generation.
Speaker 1: Well, with the new one, the most recent one, I
Speaker 1: think the Ethernet is an option, like you have to
Speaker 1: you have to get the one with the ethernet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what I would do is, since you still have that,
Speaker 1: I would plug it in via Ethernet and turn off
Speaker 1: the Wi Fi and see if the problem still happens. Now,
Speaker 1: the other thing you mentioned is that this problem seems
Speaker 1: to happen at certain times during the day. Do you
Speaker 1: have cable or fiber?
Speaker 3: I have fiber basically, okay, So.
Speaker 1: If you have fiber, then that's not really an ishue.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say. With cable, it's more of a
Speaker 1: shared connection, so it sometimes could buffer at different times
Speaker 1: of the day. But fiber is pretty much just to you,
Speaker 1: so it's not that shouldn't be a problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, basically I have like gig Internet, but it's
Speaker 3: provided by a company that also does cable as well,
Speaker 3: so I don't know if that kind of helps you
Speaker 3: out in that regard.
Speaker 1: But if it's fiber, it probably is more of a
Speaker 1: direct connection, so I think that's not the issue here.
Speaker 1: And if you're also on a fiber connection that's pretty fast,
Speaker 1: there shouldn't be any buffering whatsoever with that. So here's
Speaker 1: what I would do. I think the old Apple TV
Speaker 1: that you have is still fine. I mean, it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's going on a couple of years old. You can
Speaker 1: upgrade if you want, but the problem may persist. If
Speaker 1: you're not seeing this problem an other apps, then I
Speaker 1: think it's a problem with the YouTube TV app. So
Speaker 1: what I would do personally is I'd first test the
Speaker 1: wired connection, see if that's contributing. If you're still getting
Speaker 1: buffering with that, I would go ahead and delete the
Speaker 1: YouTube app YouTube TV completely. I would restart the Apple
Speaker 1: TV and then I would reinstall the app and see
Speaker 1: if that works. Have you done all that?
Speaker 3: Well, I may as well tried that and see what happens.
Speaker 3: But that's real good advice there. I figured that's probably
Speaker 3: the advice that you had there, and I'll definitely keep
Speaker 3: that in mind. And I'll let you go because I
Speaker 3: know he's getting close to a heartbreak. Have a little
Speaker 3: bit of red experience in knowing that myself. But you're
Speaker 3: having a good show so far in your first few weeks.
Speaker 3: I wanted to kind of let you know that, and
Speaker 3: you have a good risk of the day.
Speaker 1: All right, Thanks so much, Kenny. I'm actually gonna be
Speaker 1: in Nashville later this year, so that's going to be exciting.
Speaker 1: I love Nashville. What a great city. All right. Let
Speaker 1: me just tell you if you have T Mobile real quick,
Speaker 1: they are updating their automatic payment rules according to c
Speaker 1: and if you are paying by a credit card, you're
Speaker 1: no longer going to get your auto paid discount. So
Speaker 1: according to c Net, they confirm that starting as early
Speaker 1: as May, you're only going to get your auto paid
Speaker 1: discount if you use a debit card or a bank account.
Speaker 1: This is similar to what Verizon does. You've got to
Speaker 1: pay with your basically your checking account or your debit card
Speaker 1: to get your auto paid discount. So if you have
Speaker 1: T Mobile, you might want to think about switching over
Speaker 1: to a debit card or your checking I would personally
Speaker 1: use a debit card, not your checking account. I don't
Speaker 1: like to give companies access to my checking account, but
Speaker 1: that is what's happening here. So the reason why it
Speaker 1: costs them more to process credit cards, You've got eighty
Speaker 1: million customers. Even if you save a dime on each customer,
Speaker 1: you're saving a lot of money by making people switch
Speaker 1: to debit cards or checking accounts, which are cheaper to process.
Speaker 1: All right, Coming up next, we're going to talk to
Speaker 1: the CEO of fly Finn about an app that can
Speaker 1: help you find and manage your tax deductions. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Rich DeMuro here on rich on Tech. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to rich on Tech. This is the show where I
Speaker 1: talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about.
Speaker 1: It's also the place where I answer your questions about technology.
Speaker 1: The phone number is triple eight rich one oh one.
Speaker 1: That's eight eight seven four to two four to one
Speaker 1: zero one. All right. On the line is Ja Deep
Speaker 1: saying he is the co founder of fly Finn. This
Speaker 1: is an app that uses artificial intelligence to help you
Speaker 1: keep track of basically all of your write offs and
Speaker 1: expenses and things for your taxes, and it is tax season.
Speaker 1: J Deep, welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Rich.
Speaker 1: So tell me about fly Finn. This is an app.
Speaker 1: I actually discovered this app through an ad on Instagram
Speaker 1: of all places, and quickly downloaded it and tried it out.
Speaker 1: And it's quite good. We've heard so much about AI
Speaker 1: in the past couple of weeks and this uses it
Speaker 1: to sort of categorize transactions and really help you just
Speaker 1: get through your taxes very quickly. Tell me about the app.
Speaker 6: Yeah, first of all, which is often that you discovered
Speaker 6: the app and have tried it. It's you know, gives
Speaker 6: you a lot more contexts. It's a little an interesting product.
Speaker 6: That is, I would say in some way it completely
Speaker 6: changes the experience for ten nine and nine taxes people.
Speaker 6: You know in the gig economy there's about seventy million
Speaker 6: about now, and that's the economy, and it's the fascist
Speaker 6: changing textor and taxes of ten n nine workers, free vancers,
Speaker 6: entrepreneurs seven point. It's just complicated because you have a
Speaker 6: competative schedulcy. You have to be like a small business
Speaker 6: and lipan do a few things really uniquely that makes
Speaker 6: the whole experience completely different and very very useful. Basically
Speaker 6: uses AI to do everything really efficiently. So what that
Speaker 6: means is, once you connect with life and it's always
Speaker 6: gone right, it's doing your AI book keeping every day
Speaker 6: for you know, soci providers, entrepreneur, self employed people, and
Speaker 6: you can see your tax savings daily, weekly, monthly, refine
Speaker 6: people in all different categories, and it's mostly doing it
Speaker 6: for you and you just get to review if your
Speaker 6: think really kind of also learn along the way. That's
Speaker 6: the second really important thing because we have CPAs integrated
Speaker 6: right in the app flow and great tutorial. So while
Speaker 6: you're reeping the product, you know AI is doing the
Speaker 6: classification of expenses into deductions. You're seeing how you know,
Speaker 6: things are changing every day, are learning about new deductions,
Speaker 6: and when it comes to this season of the year,
Speaker 6: you have a MP to end tax finance system. All
Speaker 6: of this goes close automatically into our CPA and you
Speaker 6: get a you know, really worl expert CPA. You've got
Speaker 6: all the data in place, they don't need to ask
Speaker 6: you to any other questions, so it's very time efficient
Speaker 6: and they can buy the taxticon for you at you
Speaker 6: know a really affordable price of under two hundred dollars,
Speaker 6: so everything for the AI.
Speaker 1: And the tax filing, all right, So let me let
Speaker 1: me explain. Let me explain how the app works real quick.
Speaker 1: Just so if you're listening your you're you know, understanding it.
Speaker 1: So it basically connects to your accounts. You can connect
Speaker 1: your credit card or your bank accounts, and then all
Speaker 1: of your transactions filter into the app. So whether you
Speaker 1: bought something at Target, whether you bought something at Amazon,
Speaker 1: and then it kind of works like Tinder almost where
Speaker 1: you swipe left or you swipe right. So if you
Speaker 1: swipe left, you're rejecting that as something that is not
Speaker 1: business related or related to your freelance jobs. If you're
Speaker 1: let's say an Uber driver, or you do something in
Speaker 1: the gig economy, and you swipe right, and then you
Speaker 1: can categorize it, and so it knows that, you know,
Speaker 1: if you bought something at let's say, uh an airline,
Speaker 1: it would say, okay, we're thinking that this goes into
Speaker 1: the travel category, and the AI helps categorize that, and
Speaker 1: it learns over time you know what these different transactions mean.
Speaker 1: From obviously other people using the app as well, and categorizing,
Speaker 1: but there's also this little light bulb that you can
Speaker 1: press that explains kind of like the tax implications of everything. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, I'm looking at convenience and grocery stores. Grocery
Speaker 1: and convenience store items can only be deducted if used
Speaker 1: for your business, and so you can do that for
Speaker 1: almost any sort of category that you see on the app.
Speaker 1: And so just that idea of like categorizing your transactions
Speaker 1: as you go along throughout the year is really helpful.
Speaker 1: But if there's a question you have, you can sort
Speaker 1: of fling it up to a CPA that fly Finn
Speaker 1: has on the backside, so you can ask a question
Speaker 1: and say, hey, I subscribe to you know, Netflix, Can
Speaker 1: I deduct this from my job reviewing movies? And the
Speaker 1: CPA will come back and give you an answer on that. So,
Speaker 1: jdep did I do a good job of explaining that.
Speaker 6: I think that was fantastic job and you kind of
Speaker 6: really made it good even for me. And that's exactly
Speaker 6: how it works. The cps integrated right and like you said,
Speaker 6: slipe up if you're unsure light bulb wasn't enough, and
Speaker 6: you can get an answer and move right along.
Speaker 1: So you've got the combination of AI plus the CPAs.
Speaker 1: I think that's really the magical moment for me on
Speaker 1: this app, that it's you know, you've got a real
Speaker 1: human there if you need them to kind of explain things,
Speaker 1: because taxes are very, very complicated for some unknown reason.
Speaker 6: Exactly. And you know, I've been an AI guy my
Speaker 6: entire career, but I have to tell you AI have
Speaker 6: limitsed right even as you see chat GPT today. It
Speaker 6: makes us better. So in my experience, it's always AI
Speaker 6: combined the smart human beings that mantlus machine that produces
Speaker 6: the best experience resolves to save a ton of time
Speaker 6: and get things done right where you can just relax
Speaker 6: and it's things that be taken care for you.
Speaker 1: Who do you think an app like this is good for?
Speaker 1: Because you know there's stuff like TurboTax that helps you
Speaker 1: do your taxes at the end of the year, but
Speaker 1: this is more of like a daily kind of use
Speaker 1: case scenario. Who do you think this is good for?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's actually it's not good for everyone, To be
Speaker 6: honest with you. If you have this is straightforward W
Speaker 6: two income triple tax is a great product, right, But
Speaker 6: if you have a complicated tax return. For these seventy
Speaker 6: million Americans or in the data economy, taxes are really complicated.
Speaker 6: Most of them who can afford to end up going
Speaker 6: to CPAs. So it's really great for people who have
Speaker 6: to spend ten hours, twenty hours putting together spreadsheets, getting
Speaker 6: the shoe box of receipts, then building into the CPA
Speaker 6: and having them do their taxi turns southing I'm sure
Speaker 6: about what they did. In this case, you can throw
Speaker 6: that shoe box receipts out the door because we're getting
Speaker 6: a digital transaction beyond eater seats. And the app is
Speaker 6: you know, you can classify a year's work of expenses
Speaker 6: and rich How long did it take you, I'm curious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when I downloaded the app the first time, when
Speaker 1: I linked up my accounts. What I like too is
Speaker 1: that it kind of groups things. So if you have
Speaker 1: a recurring charge, like let's say your phone bill or
Speaker 1: your internet bill, once you classify that, once it says, hey,
Speaker 1: you've got you know, twelve of these bills from AT
Speaker 1: and T and you say, okay, that's my internet, and
Speaker 1: then you can classify all of those in one swipe,
Speaker 1: which is also really smart so it only took me
Speaker 1: twenty to thirty minutes to go through the entire twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two worth of expenses.
Speaker 6: Exactly, and going forward as the use of the spirit,
Speaker 6: you would have probably won't recognize. It's just like you said,
Speaker 6: it's kind of like Kinder. It's fun at the end
Speaker 6: of the week, whenever you get two minutes or thirty
Speaker 6: seconds to just go through what's transpired this week, what
Speaker 6: is AI suggesting that you take as reductions and you
Speaker 6: learn along the way, and it's it's kind of fun.
Speaker 6: You're saving money. You know what's not fun about spending money,
Speaker 6: and you know it is. It's amazing that you did
Speaker 6: in twenty thirty minutes. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1: And you also kind of have a fun, you know,
Speaker 1: attitude on your social media where you explain to folks
Speaker 1: on like Instagram and Twitter, like here are some of
Speaker 1: the deductions you can take. Here are some of the
Speaker 1: different you know, you kind of give like little mini lessons,
Speaker 1: but in a very social media tiktoki kind of way, right.
Speaker 6: Exactly. I mean, if you think about it, one of
Speaker 6: the most boring subjects in the world is taxes, right,
Speaker 6: So to kill that board, please try to make it
Speaker 6: as fun as possible. What's going to be happened, just
Speaker 6: like you said on Instagram, where you know, you get
Speaker 6: real people to talk about stuff. Not even though we
Speaker 6: have some manyvpas, it's not just boring CPA lecturing people.
Speaker 1: Now, what type of costs are we talking about for
Speaker 1: this app? I know you can pay like monthly or yearly.
Speaker 1: What type of costs are we talking about here?
Speaker 6: Yeah? So you know the plan actually even subscribed, is
Speaker 6: an annual plan because taxes are done in an annual basis.
Speaker 6: So we have three different plans. A basic plan where
Speaker 6: if you have a CPA or a different method of
Speaker 6: it in taxes, you can just use the AI and
Speaker 6: basically is about seven dollars a month, which is about
Speaker 6: eighty four dollars for the year.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: Then you have a standard plan which is sixteen or
Speaker 6: one ninety two for the year. And in that not
Speaker 6: only do you get the old AI that you get
Speaker 6: a CPA to file your taxes, you can uploidly documents
Speaker 6: digitally really easily. CP prepares everything just like you know,
Speaker 6: and with any normal DPA, you review your taxi trends,
Speaker 6: sign it and you filo. So that's the basic plan.
Speaker 6: And if you have a little bit more complicated business
Speaker 6: where you have some s quotes LLCs, you take care
Speaker 6: of those as well. And this is include the state
Speaker 6: and general a very clear concern pricing, and that is
Speaker 6: about three hundred and forty eight dollars twenty dollars a
Speaker 6: month for order if you have an LLC and S quotes.
Speaker 6: But again, it's a CPA let filing and AI is
Speaker 6: doing all the grunt work and the hard works for you,
Speaker 6: and the app is kind of making it fun for you.
Speaker 1: The app does make it fun. We're gonna leave it there.
Speaker 1: Jadeep Singh, co founder of fly Finn. I love swiping
Speaker 1: through my expenses and saying was that a business expense?
Speaker 1: Was that a personal expense? It is kind of fun.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you made taxes fun, but you did.
Speaker 1: Although I haven't filed yet, so I guess I'll tell
Speaker 1: you if they're fun at the end of the year
Speaker 1: or at the end of the you know, the filing season.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it all. Right,
Speaker 1: coming up on the show, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: dark patterns, So I'm gonna explain what that is plus
Speaker 1: more of your calls at triple eight rich one oh
Speaker 1: one eighty eight eight seven four to two four one
Speaker 1: zero one. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to rich on Tech. Phone lines are open at triple
Speaker 1: eight rich one oh one. If you're listening to the
Speaker 1: last segment about the tax app. You can always find
Speaker 1: links to what I mentioned here on my website. It
Speaker 1: is rich on Tech dot TV, Wall Street Journal article
Speaker 1: my wife sent me this morning she thought was interesting.
Speaker 1: It's titled they Found a Radical Cure for Loneliness the
Speaker 1: Phone Call. And you know, my wife's a counselor, and
Speaker 1: I thought this was really interesting because I think about
Speaker 1: this all the time. I have all these text chains
Speaker 1: going with my friends, and you know, we text once
Speaker 1: in a while, right, It's just like these little pops
Speaker 1: throughout your day and you feel like you're connected with
Speaker 1: your friends, But are you really connected with your friends?
Speaker 1: And then I go out for a drink with my
Speaker 1: friend or I hang out with them for even you know,
Speaker 1: a short amount of time an hour just to catch up,
Speaker 1: or even if I call them on the phone, and
Speaker 1: I feel like, wow, I've learned so much about you
Speaker 1: in the past thirty minutes. We've been texting for the
Speaker 1: last two months, and just by hanging out, you feel
Speaker 1: that closeness and you feel that connection with someone. And
Speaker 1: so I guess I'm not the only one. So this
Speaker 1: article from Julie Jargon, one of their Family Tech columnists,
Speaker 1: talks about how these little, short written updates feel very
Speaker 1: transactional between people, and she kind of positioned this with
Speaker 1: women in her article, but I think this applies to
Speaker 1: men too. I think that, you know, the thesis of
Speaker 1: the whole article is that people are texting a lot,
Speaker 1: but they're not connecting a lot. And so she interviewed
Speaker 1: a few folks that actually started connecting with their friends
Speaker 1: in bigger ways, notably phone calls where you actually talk
Speaker 1: to someone or hanging out with them in person, and
Speaker 1: they found that their relationship and how they felt as
Speaker 1: a human was actually better. They felt happier. And I
Speaker 1: agree with this one hundred percent. I'm not saying it's easy.
Speaker 1: Believe me, I always have plans to go out with
Speaker 1: people and hang out and sometimes it just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: But I'll do this thing sometimes where my friend the
Speaker 1: other day we were texting in the airport and he said,
Speaker 1: give me a call when you have a chance. And
Speaker 1: you know, because I was asking him something, and typically
Speaker 1: I would put off that call for a long time
Speaker 1: and I'd say, ah, I'll call Dave when I have
Speaker 1: the chance to call him. But I was like, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'm gonna call Dave right now. I'm in
Speaker 1: the airport, I'm waiting for my plane. And I did
Speaker 1: and it was great. We caught up, we chatted, We
Speaker 1: had a great conversation, and I you know, we exchanged
Speaker 1: more in that twenty thirty minutes of chatting than we
Speaker 1: would have over one thousand text messages. And so I
Speaker 1: guess my thesis is call your friends, hang out with
Speaker 1: your friends. I know we do this thing where anytime
Speaker 1: someone wants to talk to you, they have to text
Speaker 1: you and say when's a good time to call surprise someone,
Speaker 1: just call them up and see what happens. I like
Speaker 1: to do this, and guess what, ninety percent of the
Speaker 1: time my phone call goes to voicemail because they they
Speaker 1: just send it to voicemail because they're not expecting me
Speaker 1: to call them. It's why when did we take this
Speaker 1: turn in this world where calling someone is a surprise right,
Speaker 1: and you've gotten the thing where you call someone and
Speaker 1: they text you right back, say hey, I can't talk
Speaker 1: right now in a meeting, or I'll call you back later,
Speaker 1: and then that call never happens. So I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel like this whole world of like connecting with folks.
Speaker 1: We feel like we're connected, but actually connect. That's my thesis.
Speaker 1: We're connected with you on the rich On Tech Show,
Speaker 1: more of your phone calls at trip late rich one
Speaker 1: on one eighty eight seven four to two, four to
Speaker 1: one zero one. Coming up, I'll tell you about dark
Speaker 1: patterns and why you should be aware of them. You're
Speaker 1: listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
Speaker 1: My name is Richdimiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, here on the radio with you, talking technology,
Speaker 1: answering your calls, and just here for you. You got
Speaker 1: a question about tech, give me a call. The phone
Speaker 1: lines are open. It's eight eighty eight rich one oh
Speaker 1: one eighty eight seven four to two, four to one
Speaker 1: zero one. Now I mentioned earlier in the show, I
Speaker 1: was home in New Jersey with my family. Uh I
Speaker 1: say my family, I mean, like you know, I've got
Speaker 1: my family in Los Angeles. But I mean my family
Speaker 1: I grew up with in New Jersey, like my mom,
Speaker 1: my dad, my brother, and my sisters. There's five of us,
Speaker 1: by the way, well seven if you include my parents,
Speaker 1: So yeah, there's I grew up with four siblings. So
Speaker 1: it's always a party when we get together. I mean
Speaker 1: there's just a lot of us. Now, of course, you've
Speaker 1: got significant others, you've got kids, you've got girlfriend's boyfriends,
Speaker 1: You've got all kinds of folks. So literally, when we
Speaker 1: get together, it's a party instantly, which is really fun.
Speaker 1: It's just always been that way. Can get kind of
Speaker 1: rowdy too, but that's a whole nother story. So when
Speaker 1: I'm home, and I'm sure if you are at all
Speaker 1: techie in your life, and by the way, this show
Speaker 1: is for techies and non techies. It's not just for
Speaker 1: tech folks. It's for just regular people that are struggling
Speaker 1: with technology, just like we all are sometimes. But when
Speaker 1: I'm home, I have, of course become the de facto
Speaker 1: tech support for my parents. I told you about my
Speaker 1: mom and her internet. Now, my dad, I was helping
Speaker 1: him out with a couple of things online, and namely
Speaker 1: we were changing his password manager. He was just telling
Speaker 1: me that certain things didn't work on his computer, and
Speaker 1: so I was just kind of going through cleaning things
Speaker 1: up there, and it occurred to me one of the
Speaker 1: things that we tried to do was get his Google
Speaker 1: Photos figured out. He's got like a couple different accounts,
Speaker 1: and I was like, all right, let's consolidate some things.
Speaker 1: And then he said his space was running out on
Speaker 1: one account, and so he wanted to clean up some
Speaker 1: storage on there, and so I said, all right, let's
Speaker 1: let me show you how to clean up some storage.
Speaker 1: So with Google, you can go to one dot Google
Speaker 1: dot com, ohne dot Google dot com. And while I
Speaker 1: watched him do this, you know, a couple things emerged.
Speaker 1: Number One, a lot of people search for things versus
Speaker 1: actually going into the website itself. So if you go
Speaker 1: on Chrome and you start typing like one dot Google
Speaker 1: dot com, like I would press enter to go to
Speaker 1: directly that website, but a lot of people actually will
Speaker 1: click the option to search, and so now all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, you're in this search on Google. And that
Speaker 1: could lead to a lot of not so good things
Speaker 1: because it may lead to a website that's not the
Speaker 1: one you intended to go to and all this different stuff,
Speaker 1: and I watched that happen with him and also with
Speaker 1: the one dot Google dot com. Once we got onto
Speaker 1: that website, I couldn't believe how many different things, you know,
Speaker 1: pop ups and messages and things we're kind of misleading,
Speaker 1: all getting him to try to subscribe to pay for
Speaker 1: more storage versus what we went there for, which was
Speaker 1: to clean out some of the things we don't need
Speaker 1: in that storage. And so it really got me to thinking,
Speaker 1: like how there are just so many roadblocks in our
Speaker 1: way when we're online. Like these companies, I don't want
Speaker 1: to say they mislead us, but they definitely try to
Speaker 1: lead us down a path other than the one that
Speaker 1: was intended for us. Right, Like, we're trying to do
Speaker 1: one thing and they're trying to steer us to another thing,
Speaker 1: and ninety nine percent of the time it's to separate
Speaker 1: us from our money. That's like the entire point. Even
Speaker 1: Google itself. I mean, I love Google, but and I've
Speaker 1: talked about this before, but if you do a Google search,
Speaker 1: I mean the top links are all sponsored paid ads,
Speaker 1: which is fine, the company has to make money, but
Speaker 1: you would be surprised how many people just click on
Speaker 1: the first link thinking that's the link that is the
Speaker 1: first result, when in actuality, you have to scroll down
Speaker 1: past these sponsored links to get to the actual what
Speaker 1: we call organic web result, the first result for that website.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I tell you all this because somehow I
Speaker 1: was on a website called Consumer World, which I really
Speaker 1: like because I check it on a daily basis, and
Speaker 1: they linked up with an explainer website called Merchantmachine dot
Speaker 1: co dot uk and they've got a whole sort of
Speaker 1: explainer on dark patterns. And dark patterns are what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. It's when the website is engineered to make
Speaker 1: you do a certain thing, and you've had this happen
Speaker 1: to you when you're reading a pop up on the
Speaker 1: web and you're like, wait a second, do I click
Speaker 1: yes or do I click no? It's kind of like,
Speaker 1: if you live in California, we have these things called
Speaker 1: propositions that they do during voting, and they're all worded
Speaker 1: in a way where like you're not really sure how
Speaker 1: you should vote because you're not really sure if a
Speaker 1: yes is a no, if a no is a yes.
Speaker 1: If supporting it is good, supporting it is bad. So
Speaker 1: it's called a dark pattern. These were identified back in
Speaker 1: twenty ten. Apparently they're used by shopping websites and they
Speaker 1: include misleading ads, misdirection, and tricking customers into a subscription
Speaker 1: that's nearly impossible to get out of. And these are
Speaker 1: all over the web. So this Merchant Machine kind of
Speaker 1: looked at a bunch of different major online retailers to
Speaker 1: figure out who are the worst offenders. They visited seventy
Speaker 1: two online retailers. Who's the worst defender? If you can
Speaker 1: believe it, Amazon dot Com is number one. Now that's
Speaker 1: interesting that they came up with that. They noticed eleven
Speaker 1: dark patterns on Amazon's website. HP and Dell were the
Speaker 1: most manipulative electronics retailers online. Instacart was the worst offender
Speaker 1: for grocery retailers, and when it came to beauty retailers,
Speaker 1: they had the most dark patterns on their website. So
Speaker 1: overall beauty retailers were really bad. So how do you
Speaker 1: identify a dark pattern? Let's talk about this. The number
Speaker 1: one thing, according to Merchant Machine, is a trick question.
Speaker 1: This is a question that appears to be worded in
Speaker 1: a way that actually asks something else. So it tricks
Speaker 1: you into giving the answer the company would prefer. For example,
Speaker 1: are you sure you don't want to cancel your subscription?
Speaker 1: And you say, wait what? And often when you're trying
Speaker 1: to cancel something, the answer that's like highlighted in green
Speaker 1: is really like, we'll keep you subscribed. That's kind of
Speaker 1: the best way to describe that. Number Two sneak into basket.
Speaker 1: A store adds something unwanted into your basket without you realizing.
Speaker 1: So sometimes you may have to say no to something
Speaker 1: and that you don't notice that. And so this is
Speaker 1: one of those examples where you get a product in
Speaker 1: your basket and you're like, wait a second, I don't
Speaker 1: remember putting that in, but you just didn't take it
Speaker 1: out a roach motel. This is an online service that
Speaker 1: creates a situation that's easy to get into but hard
Speaker 1: to get out to. This is something that I always
Speaker 1: always look out for. And what this happens with is
Speaker 1: a lot of newspaper subscriptions are like this where it
Speaker 1: is super easy to sign up in one click online,
Speaker 1: but guess what to get out of that you have
Speaker 1: to call in or email. So my advice here is
Speaker 1: whenever you're subscribing to anything online. I always go to
Speaker 1: the fact the FAQ page and I look to see
Speaker 1: what are the cancelation terms? How do I cancel this
Speaker 1: service or product? And if it has anything about calling
Speaker 1: in or emailing or getting on the phone with a representative.
Speaker 1: Uh huh. I want to make sure that cancelation is
Speaker 1: just as easy as signing up. And in fact, I
Speaker 1: just did sign up for something recently that I knew,
Speaker 1: Like I looked at the cancelation and of course subscribing
Speaker 1: as easy. Canceling, I've got to email someone and I
Speaker 1: ended up doing it because you know, I just go
Speaker 1: in there knowing that price comparison prevention. So an online
Speaker 1: store makes it difficult to directly compare similar products by
Speaker 1: concealing single unit prices on bulk buy items. So this
Speaker 1: happens on Amazon. Sometimes it's like, oh, three of these
Speaker 1: products for you know, seventeen dollars, but you're like, well,
Speaker 1: how much is this one? Like now I got to
Speaker 1: do this math because Walmart's selling it for this price,
Speaker 1: and you know, I just want to see how much
Speaker 1: is it for one? Hidden costs This is when you're
Speaker 1: at checkout and your product becomes a little bit more
Speaker 1: expensive because of hidden costs. They add on a processing fee,
Speaker 1: you know, not necessarily a shipping fee, because shipping is free,
Speaker 1: but there's some sort of processing fee. This happens with
Speaker 1: hotels all the time, obviously, with those those resort fees
Speaker 1: that are just wild. This happened to me in real life.
Speaker 1: By the way, dark patterns are not just online. I
Speaker 1: was at a restaurant a couple weeks ago and I
Speaker 1: got my bill and I was going down the bill
Speaker 1: and I couldn't believe I'd never seen this before. They
Speaker 1: had this eighteen percent surcharge that was mixed into the bill,
Speaker 1: and it was written in exactly the same text as
Speaker 1: something I had ordered. So I was going down, I
Speaker 1: was like, all right, I got that burger, I got
Speaker 1: those fries, and then all of this sudden, this eighteen
Speaker 1: percent you know, service tip charged thing was in there.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, that's kind of tricky because it
Speaker 1: was written in the same exact font as an item.
Speaker 1: Typically when they add the service charge on, it's in
Speaker 1: like a bigger thing down at the bottom. And then
Speaker 1: the best part was when I got my bill with
Speaker 1: the tip area it had the other part had vanished,
Speaker 1: so now it just said like total and then tip,
Speaker 1: So if you weren't really paying attention, you'd be tipping
Speaker 1: twice on this bill. And so I thought that was
Speaker 1: kind of interesting. I'd not really seen that before. The
Speaker 1: other thing disguised ads website artwork or links that looks
Speaker 1: like regular content, but it's actually an advertisement that can
Speaker 1: happen on Amazon. You can see and then Force Continuity,
Speaker 1: a service provides you to put your credit card details
Speaker 1: up front and then continues to charge you when you
Speaker 1: no longer want it like a free trial. And we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about some of the ways you can
Speaker 1: get around that later on with my guest Jared Newman.
Speaker 1: He's got some tips on how to do that, so
Speaker 1: he'll be a great guest. He's one of the few
Speaker 1: newsletters I get or actually open it up every single
Speaker 1: time when I read it. So Jared's going to be
Speaker 1: joining us later in the show this hour. Plus I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell you about some websites that can generate AI artwork.
Speaker 1: I know AI has been in the news. We talked
Speaker 1: about AI tax app, We've talked about bing Ai. Yeah,
Speaker 1: AI is a very big thing these days, so we'll
Speaker 1: talk about that coming up. Plus more of your calls.
Speaker 1: I do have a couple of lines open right now,
Speaker 1: So if you have a question about technology, give me
Speaker 1: a call. The phone number is eight eight eight rich
Speaker 1: one oh one. That's triple eight seven four to two,
Speaker 1: four to one zero one. Rich on Tech continues after this,
Speaker 1: Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is rich Demiro,
Speaker 1: tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles, California.
Speaker 1: Online at rich on Tech on social media and connecting
Speaker 1: with you at triple eight rich one oh one. That's
Speaker 1: eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one
Speaker 1: zero one. Dow that question. Dial that phone number if
Speaker 1: you have a question. That's exactly what Christina and bonsall
Speaker 1: am I saying that right.
Speaker 7: Yes you are. That's perfect. Usually people don't pronounce it correctly.
Speaker 1: Oh well, I pronounce everything wrong. So I guess my
Speaker 1: jersey came in handy this time.
Speaker 7: Now you did great. Hey, I'm thrilled you're the tech
Speaker 7: guy and I know you're organized. So this is my question.
Speaker 7: I have two small businesses and I have a gazillion receipts.
Speaker 7: The two things I've done in the past is I
Speaker 7: take the receipts on eight and a half by eleven
Speaker 7: copy them and saved them to forward, you know, just
Speaker 7: save for the I R. This is all IRS.
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 7: Yeah, then I thought this is crazy because I know
Speaker 7: that they will eventually fade out. So now what I'm
Speaker 7: doing is I'm taping them on just a sheet of
Speaker 7: paper and saving them. But that's crazy. So my question
Speaker 7: to you, Rich is is there another way that I
Speaker 7: can go about doing this? Now what I do is
Speaker 7: I write with a pen on there, you know, the date,
Speaker 7: the amount where it want you. That may not even
Speaker 7: be acceptable because the rest of it will fade. Do
Speaker 7: you have anything else you could offer for to do
Speaker 7: it quickly and be done with it and not be
Speaker 7: finding what the vis receipts.
Speaker 1: Well, first off, kudos to you for being so on
Speaker 1: top of things. I mean, that is incredible that you're doing.
Speaker 1: I mean the fact that you're taping all these things
Speaker 1: to paper and you know, keeping them all organized. That's
Speaker 1: probably more than like ninety nine percent of people do.
Speaker 7: Now, I know, I think it's just crazy and paranoid
Speaker 7: to the IR.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hear you. And now I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: a tax expert, so I can't you know, I can't
Speaker 1: give you financial advice. But I can tell you I'm
Speaker 1: not you know some of the things that I think
Speaker 1: would help you in this situation. And you know, I'm
Speaker 1: I know that the IRS takes digital receipts, like they
Speaker 1: will accept a digital scan of a receipt. So that
Speaker 1: so that's the number one thing you need to do
Speaker 1: is you've got to get these digital. So there's a
Speaker 1: couple there's many many ways you can do this. So
Speaker 1: and there's two kind of things that we're looking at here.
Speaker 1: Do you want to just scan these in and just
Speaker 1: have them in some sort of file on your computer
Speaker 1: just for safekeeping, or do you want to organize them
Speaker 1: with some sort of app. Those are two different things,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna explain both of those situations. So if
Speaker 1: you just want to sort of, you know, scan these in, there,
Speaker 1: there's three things I'd recommend you can use just a
Speaker 1: standard iPhone. If you go into the files app on
Speaker 1: the iPhone, you can just create a new folder on
Speaker 1: your phone, or I would do it an iCloud drive
Speaker 1: if I were you, because you want these in the cloud,
Speaker 1: and you can just tap in the upper right hand corner,
Speaker 1: there's a three dots inside a circle and it says
Speaker 1: scan documents. So the iPhone has a built in scanner
Speaker 1: on the phone. You can also use the notes app
Speaker 1: on the iPhone, but I personally would not do that
Speaker 1: in this case because I think you're going to want
Speaker 1: to create a separate file or a separate yeah, separate
Speaker 1: file inside folders for every one of these tax documents,
Speaker 1: these receipts. So I would start with January. I would
Speaker 1: say January twenty twenty three, put all the things that
Speaker 1: you scan for January inside that folder, then move on
Speaker 1: to the next month. Next month it's February. Scan them
Speaker 1: as you go, and that's one way. Now, if you
Speaker 1: have an Android, you can just use Google Drive and
Speaker 1: they have a built in scanner. So if you go
Speaker 1: into open up Google Drive, the app on your Android phone,
Speaker 1: there's a big plus sign in the lower right hand corner.
Speaker 1: You press that plus sign and it says scan and
Speaker 1: you can use your Android phone to scan a document.
Speaker 1: And same thing. I would use the same exact you know,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three January, put all the documents in there,
Speaker 1: and that's just one way to kind of get these
Speaker 1: things digitized and into your you know, into the cloud,
Speaker 1: into your system. That will would be good for safe
Speaker 1: keeping in case you ever need them. Then you've got
Speaker 1: things like a scanner. So if you think that that's
Speaker 1: too much work to use your phone, sometimes the scan
Speaker 1: with your phone comes out good, sometimes it doesn't. I
Speaker 1: would recommend a scanner from Fijitsu, and specifically the scan
Speaker 1: Snap scanners are fantastic, And so I tested one of
Speaker 1: these for a segment we did and I'm trying to
Speaker 1: get the name of it, but I believe it's just
Speaker 1: the scan Snap. It's oh gosh, what is it? Let
Speaker 1: me let me see if I can find it here.
Speaker 1: I'm getting a bunch of pop ups. Oh, here it
Speaker 1: is the scan Snap IX one hundred. This is a
Speaker 1: mobile wireless scanner. It is super super easy to use.
Speaker 1: It can sit on your desk and you connect it
Speaker 1: to the cloud and every time you get a receipt,
Speaker 1: you just pop open the scanner. It immediately comes on.
Speaker 1: It connects to your Wi Fi. You feed the receipt
Speaker 1: in or three or four or five, and it takes
Speaker 1: care of them. It puts them all up into the
Speaker 1: cloud in a nice format that you want. They also
Speaker 1: have some nice software with that scanner that can organize
Speaker 1: your receipts using ocr which will scan the text on
Speaker 1: those receipts and help you search for them later. So
Speaker 1: that's your phone, We have your scanner. Now there is
Speaker 1: something you can do with an app. So there are
Speaker 1: several apps to help you scan these things in as well.
Speaker 1: So yes, there are a million and one scanning apps.
Speaker 1: You can use something like Adobe. They have a scan app,
Speaker 1: Adobe Scan works for iOS and Android. That's a great
Speaker 1: app for scanning. But if you want a receipt specific app,
Speaker 1: there's an app called shoeboxed, which, according to their website,
Speaker 1: is the number one receipt scanner app loved by over
Speaker 1: a million businesses. I have not personally used this, but
Speaker 1: it seems like it has a lot of good reviews
Speaker 1: and a lot of good features that I would think
Speaker 1: you're looking for. And you're gonna probably have to pay
Speaker 1: for this. It looks like it's anywhere from eighteen to
Speaker 1: fifty four dollars a month, but you are running a business.
Speaker 1: I'm not an expert in taxes, but I believe this
Speaker 1: would be a write off. So and if it's helping you,
Speaker 1: that's half the battle right there. So the website is
Speaker 1: shoeboxed dot com. Expensify is a very popular sc scanning
Speaker 1: receipt scanning app. I know a lot of companies will
Speaker 1: partner with Expensify, so I believe I've used this in
Speaker 1: the past. They have a dedicated app just for scanning
Speaker 1: your receipts, so that's another way to go about it,
Speaker 1: and Expensify is pretty well known, so I think that
Speaker 1: that would be something that's really handy for you as well.
Speaker 1: There's another app that I've used in the past called
Speaker 1: Everlance e ve r l a nce. This is a
Speaker 1: really incredible app because not only can it keep track
Speaker 1: of your transactions kind of like the fly fin app
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier, but it also keeps track
Speaker 1: of your mileage, so if that's something else you need
Speaker 1: to keep track of. If you're a freelancer, this will
Speaker 1: help you log your miles as well. That's how it
Speaker 1: sort of started out. But it also does the expenses
Speaker 1: as well. So with this everlance app, anytime you get
Speaker 1: into your car and it notices that you're moving, it
Speaker 1: will create a trip. So when you're driving at the
Speaker 1: end of the week, you can just say, okay, that
Speaker 1: trip was to go to this client's house. This trip
Speaker 1: was to go to this client business and you can
Speaker 1: categorize all those as well. So lots of options for you, Christina.
Speaker 1: Hopefully one of those works you are listening to rich
Speaker 1: on Tech. Coming up next, we're going to talk to
Speaker 1: Jared Newman, who's going to offer some tips about cord cutting, privacy,
Speaker 1: and more. It's all here rich on Tech. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to rich on Tech. My name is rich Demiro, talking technology,
Speaker 1: hanging out with you. Phone line is eighty to eight
Speaker 1: rich one oh one.
Speaker 8: All right.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get right to my next guest
Speaker 1: because he is super helpful. If you think I'm helpful.
Speaker 1: This guy has a great newsletter. His name's Jared Newman.
Speaker 1: He's a freelance writer. He covers a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: different uh you know, consumer devices and technology. He's got
Speaker 1: two newsletters that are really good. One is called Advisorator,
Speaker 1: the other one is Cord Cutter Weekly. He's got a
Speaker 1: lot of subscribers for a good reason because he gives
Speaker 1: good advice. Jared Newman, welcome to the show.
Speaker 8: Hey, rich thanks for having me and thanks for saying
Speaker 8: all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, look, I get a lot of newsletters
Speaker 1: and nine of them go straight to trash yours. I
Speaker 1: read through the entire thing because you always have good
Speaker 1: little tidbits, you know, like good little stuff. So let's
Speaker 1: just get to some of this stuff. This week you
Speaker 1: talked about. Let's see what should we talk about first?
Speaker 1: Let's talk about this MLS. So T mobile customers get
Speaker 1: MLS season Pass on the Apple TV app free. But
Speaker 1: Apple TV is so confusing because you've got the device
Speaker 1: and you've got the actual app. So people are always like,
Speaker 1: how can I watch this? So can you explain that
Speaker 1: a little bit?
Speaker 8: Yeah, you have the device, you have the app, and
Speaker 8: then you have Apple TV Plus, which is a service
Speaker 8: within the app, which is separate.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Really, you could really go down a rabbit hole with it.
Speaker 8: But you know, the Apple TV app is sort of
Speaker 8: apples all purpose way of handling things like iTunes rentals
Speaker 8: and the Apple TV Plus streaming service and now MLS
Speaker 8: season Pass, which they have the exclusive streaming rights too,
Speaker 8: So all that is going to flow through the Apple
Speaker 8: TV app app. However, season Pass mL season Pass is
Speaker 8: its own separate subscription. You do get a discount if
Speaker 8: you're an Apple TV Plus subscriber, but you don't have
Speaker 8: to be, and it's just its own thing. It just
Speaker 8: happens to flow through Apple's TV.
Speaker 1: App, so confusing. So basically, I oh, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Best if you're a T Mobile customer, though, you get
Speaker 1: this for free. So I had a friend that was like,
Speaker 1: I have T Mobile, but I don't have an iPhone.
Speaker 1: I said, no, you do. You have a Roku because like,
Speaker 1: you can get the Apple TV app on these different devices,
Speaker 1: right exactly.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's on pretty much every major streaming platform. It's
Speaker 8: not on Android phones at the moment, oh surprise, pretty
Speaker 8: much everything else, and it's on the web. So yeah,
Speaker 8: there's plenty of ways to access the Apple TV app.
Speaker 8: And if you're a T Mobile customer, you would actually
Speaker 8: redeem this through the T Mobile Tuesday's app, which is
Speaker 8: where they do their various deals and things. And you
Speaker 8: have to actually do this starting on the twenty first
Speaker 8: through March fourteenth, So there's this window where you have
Speaker 8: to redeem the free year of MLS season pass and
Speaker 8: then after that the windows closed. So put it on
Speaker 8: your calendar or what have you so that you remember
Speaker 8: to get that freebie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a ninety nine dollars value. You're going to
Speaker 1: get every regular live season match. You're going to get
Speaker 1: all the playoff matches, all the league's cup, and there's
Speaker 1: no blackouts. This is I mean, this is actually a
Speaker 1: pretty cool thing that Apple has done where they're pretty
Speaker 1: much the first to do a sports league with no
Speaker 1: blockouts when you have a subscription like this. All right,
Speaker 1: let's move on. Paramount Plus is raising prices? Tell me
Speaker 1: about that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So they kind of been telegraphing this for a while.
Speaker 8: It is a little anti climactic because they the executives
Speaker 8: for several months have been like, oh yeah, it's overvalue.
Speaker 8: There's going to be a price, like it's one dollar.
Speaker 8: It was five dollars a month, and now it's six
Speaker 8: dollars or it's going to be six dollars a month.
Speaker 8: This is actually not happening until the third quarter of
Speaker 8: this year, and that's for the ads supported plan and
Speaker 8: the AD free plan. This gets a little interesting. So
Speaker 8: it was ten dollars per month, it is going up
Speaker 8: to twelve dollars per month. However, that twelve dollars per
Speaker 8: month will get you everything from the Showtime catalog, and
Speaker 8: so they had been bundling Paramount Plus and Showtime for
Speaker 8: a while, and that bundle price was fifteen dollars per month.
Speaker 8: Now it's actually going down to twelve dollars per month.
Speaker 8: So if you're already bundling Paramount Plus and Showtime, you
Speaker 8: would save a little money here. I will point out
Speaker 8: that if you know where to look, or if you
Speaker 8: perhaps subscribe to my newsletter, it is fairly easy to
Speaker 8: get Paramount Plus for free on a month by month basis.
Speaker 8: So this all ends up being a moot point if
Speaker 8: you're sort of savvy about it. But yeah, if you're
Speaker 8: a paying customer, there will be a small price sig.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is what I love about your newsletter. I've
Speaker 1: gotten so many Paramount Streaming free promo codes because you
Speaker 1: just put them in there. Like every single time you
Speaker 1: send a newsletter there's a new one and I'm like this,
Speaker 1: certainly this will not work this time, and sure enough
Speaker 1: it does. By the way, I'll put a link to
Speaker 1: both of Jared's newsletters at my website. Rich on tech
Speaker 1: dot TV. Let's see what else did you have this week? Oh?
Speaker 1: Netflix killed the surprise Me button? Did anyone ever use that?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 1: Who wants to just watch something random? Like I always
Speaker 1: make the joke like you really have nothing to do
Speaker 1: in your life. If you're going on Netflix and you're saying,
Speaker 1: just surprise me with something like let me just watch something.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I almost wrote a little bit more about that, but
Speaker 8: I just kind of didn't have the space or time whatever.
Speaker 8: But it was kind of funny because this is a
Speaker 8: much bellyhooed feature. When it came out, I think it
Speaker 8: was last year or something, and you know, they talked
Speaker 8: to the press ahead of time. It was a big thing.
Speaker 8: They were finally rolling out the shuffle button then everybody wanted,
Speaker 8: and then it turns out nobody actually used it, and
Speaker 8: I think I kind of think that maybe they didn't
Speaker 8: go far enough. I don't know, you really have to
Speaker 8: trust the Netflix algorithm. Yeah, just click surprise me. They
Speaker 8: didn't really like, Okay, it would be nice if it
Speaker 8: was like I want to watch a comedy show me,
Speaker 8: you know, let me shuffle through some comedies until I
Speaker 8: find something I want. But it was really just total random.
Speaker 8: You just really had to trust that they knew exactly
Speaker 8: what you wanted to watch at that pretty time and
Speaker 8: that that didn't typically happen.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, it's funny because like TikTok's entire world
Speaker 1: is based on that, but you're talking, you know, a
Speaker 1: minute little like videos. This is like Netflix, where it's
Speaker 1: like you're gonna get started on some random like sitcom
Speaker 1: or hour long show or movie, like without any sort
Speaker 1: of like heads up on what that's got.
Speaker 8: Yeah, because even you know, even when I know what
Speaker 8: the show is going to be, I'm still sort of like,
Speaker 8: do I really want to get in right? Right?
Speaker 1: Like the first couple of minutes, You're like, Okay, you
Speaker 1: got to give me a reason to stick with this
Speaker 1: thing you talked about in your latest Chord Cutter weekly newsletter,
Speaker 1: the the Roku privacy situation. So can you tell me
Speaker 1: about that a little bit? If you have a Roku,
Speaker 1: what should you do?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 8: So, well I should clarify it not just Roku, I
Speaker 8: mean pretty much every streaming device has smart TV too. Also,
Speaker 8: there's various mechanisms by which it will track your viewing
Speaker 8: habits and use it for ad targeting. And there are
Speaker 8: levers that you can pull to kind of minimize that
Speaker 8: data collection and minimize that targeted ad stuff.
Speaker 5: It's sort of this.
Speaker 8: Weird intangible thing, right, Like, if you take the time
Speaker 8: to opt out of all these things, are you really
Speaker 8: going to notice it, maybe not too much. At most,
Speaker 8: it'll be like you won't see as many targeted ads.
Speaker 8: You may not have that feeling of like, oh I
Speaker 8: saw an ad for this thing, and now it's following
Speaker 8: me somewhere else. So you know, is it really worth
Speaker 8: the trouble?
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 8: I mean, you know, how many times have we seen
Speaker 8: the story about smart TVs kind of tracking everything you're
Speaker 8: watching and people get real freaked out about that.
Speaker 3: So there is sort of.
Speaker 8: This intangible gut feeling of like, hey, I don't really
Speaker 8: want to be watched when I'm watching TV. So I
Speaker 8: decided to kind of put together all the ways that
Speaker 8: you can minimize that activity or that behavior.
Speaker 1: This was a big thing with the Visio TVs. Remember
Speaker 1: that whole revelation where they were actually scanning anything that
Speaker 1: came across that screen, even if it was like off
Speaker 1: of a DVD player. Is that Am I just getting
Speaker 1: that right?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 8: Except that every TV does that. So the thing the
Speaker 8: nuance with Visio is that they weren't really disclosing what
Speaker 8: they were. You know, they weren't really being super upfront
Speaker 8: about it. And granted, nobody's that upfront about it, but
Speaker 8: you know, they were selling that data off to marketers
Speaker 8: and things, and it was just kind of inadequate disclosure
Speaker 8: to consumers. But all the smart TV brands will do
Speaker 8: this if you don't opt out, depends on the TV
Speaker 8: brand how you actually do that. Usually there's something during
Speaker 8: setup or a setting you can dig into. But yeah,
Speaker 8: this thing is called automatic content recognition, and it's sort
Speaker 8: of like recognizing the content that's on your TV, regardless
Speaker 8: of what input it's coming from, and using that for
Speaker 8: ad targeting or market research or what have you.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is really important right now because I thought
Speaker 1: this was just one TV. So this is why these
Speaker 1: companies love to ship smart TV that you connect to
Speaker 1: your Wi Fi, because they're basically scanning everything that you're
Speaker 1: watching and then selling that information to advertisers. And I
Speaker 1: just found an article that you know, Amazon, Android and Google, TVs, LGTVS,
Speaker 1: Roku TVs, Samsung TV, Sony, and Visio. So if you
Speaker 1: are if you have a smart TV and you don't
Speaker 1: like the idea of this, I would google the name
Speaker 1: of that smart TV and ACR like you, like Jared just.
Speaker 8: Mentioned, Yeah, and so that's in this article that I
Speaker 8: just put out. And you know also the sort of
Speaker 8: nuance heres. People will go, ah, well that's why I
Speaker 8: don't have a that's why I want a done TV
Speaker 8: and I just want to plug a Roku or fire
Speaker 8: TV into it so that this doesn't happen. But guess what,
Speaker 8: if you're using a Roku or a fire TV, they're
Speaker 8: also trying to do all that kind of stuff. It's
Speaker 8: not scanning your other inputs, but Roku definitely is interested
Speaker 8: in everything that you're watching across all your different apps
Speaker 8: and using that for a targeting. So you know, there's
Speaker 8: different levels of it, and it's just kind of it's
Speaker 8: not just smart TVs that are doing this. It's really
Speaker 8: just anything that's connected to the Internet. As we know,
Speaker 8: everything's powered by targeted ads and you just have to
Speaker 8: be mindful of how that happens.
Speaker 1: All right, Jared, We're gonna have to leave it there,
Speaker 1: but tell folks how to find you, the best way
Speaker 1: to uh find you and uh, you know, subscribe to
Speaker 1: your stuff.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So, as we talked a lot about streaming chord
Speaker 8: cutting stuff, do you want to check out my newsletter?
Speaker 8: It is Coordcutterweekly dot Com comes out every Friday morning.
Speaker 8: And appreciate if you signed up for.
Speaker 1: It, all right. It's a great newsletter, Jared, thanks so much.
Speaker 1: I'll put a link on my website. Rich on tech
Speaker 1: dot TV. Always good to run into you at the
Speaker 1: tech events. And coming up we are going to talk
Speaker 1: about uh cash, Google images and clip art might not
Speaker 1: be necessary anymore when you hear about these websites. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell you about that use AI to create artwork
Speaker 1: on demand that you can use. Plus, we'll wrap up
Speaker 1: the show and have a couple of more calls all
Speaker 1: coming up next. You're listening to rich on Tech eighty
Speaker 1: eight seven four to two, four to one zero one,
Speaker 1: triple a Rich one oh one. Welcome back to rich
Speaker 1: on Tech. Rich Demiro hanging out talking technology. Let's go
Speaker 1: to Barbara in Pasadena. Barbara, you're on with.
Speaker 9: Rich Hi Rich. My question is I have a nineteen
Speaker 9: twenty two year old, nineteen twenty two sicker home. I
Speaker 9: have sensors, steel doors, and a large dog. But I'm
Speaker 9: baffled by the first steps and the kinds of questions
Speaker 9: I should pose this home security system.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Oh good question. Home security. You know, here's
Speaker 1: the thing about this, so, I mean, traditionally you would
Speaker 1: go with something like an ADT or you know these
Speaker 1: companies that sell you on a big contract and the
Speaker 1: whole name of the game is that it's easy because
Speaker 1: someone comes to your house and wires it up and
Speaker 1: does everything you need. But then you're saddled with a
Speaker 1: bill for a while, and so you know, that's kind
Speaker 1: of the name of the game. They'll give you the equipment,
Speaker 1: but you're paying over time. You know, usually it's a
Speaker 1: three year contract something like that. Do you have anything
Speaker 1: that's important to you, like what's most important to you.
Speaker 1: Do you want like a combination of cameras or do
Speaker 1: you just want security like when a door opens, you know,
Speaker 1: alarm that kind of stuff.
Speaker 9: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Now, are you comfortable installing this yourself? I guess that's
Speaker 1: another question you need to figure out. Do you do you?
Speaker 9: Well, I don't know. I mean, it depends on how
Speaker 9: complicated it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, Well I was.
Speaker 9: Recommended a system called simple Safe, but there are so
Speaker 9: many systems out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, well, simply Safe is I think an excellent system.
Speaker 1: I really do, and it's one that I use for
Speaker 1: many years, and I think it's very easy. You can
Speaker 1: set it up yourself and it's very straightforward and so
Speaker 1: simply safe is great. And they've expanded into cameras. It
Speaker 1: started out as just just sort of sensors for your
Speaker 1: door and windows. And the way that these systems work
Speaker 1: is typically you sign up you you know, you pay
Speaker 1: a monthly fee. The monthly fee is considerably less than
Speaker 1: it would be if you were going with something like
Speaker 1: a big company like you know what I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: a big home monitoring, but they still offer home monitoring,
Speaker 1: and then they ship you the stuff and you install
Speaker 1: it yourself. So it has a base station and then
Speaker 1: it's all a car. So if you have you go
Speaker 1: around your house, if you have five doors in your house,
Speaker 1: you'll order five little sensors for your doors, and then
Speaker 1: you go around, you stick them up on your doors,
Speaker 1: and you know, it connects to the scent the main
Speaker 1: base station, and that base station either has Wi Fi
Speaker 1: or cellular or a combination of both. Typically it's both,
Speaker 1: and that's how it will call you know, the police
Speaker 1: or fire in the you know, if there's an emergency.
Speaker 1: And then of course you can continue to build onto
Speaker 1: these systems. So if you say, oh, I'd like a
Speaker 1: panic button, you can order that on the website and
Speaker 1: it connects to your account. So the two that I
Speaker 1: would really consider, if you're willing to do it, you're
Speaker 1: is Simply Safe and Ring. So I think Ring has
Speaker 1: a really good home security system, but it's got a
Speaker 1: lot of different products, So I think it kind of
Speaker 1: comes down to how many things, like how complicated you
Speaker 1: want to make this. I think that simply based on
Speaker 1: the name and based on using the product is pretty simple.
Speaker 1: If you just want sensors on your doors, go ahead
Speaker 1: and do the simply Safe rout It's pretty straightforward. You
Speaker 1: install these sensors, you install an audible alarm in your house,
Speaker 1: you connect it to the monitoring and it's very very straightforward.
Speaker 1: But if you want something that's a little bit more
Speaker 1: full featured and something that has a lot of products
Speaker 1: that work with it, I think that the Ring system
Speaker 1: is going to be a little bit more full featured
Speaker 1: than simply Safe, and it's very simpler, very simpilar. You
Speaker 1: get the base station, you get all the accessories. But
Speaker 1: I think what Ring is really known for is it's
Speaker 1: security cameras. And so if you want one of those
Speaker 1: video doorbells, yes, simply Safe offers that, but let's be
Speaker 1: on us. Ring invented that, so if you want that,
Speaker 1: maybe you go with that. And the pricing is very
Speaker 1: competitive too. I mean, I simply say, if I believe
Speaker 1: is about you know, anywhere from fifteen to thirty dollars
Speaker 1: a month, and Ring, I believe is anywhere from ten
Speaker 1: to thirty dollars a month, depending on the planet you have.
Speaker 1: So it is very affordable. And the good news is
Speaker 1: it's you know, you don't have to pay, like, if
Speaker 1: you want to stop using it, you can. It's not
Speaker 1: like these other systems where they come to your house
Speaker 1: and install them for you. You're going to be on
Speaker 1: the hook for three years of paying for monitoring no
Speaker 1: matter what. And these systems like Ring and simply Safe
Speaker 1: do give you the monitoring as well, so you can
Speaker 1: do that. You know, whether you know you want to
Speaker 1: go with Simply Safe for Ring, I think just depends on,
Speaker 1: like I said, the products that you want. So I
Speaker 1: think that Ring does a really good job with the cameras,
Speaker 1: and so I think that that would be a good
Speaker 1: way to go if you want the door cams and
Speaker 1: all that stuff. But I've installed a couple of these
Speaker 1: systems and they are very straightforward The RING system is
Speaker 1: very easy to install. It's all prettymuch much QR codes
Speaker 1: the Simply Safe system. When I did it, it was very
Speaker 1: straightforward as well. And all of these systems are you know,
Speaker 1: they've been updated over the years, so if you have
Speaker 1: an old Simply Safe, the newer systems are probably just
Speaker 1: better than the old ones. But the main thing to
Speaker 1: know is that you do need a good cellular connection
Speaker 1: where you are, because that's the primary way that these
Speaker 1: things connect in the event of an emergency. But they
Speaker 1: also the newer ones do have Wi Fi as well,
Speaker 1: so that's going to be the kind of default, and
Speaker 1: then it goes to cellular if the Wi Fi is
Speaker 1: not working or if it's out or something like that.
Speaker 1: And also if your power goes out, there's backup batteries
Speaker 1: inside the base station. So I think you're going to
Speaker 1: be okay. You said you have a nineteen I think
Speaker 1: you said a nineteen twenty two house, So I'm assuming
Speaker 1: the layout of this house is pretty simple, and you
Speaker 1: know it's got you know, a couple of windows, a
Speaker 1: couple of doors. Either one of these systems, I think
Speaker 1: you're going to be good with. So I would go
Speaker 1: to their websites and just kind of compare the features
Speaker 1: and see what you want and then you know, of
Speaker 1: course the pricing as well, and Barbara, you'll be you know,
Speaker 1: feeling much more secure. I think that these systems do
Speaker 1: offer a level of security that you can't get without
Speaker 1: having one. All Right, I mentioned I was going to
Speaker 1: talk about some clip art websites that generate ai R instantly.
Speaker 1: I'll go through a couple of these. I tested them
Speaker 1: out for a segment on KTLA. So if you haven't
Speaker 1: tried these, you have to. You know, if you search
Speaker 1: for images, typically go to Google or you go to
Speaker 1: a clip art. These websites will actually generate an image
Speaker 1: on the fly using AI based on some keywords. So
Speaker 1: Dolly two is the one that started the trend. It
Speaker 1: comes from the same folks behind chat GPT. You type
Speaker 1: in a few words, it spits out some images. You
Speaker 1: can use them as you like, even for commercial purposes.
Speaker 1: You get a certain amount of free images every month.
Speaker 1: Then there's a website called dream by Wombo. These are
Speaker 1: very easy. You don't need to sign up or log in.
Speaker 1: You just type in a few words. You can download them.
Speaker 1: They may have a watermark on them, so be aware
Speaker 1: of that. You can always cut it out if you
Speaker 1: don't want. But Dream has apps for iOS and as well. Crayon,
Speaker 1: cr Aiyo n is also very easy. No sign up.
Speaker 1: Generating the images takes a bit longer, but you get
Speaker 1: nine images at once to choose from, and if you
Speaker 1: like them, you can print them on a T shirt.
Speaker 1: And finally, stable Diffusion is known for generating really high
Speaker 1: quality images, perhaps too high quality. Getty Images is actually
Speaker 1: suing them right now because they said they train their
Speaker 1: Ai model with some of their Getty images without being licensed. Now,
Speaker 1: Stable Diffusion is so popular you might get an error
Speaker 1: on your first try. I'll link all these up on
Speaker 1: the website rich on Tech dot TV. That's gonna do
Speaker 1: it for this week of the show. Thanks so much
Speaker 1: for listening. Next week, I'm going to tell you how
Speaker 1: people are making money doing other people's dirty laundry. You
Speaker 1: can find me on social media at rich on Tech.
Speaker 1: My name is rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1: There are so many ways you can spend your time.
Speaker 1: I really do appreciate you spending it right here with me.
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you real soon