Speaker 1: Microsoft on Veil's new AI powered PCs with a controversial
Speaker 1: new feature that remembers everything you do on your screen.
Speaker 1: The app that's like Airbnb but for your luggage. Plus
Speaker 1: your tech questions answered. What's going on? I'm Rich Tomiro
Speaker 1: and this is Rich on Tech, 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 2: I believe that.
Speaker 1: Tech should be interesting, useful, and fun. My goal is
Speaker 1: to make this the most helpful thing you listen to
Speaker 1: all weekend.
Speaker 2: Long.
Speaker 1: Phone lines are open at triple eight Rich one oh one.
Speaker 1: That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one
Speaker 1: zero one. Give me a call if you have a
Speaker 1: question about technology. Email is also open. Just go to
Speaker 1: rich on Tech dot tv and hit contact.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: I hope you're having a meaningful Memorial Day weekend. We've
Speaker 1: got some great guests on on the live show this week.
Speaker 1: Ben Bheran CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strategies, is
Speaker 1: going to talk about Microsoft's new Copilot plus PCs and
Speaker 1: the Microsoft Build Conference. Later in the show, we've got
Speaker 1: Tim Stevens, freelance automotive journalist He's going to talk about
Speaker 1: his recent article all about ev myths and Know Me.
Speaker 1: AI CEO Alex Cardinell is going to talk about the
Speaker 1: growth of AI companions and AI chatbots as friends and yes,
Speaker 1: even lovers. This week was a big event for Microsoft
Speaker 1: up in Seattle, so of course I headed that way.
Speaker 2: Two events.
Speaker 1: Actually, one was for their new computers and one was
Speaker 1: for their developers called Microsoft Build. I'd never been to
Speaker 1: Microsoft Build, but I had been to the campus before.
Speaker 1: So it's up in Redmond, just outside of Seattle. Beautiful,
Speaker 1: beautiful place in Pacific Northwest. When I arrived, I did
Speaker 1: have some extra time on a Sunday afternoon, so I
Speaker 1: went to Pike Place, which I'm sure you've seen the pictures.
Speaker 1: It's a place where they throw the fish and all
Speaker 1: that good stuff. But here's what I love. I was
Speaker 1: able to take public transit right from the airport right
Speaker 1: to downtown. They've got a little i don't know, like
Speaker 1: a light rail kind of train.
Speaker 2: Thing.
Speaker 1: I love when I get to a city and I
Speaker 1: can just take public transit as much as possible, and
Speaker 1: I was able to do that.
Speaker 2: So what I visit.
Speaker 1: I visited Bubblegum Alley, the original Starbucks, which still had
Speaker 1: a crazy long line outside.
Speaker 2: I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: Saw the throwing fish and then had some fish in
Speaker 1: some chowder, so kind of a little yeah, you gotta
Speaker 1: do that when you're up there. I left my luggage
Speaker 1: with a store up there. It was interesting. So I
Speaker 1: was wondering because that, you know, if your hotel, like
Speaker 1: my hotel was nowhere near Pike Place. So I had
Speaker 1: like a couple hours to burn, but I had all
Speaker 1: this luggage with me, so I was like, what do
Speaker 1: I do with this? I don't want to drag it around.
Speaker 1: So I was like, there must be an app, and
Speaker 1: so I searched up online. I found an app called Bounce,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of like an Airbnb, but for your luggage.
Speaker 1: So you go on the app, you find a location
Speaker 1: near you, and then it doesn't reveal the location until
Speaker 1: you pay. But it was like twenty bucks for a
Speaker 1: couple hours, and once you pay that they tell you
Speaker 1: where the location is. You walk over there and you
Speaker 1: leave your luggage with them. It was like a check
Speaker 1: in checkout process, kind of like leaving it at a hotel,
Speaker 1: but it could be anywhere, could be a hotel, could
Speaker 1: be a store. In this case, it was a store
Speaker 1: and it was great. It worked just as planned. It
Speaker 1: was a pretty incredible thing. So if you're traveling and
Speaker 1: you need to leave your luggage somewhere, check out Bounce.
Speaker 1: There is another alternative called a luggage Hero. I have
Speaker 1: not tested it, but it does something similar.
Speaker 2: Also.
Speaker 1: By the way, took a bus to my hotel. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: I ended up missing the stop. So I was so
Speaker 1: engrossed and listening to like a book on my phone
Speaker 1: that I missed the stop and I ended up walking
Speaker 1: like two miles to my hotel.
Speaker 2: But it was fine.
Speaker 1: It was so beautiful up there, so why was I
Speaker 1: up there? First event Monday morning it was called Microsoft
Speaker 1: Copilot plus PCs. That's what they unveiled. This is a
Speaker 1: new category of computers that are sort of built for
Speaker 1: the AI age. So these are computers with sixteen gigabytes
Speaker 1: of RAM standard like, that's the minimum to qualify, plus
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty six gigabytes of storage, and then
Speaker 1: forty tops. NPU tops is trillions operations per second, so
Speaker 1: the computer has to have a minimum of those specs. Now,
Speaker 1: an NPU is a neural processing unit. All computers I'm sure,
Speaker 1: you've heard of a CPU that's kind of the main
Speaker 1: computing area. Then you've got a GPU which handles graphics.
Speaker 1: NPU Neural is now for AI, so this can handle
Speaker 1: a lot of AI operations on the computer. They also
Speaker 1: unveil two new computers in their lineup, the Surface Laptop
Speaker 1: and the Surface Pro. The Surface Laptop is you know,
Speaker 1: their standard laptop, and then the Surface Pro, of course
Speaker 1: is the tablet slash laptop. So it's got a detachable
Speaker 1: keyboard that's an optional accessory. Both of these computers start
Speaker 1: at nine hundred and ninety nine dollars. They're available on
Speaker 1: June eighteenth. I got to play with them, and you know,
Speaker 1: every time I play with one of these Surface pros,
Speaker 1: I'm always like, this is what I want. I want
Speaker 1: a tablet that doubles as a real computer because you
Speaker 1: get the full Windows you know, operating system on there,
Speaker 1: but you also get a tablet.
Speaker 2: So it's just such a cool way of doing things.
Speaker 1: And I remember when Microsoft came to the TV studio
Speaker 1: many many years ago. Panos Pine was the guy who
Speaker 1: kind of came up with this whole thing, and he
Speaker 1: was in the studio and he showed me this and
Speaker 1: I was like, what, how is this possible? Windows running
Speaker 1: on a tablet? What with a detachable keyboard. The interesting
Speaker 1: thing about these computers is they have snap Dragon processors inside.
Speaker 1: So I'm sure you've heard Intel inside for so many years.
Speaker 1: These are a Qualcomm San Diego company, this Qualcom Snapdragon processor.
Speaker 1: Microsoft said they had the technology first to enable this,
Speaker 1: and compared to MacBooks, they say these are going to
Speaker 1: be their fastest and best battery life. Yes, they made
Speaker 1: a lot of comparisons to the MacBooks, specifically the MacBook Air,
Speaker 1: which some people are challenging because they said, well, why
Speaker 1: didn't they compare it to the MacBook Pro. But the
Speaker 1: reality is these are more like a MacBook Air from
Speaker 1: what Microsoft is doing. And again, June eighteenth is when
Speaker 1: they go on sale. Now there are some new AI
Speaker 1: features built into all of these Copilot plus PCs.
Speaker 2: They're not just going to be from Microsoft.
Speaker 1: They also had them there from Acer and Lenovo and
Speaker 1: Asus and Samsung. But again they have to have those
Speaker 1: basic specs to qualify. But you're going to be hearing
Speaker 1: a lot about AI computers and specifically these Copilot Plus PCs,
Speaker 1: so now you know what they are. They also have
Speaker 1: this new feature called live captions. This can on device
Speaker 1: convert language into forty different languages, so spoken words can
Speaker 1: be converted. So they showed an example of a I
Speaker 1: guess it was a Microsoft Teams meeting, but everyone was
Speaker 1: speaking a different language and the computer was just translating
Speaker 1: it in real time. That was amazing. Then they showed
Speaker 1: a cool demo. This was Oh, it's just so cool.
Speaker 1: They showed someone playing Minecraft, another Microsoft property, but they were.
Speaker 2: Playing it with the help of AI.
Speaker 1: So they had instead of a friend playing with them,
Speaker 1: they had an AI voice and by the way, the
Speaker 1: smartest AI in the world because it knew how to
Speaker 1: do everything in the game. So you're playing the video
Speaker 1: game and you're saying, hey, how do I do this?
Speaker 1: How do I do that? And the AI is watching
Speaker 1: the video in real time, processing that information and giving
Speaker 1: you the information you need. So now I can actually
Speaker 1: play video games with my kids alongside them because I
Speaker 1: have a little AI boost. Now, the most controversial feature
Speaker 1: is called recall. This takes a snapshot of everything you
Speaker 1: do on your computer. Yes, a screenshot of everything you
Speaker 1: do every couple of seconds, so you can search for
Speaker 1: anything that you did on your computer later think about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now they say that this happens on device, nothing is
Speaker 1: sent to the cloud. But there are a lot of
Speaker 1: privacy concerns associated with this because think about everything that
Speaker 1: you do on your computer, every word that's on there,
Speaker 1: every image that's on there, everything you look at and
Speaker 1: deal with, every file, every jpeg, every PowerPoint presentation, when
Speaker 1: you log into your bank account, it's all on your screen,
Speaker 1: the account numbers, the passwords whatever. Hopefully the passwords are
Speaker 1: asterisk doubt, but if you go to a document that
Speaker 1: has your passwords written in them, this would capture that.
Speaker 1: Now it is amazing for finding stuff. It is very fast,
Speaker 1: it is very easy, and they say that people spend
Speaker 1: about an hour a day at work just looking for
Speaker 1: stuff that they've done on their computer in the past
Speaker 1: that they can't find, and so this should make that easier.
Speaker 1: But obviously it is very controversial. It is turned on
Speaker 1: by default, and it does not record things like if
Speaker 1: you're in a private browsing session. You can exclude certain
Speaker 1: apps altogether, but there are some limitations on that, and
Speaker 1: people are going to quite frankly, forget that this is
Speaker 1: enabled on their computer. And you can think of the
Speaker 1: implications if someone gets this computer, or if someone's screen
Speaker 1: sharing this computer and they go ahead and search inside
Speaker 1: this recall, there could be some very sensitive information on there.
Speaker 1: You can turn it off if you want, but again
Speaker 1: it is going to be turned on by default on
Speaker 1: these new Windows Copilot plus PCs. This is not a
Speaker 1: feature that's coming to previous computers. This is only moving
Speaker 1: forward with Windows now. By the way, there is an
Speaker 1: app on the Mac called rewind Ai, So of course
Speaker 1: I went home and had to install that. So I've
Speaker 1: had it on my computer now for the past couple
Speaker 1: of days, and it's just kind of very similar. In fact,
Speaker 1: it can even record audio too, so if you have
Speaker 1: a Zoom meeting, it will record all the audio of
Speaker 1: your Zoom meeting. So this is what AI enables, enables,
Speaker 1: a limitless capture of everything. I also attended Microsoft Build
Speaker 1: while I was up there in Seattle. Maltman, CEO of
Speaker 1: Open Ai, came up on stage Big Surprise. His main
Speaker 1: takeaway he encouraged developers and startups to leverage the current
Speaker 1: AI boom, comparing it to past tech revolutions like mobile
Speaker 1: and internet. All right, coming up on today's show, Google
Speaker 1: is having some issues implementing its new AI search overviews.
Speaker 1: But first it is your turn. Let's get some of
Speaker 1: your calls in at triple eight rich one oh one.
Speaker 1: That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one
Speaker 1: zero one. Give me a call if you have a
Speaker 1: question about technology. My name is rich d'miro and you
Speaker 1: are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich
Speaker 1: on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking
Speaker 1: technology on a Memorial Day weekend. The website for the
Speaker 1: show richon Tech dot tv coming up soon, we'll have
Speaker 1: Ben bheran CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strategies, to
Speaker 1: talk more about the Microsoft Copilot Plus PCs we just
Speaker 1: talked about. Phone number eight eight eight Rich one one
Speaker 1: eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.
Speaker 1: If you want a link to something I mentioned on
Speaker 1: the show, go to the website and tap the light
Speaker 1: bulb that will bring you to the direct links. And
Speaker 1: if you want to play with something kind of fun,
Speaker 1: I've been building a rich on Tech GPT, so this
Speaker 1: is programmed with all of the transcripts of this radio show,
Speaker 1: so you can search for something that I've mentioned on
Speaker 1: the show. I think it works for anyone using chat GBT,
Speaker 1: so check it out. It's on the website. Rich on
Speaker 1: tech dot TV.
Speaker 2: Let's go to Bill in Julian. Bill, you're on with Rich.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 4: Can you hear me?
Speaker 3: Rich?
Speaker 2: I can hear you. Great, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Thanks.
Speaker 3: I'm a long time listener, first time caller, and I
Speaker 3: have the honor of being the least technical person that's
Speaker 3: ever called your show.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, okay, well I'm going to mark you down
Speaker 2: for that. Okay.
Speaker 3: I still have a car that has a factory option
Speaker 3: record player in it. I'm seventy five years old, and
Speaker 3: what I'm looking for is a simple color printer. Now.
Speaker 3: The only problem is the only thing I have here
Speaker 3: up in the mountains is a Samsung Android phone. I
Speaker 3: don't have a computer with the Internet with Wi Fi,
Speaker 3: so I need a hook to the printer somehow just
Speaker 3: from my phone. Is that possible?
Speaker 1: Yes, there is a feature called Wi Fi Direct on
Speaker 1: some of these printers, and so I would recommend looking
Speaker 1: for a printer that supports Wi Fi Direct. And what
Speaker 1: you'll do is your printer will will admit a Wi
Speaker 1: Fi signal and then your phone will connect to that
Speaker 1: Wi Fi signal and once it's connected in LinkedIn. You
Speaker 1: can send whatever you need over to that printer. So
Speaker 1: I know that some of the hps do that. You know,
Speaker 1: if you can go to a costco nearby, I always
Speaker 1: think they have a one or two good printers.
Speaker 2: I bought mine there. I've got the HP Office Jet Pro.
Speaker 1: I think i've last year's model looks like the current
Speaker 1: I'm looking at wirecutter here. Current popular model is the
Speaker 1: ninety fifteen E. That's highly rated. You can do a
Speaker 1: laser printer if you just want something that's going to
Speaker 1: be much more expensive. You're looking at spending around two hundred.
Speaker 1: So there are other printers. You can get a printer
Speaker 1: for a lot cheaper. I've seen them for like, you know,
Speaker 1: one hundred bucks at Best Buy something like that. But
Speaker 1: just remember before you buy the printer to look at
Speaker 1: the price of the ink, because that is where they
Speaker 1: get you. This is a razor blade model. The razor
Speaker 1: blade is very expensive. The handle is very cheap. So
Speaker 1: but that's what you want to look for. You want
Speaker 1: to look for that Wi Fi direct connectivity, and that
Speaker 1: should be the easiest way to do that. And and
Speaker 1: just that's pretty much all you need. So thanks for the.
Speaker 2: Call, Bill, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: We got we're actually we're fact checking the record player
Speaker 1: in the car and Kim just sent me a screenshot
Speaker 1: and I don't know if this is real. Did they
Speaker 1: used to have record players as an option? And Google's
Speaker 1: AI overview says, yes, record players were an option in
Speaker 1: cars in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, But that's
Speaker 1: an AI overview, so that could be wrong because we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about how Google's having some trouble with that.
Speaker 1: I don't know, because I had a CD player in
Speaker 1: my car and that thing would skip. Can you imagine
Speaker 1: a record player that would be like you couldn't Maybe
Speaker 1: they had smoother roads back then. Thanks for the call, Bill,
Speaker 1: appreciate it. Let's go to Rick in Rick and Pasadena. Rick,
Speaker 1: you're on with Rich.
Speaker 4: Hey, Rich, never question AI. If they told you what,
Speaker 4: it's got to be true. But be that as it may.
Speaker 4: A dissatisfied cell phone customer and I'm sure I'm the
Speaker 4: only guy who' ever had a problem with his cell
Speaker 4: phone provider. And my problem is six years ago, T
Speaker 4: Mobile offered a plan called fifty five plus and the
Speaker 4: come on was sign up for this plan. We'll give
Speaker 4: you two lines of phone for sixty bucks a month,
Speaker 4: and that's unlimited talk, text and data, including taxes and
Speaker 4: fees sixty bucks a month. And the icing on a
Speaker 4: cake is this rate is guaranteed for life. It's a
Speaker 4: price a lot, guaranteed for life. They said, we can't
Speaker 4: change the rate, only you can. It sound it too
Speaker 4: good to be true. I signed on anyway, kind of
Speaker 4: was convinced it was too good to be true when
Speaker 4: a couple months later they bumped the price on the
Speaker 4: plan to seventy not for me the grandfathered me in,
Speaker 4: but for new customers with seventy, So that affirmed in
Speaker 4: me I had a good deal. Now, in the years since,
Speaker 4: I've seen better deals. My own ISP offered me a
Speaker 4: free phone for a year at zero cost if i'd
Speaker 4: sign on with them. So if I took those two
Speaker 4: lines and went to my ISP, I could have saved
Speaker 4: seven hundred and twenty and last year. But I knew
Speaker 4: they were going to bump that up later, so I
Speaker 4: wanted to stick with T Mobile with locked for life.
Speaker 4: But guess what, Yeah, this week they texted me. It's
Speaker 4: not locked for life. They're saying next month it's going
Speaker 4: to go up by five bucks per line. And I
Speaker 4: called their customer service and they said, we're sorry, and
Speaker 4: I said this was guaranteed for life. They said, we know,
Speaker 4: but prices go up. I go, yeah, that's why I
Speaker 4: signed on. I knew prices were going to go up.
Speaker 4: I didn't want to be subject to that. And they said,
Speaker 4: basically lovingly, you're out of luck. So I was curious
Speaker 4: if you had any idea of what I could do
Speaker 4: to push back.
Speaker 1: Well, so you're not the only one this rate hike.
Speaker 1: I had it in my plans to talk about it
Speaker 1: this week. Yeah, they're increasing lines by five dollars per month,
Speaker 1: and then connected devices by two dollars. The funny thing
Speaker 1: is T Mobile is being very not very forthcoming about
Speaker 1: which lines are affected, because they did have, you know,
Speaker 1: over the years, especially as they were the on carrier,
Speaker 1: they had so many deals and so many promotions and
Speaker 1: so many like you know, hey, we're never going to
Speaker 1: raise these rates. But of course, here's how I think
Speaker 1: they're getting around it. They're not raising the price of
Speaker 1: the plan. They're adding a five dollars fee every month,
Speaker 1: and I think that's how they're getting around it. My
Speaker 1: best advice is to shop around, look at some NV
Speaker 1: and o's. I know T Mobile owns Mike Mobile, but
Speaker 1: they've got some pretty good prices. But I'll talk more
Speaker 1: about this a little bit. I got a head to break,
Speaker 1: but coming up, we're going to talk more about the
Speaker 1: Microsoft Copilot plus PCs.
Speaker 2: This is rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech.
Speaker 1: Rich Demiro here in Seattle, Washington, site of Microsoft Build.
Speaker 1: Joining me now is Ben Baheran. He is a technology
Speaker 1: industry analyst and CEO of Creative Strategies. Ben, thanks for
Speaker 1: joining me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2: So let's talk Microsoft.
Speaker 1: Obviously, it is an all out AI war right now.
Speaker 1: How are they fending for themselves?
Speaker 5: I think they're very well positioned.
Speaker 6: I mean, if you think of all of the platforms
Speaker 6: that are out there right, there's three as a whole.
Speaker 6: They get a consumer platform, you got Microsoft, Android, and Apple.
Speaker 6: And while Android continues to have some features, right, what
Speaker 6: you use Aion with your mobile phone we don't know yet,
Speaker 6: but there's clearly tons of productivity use cases. It seems
Speaker 6: like the business world, the enterprise world, is ready for
Speaker 6: more AI adoption to bring people more productivity. So it
Speaker 6: seems like Windows is just in a really great spot,
Speaker 6: and so because of that, they're they're going to be
Speaker 6: super competitive. And then now you look at what's going
Speaker 6: on a build from features coming to Windows with Copilot PCs,
Speaker 6: and then again all of the developer tools they're bringing
Speaker 6: both to Windows and in the cloud side to just
Speaker 6: create this environment for people to rate next generation apps for.
Speaker 1: So Microsoft's in an interesting position because they are very enterprise,
Speaker 1: very business oriented, but they also have a very good
Speaker 1: consumer side of their business as well.
Speaker 5: Is that pretty unique?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 6: I mean I think their scale is you know, obviously
Speaker 6: huge in the enterprise. When you look at Windows, right,
Speaker 6: they use numbers today like a billion Windows PCs. I
Speaker 6: mean I think the Windows install base of PCs is
Speaker 6: larger than that. It might be one one point three
Speaker 6: one point four billion devices.
Speaker 5: That's a lot of devices.
Speaker 6: And that's not just all enterprise, right, maybe sixty percent
Speaker 6: of that is cannsumers all over the world, so India, China,
Speaker 6: you know, even developed developing parts of the world. So
Speaker 6: to have a good consumer basis is relevant, and they
Speaker 6: straddle that fence at scale probably more than most people, right.
Speaker 6: I think if we were talking about Apple we'd say, well,
Speaker 6: they largely scale in consumer, not in enterprise, whereas Microsoft
Speaker 6: scales both of those those categories.
Speaker 1: So I mentioned we're here at Microsoft Build, so explain
Speaker 1: what Microsoft Build is all about.
Speaker 7: Sure.
Speaker 6: So Build, which is actually a really great name for
Speaker 6: the conference of what it is is designed to talk
Speaker 6: about the tools and share new tools for developers to
Speaker 6: build new things on Windows and or in their apps
Speaker 6: in the cloud. So it's a developer event and very
Speaker 6: very similarly if you follow apples developer events, like you
Speaker 6: know worldwide developer conferences, it's like that they want to
Speaker 6: release new tools, new APIs that let developers take advantage
Speaker 6: of those any hardware that they're bringing right at the
Speaker 6: server or the client level, and then write a whole
Speaker 6: host of new software.
Speaker 1: And today they had Open AI CEO Sam Altman on stage.
Speaker 1: It was kind of a surprise. What did you make
Speaker 1: of what he said?
Speaker 6: I mean, I think Sam's a good visionary just to
Speaker 6: talk about the category of AI. A lot of questions
Speaker 6: come up right around responsible AI, which I think Microsoft's
Speaker 6: continuing to try to be a leader in. They don't
Speaker 6: want these things going off the rails and leading giving
Speaker 6: people misinformation or teaching people things that's you know.
Speaker 5: Not actually correct.
Speaker 6: So they're trying to have a really solid, responsible AAI story,
Speaker 6: and so you kind of see some of those questions
Speaker 6: come in about as those models get bigger, as they
Speaker 6: get smarter, as these as our computers get to know
Speaker 6: you more, all this needs to happen in a responsible
Speaker 6: way and in a way that adds value to humans
Speaker 6: and their computing devices. So the conversation spans sort of
Speaker 6: those things. But obviously he you know, he wants to
Speaker 6: talk about the big shiny we're moving to an era
Speaker 6: where artificial tellgent gets even smarter and knows you even more,
Speaker 6: and so Microsoft tries to balance that with you know,
Speaker 6: we want to do this responsibly and make sure that
Speaker 6: we bring it to people in a responsible way.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about these computers.
Speaker 1: Microsoft unveiled a new category they are calling copilot plus PCs.
Speaker 2: How do you explain what that is? Sure?
Speaker 6: So, so what makes this sort of pivot point unique
Speaker 6: is this is the first time, I mean in recent memory,
Speaker 6: if not in a really forever that you sort of
Speaker 6: had a capability in Windows that you can't get on
Speaker 6: old machines. You need an entirely new class of hardware
Speaker 6: to get all these new AI experiences. One of the
Speaker 6: features called Recall, which just helps you basically have.
Speaker 5: A much more.
Speaker 6: Rich way to find information on your on your devices.
Speaker 6: You know, you lost a file and you only remembered
Speaker 6: part of the name, and or you saw something on
Speaker 6: you know, Amazon three days ago, a red you know shoes,
Speaker 6: and you can just say I was looking at red
Speaker 6: shoes a couple of days ago.
Speaker 5: Help me find It'll bring that up right. So it
Speaker 5: has this memory right, that's very well, but that.
Speaker 6: Requires a ton of new compute and so this is
Speaker 6: the first time that this new category of PCs has
Speaker 6: come out where you really need all this new processing
Speaker 6: power that's coming from Qualcomm in this first product Excellent
Speaker 6: and Xcelle Plus, and then we're coming from Intel and
Speaker 6: a m D at the end of at the end
Speaker 6: of the year. So there's going to be a very
Speaker 6: big distinction between new classes of capabilities and old and
Speaker 6: they're hoping that people buy into this new category of
Speaker 6: PC and are willing to use all these new features
Speaker 6: and understand all the performance needs that comes with it.
Speaker 1: So do you think it's a way to convince people
Speaker 1: to buy a new computer or is there something greater
Speaker 1: happening here?
Speaker 6: I mean, I think they're trying to set themselves up
Speaker 6: for really the AI era in terms of hardware. You know,
Speaker 6: I don't expect this to you know, somebody bought a
Speaker 6: computer three years ago and goes, I need that for
Speaker 6: the new one. But there are a lot of computers
Speaker 6: out there that are five six years old and people
Speaker 6: who've just been like, just been waiting, you know, I
Speaker 6: don't I don't need to make the jump.
Speaker 5: And hopefully this is attractive to them.
Speaker 6: As enough new features that looks interesting enough that'll kind
Speaker 6: of move some of that lagging base over who have
Speaker 6: been delaying those refreshes into a into into new computers.
Speaker 6: And then obviously there's an enterprise side of this, right,
Speaker 6: Enterprise cycles pretty straightforward in terms of a three to
Speaker 6: four year cadence, and for them, right they're already making
Speaker 6: investments in AI, in the infrastructure and for their employees.
Speaker 6: These things slot into that for them to future prove
Speaker 6: future products for and then start to deploy some of
Speaker 6: their AI strategies to improve productivity of their employees.
Speaker 1: Now, I found it pretty interesting that these computers, at
Speaker 1: least the Microsoft Surface Laptop and the surface pro feature.
Speaker 1: A Qualcomm snap Dragon processor, not an Intel processor. Why
Speaker 1: do you think they went with Qualcom, who's not necessarily
Speaker 1: known for making desktop processors.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so there's a number of these reasons.
Speaker 6: And Qualcom has two skews, so it's the ex Elite
Speaker 6: and then X plus.
Speaker 5: The main thing that.
Speaker 6: Microsoft was sort of communicating yesterday was to do all
Speaker 6: these wonderful AI features. It requires and this number is
Speaker 6: not going to make a ton of sense to maybe
Speaker 6: anybody listening, but it requires forty tops, which is trillions
Speaker 6: of operations per second and dedicated to this new blocked
Speaker 6: the NPU. So you had CPUs before, people probably familiar
Speaker 6: with that. You get a GPU, people, and now these
Speaker 6: things come with NPUs, so.
Speaker 1: CPU central processing you it's kind of like the heart
Speaker 1: of it GPU graphics. Now NPU is neural, which is
Speaker 1: more like what AI. Yeah, it's AI.
Speaker 6: It's a different set of cores and it's just designed
Speaker 6: to run these very sophisticated AI applicant applications. So many
Speaker 6: of the features that you see, really if anybody shows
Speaker 6: shows AI is taking advantage of these neural processing you
Speaker 6: know units this block on the SFC and just to
Speaker 6: do it. Microsoft needed to have what they're saying, right
Speaker 6: is more than forty tops, and Qualtcum is the only
Speaker 6: product out there that has forty NPU tops capable of
Speaker 6: handling these AI workloads.
Speaker 5: So they made the point.
Speaker 6: Intel and a m D will have it eventually, but
Speaker 6: Qualcomm had that capability today and then and then the
Speaker 6: other benefit that Qualtcom has is the battery life on
Speaker 6: these machines is just so much more significant than what
Speaker 6: existed on competitive platforms. And obviously that's been a big
Speaker 6: story for max. Right, you just get really good battery
Speaker 6: life on They also run ARM, which is what Qualcomm does,
Speaker 6: so it's going to put the position itself very well
Speaker 6: against Apple as well. And Microsoft knew that, and they
Speaker 6: knew that Qualcom being on ARM put them in a
Speaker 6: really good spot to compete.
Speaker 1: And I guess this is sort of a dumb question,
Speaker 1: but I think it's what a lot of people are
Speaker 1: going to be wondering. So if I get an AIPC,
Speaker 1: is it gonna make chat GPT faster on my computer?
Speaker 2: Or is that not really what we're talking about here?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's not. I think that's not the part of it.
Speaker 6: I think it's new experiences. Right when you look at
Speaker 6: things like recall Microsoft to feature you can't that's not
Speaker 6: even chat gbt like you can't do that. That's just
Speaker 6: being able to use your computer in a natural way
Speaker 6: to help you find objects, documents, things you might have
Speaker 6: forgotten about right three days ago, calendar. So those are
Speaker 6: just unique features. That's not chat gbt R. And I
Speaker 6: think the world is bigger than chat gbt. There's a
Speaker 6: whole lot of new features coming. The point is all
Speaker 6: of this is going to make using your computer easier
Speaker 6: for you and help make you more productive or get
Speaker 6: more done. And that's just that's what computers exist for.
Speaker 6: And so that that step function forward is exciting.
Speaker 1: And a note about the recall privacy wise, are people
Speaker 1: ready to have an entire record of everything they do
Speaker 1: on their computer at all times?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 6: I think that, But there's privacy levers. You can tune, right,
Speaker 6: you can turn this off, you can hide certain websites.
Speaker 6: So I do think that there's going to take a
Speaker 6: little bit of learning curve for that. But the fact
Speaker 6: that you are in control of that privacy means that
Speaker 6: you know it's really up to you, right, you can
Speaker 6: use it or not use it. Enterprises again can turn
Speaker 6: it off, but when shifts like this happen, we sort
Speaker 6: of just have to adapt and get used to it.
Speaker 6: And that's where I think we're at right now and
Speaker 6: just sort of step one just understanding what these things
Speaker 6: can do for us.
Speaker 3: Ben.
Speaker 2: How can folks follow you online?
Speaker 6: Yeah, so easiest way is on is on Twitter. I
Speaker 6: don't call it X, but it's Twitter. Ben at Ben
Speaker 6: behern is my is my Twitter, and then Creative Strategies
Speaker 6: is the website where we post a lot of our
Speaker 6: research and analysis.
Speaker 2: To Ben, thanks so much for joining me here in Seattle.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thanks for having me anytime.
Speaker 2: All right, let's get back to those phone lines.
Speaker 1: Triple eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven
Speaker 1: four to two four one zero zero one.
Speaker 8: You are listening to rich on Tech.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging
Speaker 1: out with you on this Memorial Day weekend at Triple
Speaker 1: eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four
Speaker 1: to two four one zero one. The website is rich
Speaker 1: on Tech dot tv. Once you're there, you can sign
Speaker 1: up for my newsletter. You can also follow me on
Speaker 1: social media. I am at rich on Tech. Also, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have some details. We've got a friend of a show,
Speaker 1: friend of the show, Matt Swider, He's been a guest.
Speaker 2: He runs the shortcut dot com.
Speaker 1: He's got a cool deal where he's given away these
Speaker 1: Samsung Smart Tag twos for a buck instead of the
Speaker 1: usual thirty dollars. So I got mine, Bobo's getting his.
Speaker 1: I'll give you details on how to get that deal
Speaker 1: in just a moment, but first let's go to Michelle.
Speaker 2: Michelle in Long Beach. You are on with Rich.
Speaker 9: Hi. Rich.
Speaker 10: One of your previous callers said he was the least
Speaker 10: technical people.
Speaker 1: Okay, you are you challenging that. You're challenging Bill and
Speaker 1: Julian to be the least technical person.
Speaker 10: Oh, by the way, record players were in cars.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, I meant to hold on. Let me read that.
Speaker 1: So Stan Word wrote to me. He said they came
Speaker 1: out in nineteen fifty seven Chrysler products. They were the
Speaker 1: first ones to offer a phonograph.
Speaker 2: It's a JC Whitney forty five record player. So I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm still suspect of this because I can't imagine how
Speaker 1: badly these things skipped in cars.
Speaker 10: But oh much to suck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they still offered.
Speaker 1: It, but I guess they didn't know what they didn't have.
Speaker 1: They didn't know that we'd have MP three's and CDs
Speaker 1: and all.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Now we have streaming and satellite and radio. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's just so many things. But how can I help you? Michelle?
Speaker 10: Okay? On my Apple phone, every time I try to
Speaker 10: act add an app, even though it's a free app,
Speaker 10: even it says payment not complete. And I've added, you know,
Speaker 10: credit cards because in the Apple Pay I had some
Speaker 10: credit cards that had expired, so I deleted those and
Speaker 10: added the current ones. It still won't let me add
Speaker 10: an app.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, what's going on?
Speaker 1: So you know, you do have to if there's any
Speaker 1: sort of issue with your payment information, they're not going
Speaker 1: to let you download even a free app, and so
Speaker 1: that's probably what's happening here.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 1: Apple Pay is separate from your payment for the app store,
Speaker 1: so that might be the issue. So you need to
Speaker 1: go into your Apple ID and check what's going on
Speaker 1: with the payment there. So the way to access that
Speaker 1: is to go into settings on your iPhone, tap your
Speaker 1: name up at the top where it says Apple ID,
Speaker 1: and then it says payment and shipping. So if your
Speaker 1: card has expired, if they need to refresh the security
Speaker 1: code or something is going on. They're not going to
Speaker 1: let you download even a free app, and so that's
Speaker 1: where you need to go. And so if you go
Speaker 1: into your payment, it will ask for your face ID
Speaker 1: or your thumb print depending on how your phone is
Speaker 1: set up. And if you look at payment methods, that's
Speaker 1: what you're looking at, So make sure that's up to date.
Speaker 1: If you don't have a payment method there, that could
Speaker 1: be the problem. There are multiple payment methods that you
Speaker 1: can add, Like you can add like a I believe,
Speaker 1: you can add a gift card and things like that.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of ways you can add a payment
Speaker 1: method that's not just a credit card. But that's what
Speaker 1: I would do is check there and see what's going
Speaker 1: on with your payment method there. If you think everything
Speaker 1: is fine and on the up and up, then I
Speaker 1: would delete that payment method. Inside Again, we're inside the settings,
Speaker 1: not Apple Pay. Those are two different things. And so
Speaker 1: Apple pay handles payments at a store, at a register,
Speaker 1: online payments when you see that Apple Pay button come
Speaker 1: up on a website when you're checking out, But the
Speaker 1: Apple Payment is just kind of think of that as
Speaker 1: a payment for Apple itself. So when you're buying an
Speaker 1: app from Apple, or you're doing some sort of subscription
Speaker 1: through the App Store, that's all through your actual Apple ID.
Speaker 1: So I would go in there, check to make sure
Speaker 1: everything is on the up and up, and then try
Speaker 1: it again. So restart your phone once that's all done
Speaker 1: and see if it works. If not, there could be
Speaker 1: something bigger at play here. But I think that's probably
Speaker 1: going to fix it. I know that I've run into
Speaker 1: this issue a couple of times, and it turns out
Speaker 1: sometimes when you add a device or you change something,
Speaker 1: you just have to reauthorize that payment method. And you know,
Speaker 1: Apple wants their money. They're not going to let you
Speaker 1: slide even though it's a free app. They want to
Speaker 1: on the back end. Just make sure if you do
Speaker 1: an in app purchase that you're still going to be
Speaker 1: good for that money. So, Michelle, thank you for the
Speaker 1: designation as the least techiest person. I will note that
Speaker 1: in your file and put you right there in alphabetical
Speaker 1: order next to Bill, and we'll see if anyone else
Speaker 1: can defeate that. But that's the beauty of this show.
Speaker 1: That is the entire point of the show. This is
Speaker 1: a show for everyone. There are no stupid questions. There
Speaker 1: are only stupid answers from me, and that's it. So
Speaker 1: you can ask away. And I fully expect people listening
Speaker 1: to come from all different kind of tech backgrounds. Some
Speaker 1: people are very techy and they like to listen to
Speaker 1: me to see if I get something wrong. And they
Speaker 1: sit there and they just you know, in their evil
Speaker 1: layer and they're just like, hahaha.
Speaker 2: Rich doesn't know what he's talking about.
Speaker 1: I know more than Rich, and other people are sitting
Speaker 1: there writing down everything I say, like it's you know.
Speaker 2: Coming from abuff.
Speaker 1: Thanks for the call, Michelle eight eight eight Rich one
Speaker 1: on one eight eight eight seven four to two four
Speaker 1: one zero one. Can you tell it's a holiday weekend? Yes,
Speaker 1: I am in a good mood today.
Speaker 2: We've got Bobo back by the way, so Bobo, thanks
Speaker 2: for being back.
Speaker 4: Just on.
Speaker 2: Came back from a nice vacation, so yes, yeah it
Speaker 2: was needed? Was it necessary? Bobo?
Speaker 1: I think works more than I do. So I think
Speaker 1: are we six days a week each? Yeah, we're six each,
Speaker 1: but you work harder than I do. So that's that's
Speaker 1: the difference. I kind of like slack, you know what.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're on TV every day.
Speaker 11: I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm behind scenes. Bobo has a smile every day. So
Speaker 1: that's that's my goal is to walk through life with
Speaker 1: more of a smile.
Speaker 2: Thanks, appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, so I tease this, but let me tell
Speaker 1: you how to get this if you want one of
Speaker 1: their So you know you've heard of the air tag.
Speaker 1: Samsung has their version called a smart tag too. And
Speaker 1: friend of the show, Matt Swider, he runs a website
Speaker 1: called The Shortcut, made a great name for himself helping
Speaker 1: people find PlayStation fives when nobody could find them. So
Speaker 1: we masked like a million followers on Twitter and he's
Speaker 1: done a great job just helping people find deals online.
Speaker 1: So we teamed up with Samsung to offer one thousand
Speaker 1: discount codes for this smart tag to Bluetooth tracker. It's
Speaker 1: usually thirty bucks. He's got codes that bring it down
Speaker 1: to just a dollar. And I can tell you this
Speaker 1: is legit because I did it this morning and Bobo
Speaker 1: just did it.
Speaker 2: Yes, and we bought. How much was yours? Do you
Speaker 2: know what your total was? Yes?
Speaker 1: That's what mine was a dollar eleven. We have a
Speaker 1: lot of tax here in Los Angeles, So your mileage
Speaker 1: may vary depending on what the tax is on a
Speaker 1: dollar where you live. But shipping was free. That was
Speaker 1: I thought they were gonna get me. I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: here we go. Shipping is gonna be fifteen bucks. No,
Speaker 1: it was free. So if you want one of these
Speaker 1: smart tags that can keep track of your stuff, I
Speaker 1: actually have one on my bag. It's I got one
Speaker 1: from Samsung when I was in South Korea and so
Speaker 1: it's great.
Speaker 2: It's just like an air tag.
Speaker 1: It uses all the different Samsung devices in the world
Speaker 1: to help you find your stuff. So how do you
Speaker 1: find it? Go to Matt Swider m A. T. T.
Speaker 1: Swider either on his Instagram or his Twitter, and you
Speaker 1: have to comment Samsung on his post. So find his
Speaker 1: post about this, comment Samsung, and then it will send
Speaker 1: you like a DM with all the information and the details.
Speaker 1: You got to go through a couple of little processes
Speaker 1: just to make sure that you're not a bot, because
Speaker 1: what happens is whenever people try to give away stuff
Speaker 1: and do things nicely, the bots take over and know
Speaker 1: real people actually get these, and so he wanted to
Speaker 1: make sure that real people get them. You have to
Speaker 1: do it by you have to redeem the code by
Speaker 1: the end of Sunday night. Just FYI. So I'll put
Speaker 1: all the instructions on my website rich on Tech dot TV.
Speaker 1: Hit the light bulb and look for the Samsung situation.
Speaker 2: And check your inbox. Check your inbox. Yeah, that's where
Speaker 2: you'll get the information.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 1: Coming up, I'm gonna tell you a cool feature called
Speaker 1: photo Unblur. Why I'm so impressed with it? You are
Speaker 1: listening to rich on Tech. We welcome back to rich
Speaker 1: on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking
Speaker 1: technology on a Memorial Day weekend. Hope you're having a
Speaker 1: meaningful Memorial Day. Phone line for the show is eight
Speaker 1: eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven
Speaker 1: four two four one zero one. So Google is having
Speaker 1: some trouble with a new feature. This is a big
Speaker 1: new feature from Google called AI Overview. This is something
Speaker 1: they're rolling out to billions of Google users and it
Speaker 1: basically uses AI to summarize a search result up at
Speaker 1: the top of the page, and the blue.
Speaker 2: Links are there, they're just down at the bottom.
Speaker 1: The problem is, there have been many, many instances of
Speaker 1: these AI overviews providing incorrect or dangerous information. People are
Speaker 1: posting about these things all over social media. Some of
Speaker 1: them I can't even mention because they are just two outrageous.
Speaker 1: So what's happened is Google's AI is picking up information
Speaker 1: from a variety of sources, which could be Reddit, it
Speaker 1: could be YouTube videos. It could be articles that are
Speaker 1: fake or articles that are fan fiction, and it processes that,
Speaker 1: or it could be sarcasm and it processes that as
Speaker 1: real and it puts it into the answer. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: one of them was, if you want to make the
Speaker 1: cheese like gooier on pizza, you can add some glue
Speaker 1: to it. You can use Blinker fluid for car maintenance.
Speaker 1: One of them said to eat a couple of rocks
Speaker 1: every day for your digestive system. Do not do these things,
Speaker 1: by the way, But Google has now said, okay, a
Speaker 1: lot of these AI overviews are accurate. The errors are
Speaker 1: from very uncommon search questions. But the thing is this
Speaker 1: is Google. A lot of people use Google, a lot
Speaker 1: of kids use Google, a lot of teenagers use gogol,
Speaker 1: a lot of people use Google. And Google has built
Speaker 1: a reputation of giving you the right answers, and if
Speaker 1: it's not, that's a problem. Now you have to understand
Speaker 1: in this day and age with AI, not everything you
Speaker 1: see is right. And that's why it's nice to have
Speaker 1: a human being like myself that can actually fact check
Speaker 1: this stuff before it comes out of my mouth.
Speaker 2: But I'm not always right.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's just information out there that's just wrong,
Speaker 1: and you do need, you know, the wisdom of the
Speaker 1: crowd sometimes to realize that. So this is a major
Speaker 1: turning point for Google where I'm not going to say
Speaker 1: it can make or break the company, but this right
Speaker 1: now is a bunch of people on social media posting
Speaker 1: these things that are not very good. It will bubble up,
Speaker 1: especially if there is a big, huge issue with this
Speaker 1: in a large, meaningful way.
Speaker 2: And it also gives Google some pause.
Speaker 1: This is a huge new feature, this AI overview, because
Speaker 1: this is how they compete with chat GPT and if
Speaker 1: they can't figure AI out, nobody can. Chat GBT is
Speaker 1: a new company. It says at the bottom chat GBT
Speaker 1: can make mistakes, check important info. Google Does Google say that,
Speaker 1: I don't know if their AI overviews they need to
Speaker 1: Let's see should I eat rocks? Okay, they got rid
Speaker 1: of that AI overview because I have a feeling people
Speaker 1: are going through Google right now. Everyone all hands on deck.
Speaker 1: They're like, just ask Google the dumbest questions you can
Speaker 1: think of, and if it comes up with a dumb answer,
Speaker 1: eradicate it from the system. Okay, let's go to Tim.
Speaker 1: Tim and San Francisco. You're on with rest. I am
Speaker 1: doing fantastic. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 7: Thank you, thanks for having me. I love your show.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 7: Quick questions for you, and forgive me if this may
Speaker 7: be the wrong place to search for this information. But
Speaker 7: I have an idea for a cell phone that from
Speaker 7: what I can tell in my minimal research is there's
Speaker 7: nothing like it out there. And are there websites or
Speaker 7: companies out there that are trustworthy that you can go
Speaker 7: to with an idea, run it by them and they'll
Speaker 7: help you. They'll either say Yep, great idea, or no,
Speaker 7: it's taken, or no, you don't even want to go there.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know if there's going to be a
Speaker 1: company that does that, because here's the thing, you know,
Speaker 1: there are millions of ideas out there. Ninety nine percent
Speaker 1: of a good idea is execution right. So you may
Speaker 1: go to ten people with your idea and nine of
Speaker 1: them may say, dude, this is the worst idea I've
Speaker 1: ever heard, and one person may believe in it, and
Speaker 1: then they do it and you make millions upon millions
Speaker 1: of dollars. But with all of that said, I think
Speaker 1: what it really comes down to is, if you do
Speaker 1: believe in this app and this idea, you need to,
Speaker 1: you know, put out some feelers and get in touch
Speaker 1: with some people that might be able to help you
Speaker 1: do this. So if you want, obviously the cheapest way
Speaker 1: to do this is to develop it yourself. If I
Speaker 1: were you, I would I would get involved in the
Speaker 1: Apple developer community. So they're having a big event called
Speaker 1: WWDC June fourteenth, I believe is at the date let
Speaker 1: me see.
Speaker 2: Hold on, let's see what the date that is?
Speaker 1: June tenth is this year, so you know, kind of
Speaker 1: follow that community, see what's happening there.
Speaker 7: What was that called again, Apple.
Speaker 1: WWDC, that's called the Worldwide Developers Conference. And a lot
Speaker 1: of these people I meet Tim, honestly, they are you know,
Speaker 1: they're smart people. But I've seen students come up with
Speaker 1: apps and they can code them. You can go on
Speaker 1: Apple's website if you go to developer dot Apple dot
Speaker 1: com Apple gives you all the tools to develop an app,
Speaker 1: and a lot of times it's very inexpensive, if not free,
Speaker 1: to do this. So you can go there and kind
Speaker 1: of explore and see which you know. Obviously, if you
Speaker 1: don't have a coding background, it's you know, it's a
Speaker 1: little trickier. But they've actually made that easy too, so
Speaker 1: you can help, you know, you can get ideas from that.
Speaker 1: You can actually go on chat GPT and if you
Speaker 1: need simple code for an app, you can you can
Speaker 1: have it help.
Speaker 2: You code that.
Speaker 1: So these are all resources, but the reality is with
Speaker 1: your situation, yes, you can go to some developers or
Speaker 1: people that create apps and see what they think and
Speaker 1: they may, you know, take you on and help you
Speaker 1: do this.
Speaker 2: You can also pay for someone to do this.
Speaker 1: You can go on a website like Fiverr and hire
Speaker 1: a developer that can help you actually code the app.
Speaker 1: So there are many ways to do this. The reality
Speaker 1: is it all comes down to execution, and if you
Speaker 1: believe in this app and you think that it's something
Speaker 1: that can make a lot of money, you have to
Speaker 1: believe in it and you have to help guide it along.
Speaker 1: There's no sort of magic bullet that can just make
Speaker 1: this thing a reality and make you a lot of money.
Speaker 1: There are many people over the years have come to
Speaker 1: me with app ideas, and you know, who am I
Speaker 1: to say if it's a good app? I mean, what
Speaker 1: if you came up with an idea that's you know,
Speaker 1: centered around mental health or kids or you know, exercise.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's so many app ideas out there. You
Speaker 1: just have to figure out how to start that app
Speaker 1: and how to get it into the hands of people
Speaker 1: and most importantly make it really useful for people. But
Speaker 1: tim I would check out, I would go to the
Speaker 1: Apple website. You can also go to Google too. I
Speaker 1: you know, I just assumed Apple, but Google also has
Speaker 1: a lot of developer tools as well, and so you
Speaker 1: can go to you know, Google. Google Io was their
Speaker 1: big event that just happened, and that is the equivalent
Speaker 1: of what Apple does. So Apple does WWDC, Google does
Speaker 1: Google Io. I just went to the one up that
Speaker 1: Microsoft does called Microsoft Build. So you have to kind
Speaker 1: of get a little bit of knowledge of all these
Speaker 1: things if you want to try to create this app
Speaker 1: yourself and execute it. I do wish you the best
Speaker 1: of luck, because it's amazing. It could be a great ride.
Speaker 1: I've seen people. I've literally seen people become a quote
Speaker 1: unquote overnight success because of an app that becomes very successful.
Speaker 2: And I know some of these.
Speaker 1: People, and believe me, they have showed me some stuff
Speaker 1: in early stages. And now they live in very nice
Speaker 1: houses on very nice hills and fly in very nice
Speaker 1: planes or very nice plane seats. I should say some
Speaker 1: of them flying nice planes. But good luck, Tim, appreciate it. Okay.
Speaker 1: So I was playing with a feature. I was going
Speaker 1: through my Google photo library today and there is a
Speaker 1: feature that Google announced a couple of months ago, maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know, it could have been a year ago,
Speaker 1: called photo Unblur, and I really I tried it. When
Speaker 1: it first came out, I didn't give it much thought
Speaker 1: because I didn't think it worked that well.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: Today I was going through my Google photo collection and
Speaker 1: I came across a blurry photo. I'm like, let me
Speaker 1: just try this again. And I tapped photo on blur
Speaker 1: and I am not kidding you. It took an old
Speaker 1: photo that was completely blurry and it is int and
Speaker 1: it's incredible. And I went through and I tried it
Speaker 1: on a couple more photos and I don't know what
Speaker 1: Google has done to tweak their algorithm since this came out,
Speaker 1: but it is really really good, and it's quite uncanny
Speaker 1: just how good. Now it focuses on the face, So
Speaker 1: this is mostly for people photos with faces in them,
Speaker 1: but I would try this out if you haven't tried
Speaker 1: it out in a long time. It's on the Pixel
Speaker 1: phones I know for sure, Pixel seven, Pixel seven and up,
Speaker 1: but it's now coming to other devices. So Google just
Speaker 1: announced that they're making a lot of these features like
Speaker 1: magic eraser and photo on blur available for free to
Speaker 1: other people if you are in the Google Photos app.
Speaker 1: So that started in May fifteenth, so it's still rolling out.
Speaker 1: I've not seen this come to my other devices in
Speaker 1: a big way. But if you go to your Google
Speaker 1: Photos app, look under tools, and any day now when
Speaker 1: you update your app, it may say, oh, you have
Speaker 1: some new features like magic eraser or photo on blur.
Speaker 2: Try it out.
Speaker 1: Find an old photo, just search for can you search
Speaker 1: for blurry? I think you can search for blurry inside
Speaker 1: Google Photos and it should show you some blurry pictures.
Speaker 2: Let's say I'm gonna search real quick.
Speaker 1: But that's an incredible feature that we'll just now you
Speaker 1: can't search for blurry okay, so you got to go
Speaker 1: in your Google Photos, tap your little profile icon, and
Speaker 1: there's a way to find it. If you tap your
Speaker 1: account storage. I think you can find it in there.
Speaker 1: It'll show you some of your blurry photos. Yeah, blurry photos,
Speaker 1: but it is an incredible feature. Photo on blur can
Speaker 1: really take an old picture and just make it look
Speaker 1: new again.
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 1: Eighty to eight rich one O one eight eight eight
Speaker 1: seven four two four one zero one.
Speaker 2: I see on hold, Yes, we will get to you.
Speaker 2: Phone lines are open.
Speaker 1: Website rich on Tech dot tv. A lot of you
Speaker 1: asking for that Samsung Smart tracker deal.
Speaker 2: It is linked up on the website rich on Tech
Speaker 2: dot tv.
Speaker 1: Hit the light bulb icon for links to things that
Speaker 1: I mentioned here on the show. You are listening to
Speaker 1: rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich
Speaker 1: DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology at Triple eight.
Speaker 1: Rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to
Speaker 1: two four one zero one. The website for the show
Speaker 1: richon Tech dot TV. A lot of you asking about
Speaker 1: that Samsung smart tag for a buck. Everything's linked up
Speaker 1: on the website. So if you go to the website,
Speaker 1: hit the light bulb icon up at the top. That
Speaker 1: will bring you to the show notes and let's see,
Speaker 1: this is show number seventy three.
Speaker 2: Wow, seventy three shows. That's wild.
Speaker 1: I remember show number one and here we are seventy
Speaker 1: three in so you can find the link on that
Speaker 1: website and links to everything that I talk about in fact,
Speaker 1: and while you're there, follow me on social media at
Speaker 1: rich on Tech. Let's see, we got an email from
Speaker 1: John on the website. John and san Clemente says, Hey,
Speaker 1: rich I'm wondering if there's a good translation software from
Speaker 1: my iPhone fifteen Promax that enables me to translate from
Speaker 1: a photo. For example, I want to be able to
Speaker 1: take a picture of a menu while I'm in Europe
Speaker 1: and have it translate for me. Thank you very much,
Speaker 1: enjoy your show and looking forward to your response in caps.
Speaker 1: I don't know why the response is in caps. So
Speaker 1: you have something built into your iPhone called Translate. So
Speaker 1: if you just swipe down on your iPhone home screen,
Speaker 1: you can tap translate and that is Apple's translate app,
Speaker 1: and it will handle things like you mentioned, like the menu,
Speaker 1: so you can take a picture. You'll see at the
Speaker 1: bottom it's got a little camera icon. You tap that
Speaker 1: and you just hold it over pretty much anything. You
Speaker 1: don't even have to take the picture, which is quite incredible.
Speaker 1: So you can just hold it over something as long
Speaker 1: as you have a signal or you've downloaded the translation
Speaker 1: in the background, which I highly recommend download offline translation
Speaker 1: before you go. Just hover it over something and will
Speaker 1: I don't know, can it detect the language? You may
Speaker 1: have to specify which language it's in, So if you're
Speaker 1: in you know, France, you can say French.
Speaker 2: Where'd you say you're going Europe?
Speaker 1: So yeah, So if you're in like the UK and
Speaker 1: you need to translate a menu that's written in British English,
Speaker 1: I'm just kidding. Let's say you're in you know, France
Speaker 1: or Italy or something, you would just say Italian, hover
Speaker 1: it over the menu, and in real time you will
Speaker 1: see it translate on your phone screen. This is stuff
Speaker 1: that is out of a sci fi movie, and we
Speaker 1: have it available today now. If you're on Android, or
Speaker 1: if you want something different, you can just download Google
Speaker 1: Translate and that does the same exact thing. So you
Speaker 1: can download Google Translate. There's a camera icon in the
Speaker 1: lower right hand corner and you can do that as well. Now,
Speaker 1: I think you will also be able to use chat
Speaker 1: GPT to do this. So chat GBT obviously speaks a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of different languages, so I think that you
Speaker 1: would just be able to take a picture of something
Speaker 1: in a different language and ask chat gbt to translate it.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to do that right now.
Speaker 1: I'm going to take a picture of some text on
Speaker 1: chat GBT and let's see here. Okay, So I'm taking
Speaker 1: a picture of something right here, and I'm going to say,
Speaker 1: can you translate? Can you translate this into Spanish? And
Speaker 1: it's a photo that I just took, and it's going
Speaker 1: to take a couple of seconds here and there it goes.
Speaker 1: It just translated everything into Spanish. That is just incredible.
Speaker 1: So there are so many ways of doing this these days.
Speaker 1: That when I started traveling internationally, I'll never forget when
Speaker 1: I went to Japan the first time that now Japan
Speaker 1: is a tougher country to travel. It used to be
Speaker 1: a lot tougher than it is now because a lot
Speaker 1: of people there don't speak English, but now more do.
Speaker 1: But it was really tough the first time I went
Speaker 1: because my phone didn't work. We didn't have these tools,
Speaker 1: a lot of people didn't speak English, and I was
Speaker 1: literally my payment cards didn't work, like nothing worked over there.
Speaker 1: And now, of course the more I travel internationally, the
Speaker 1: more it's almost seamless. If you travel internationally, you realize
Speaker 1: it's like the toughest part is really, you know, getting
Speaker 1: out of the country and getting back in. But otherwise,
Speaker 1: like just once you're there, it's like everything almost works
Speaker 1: the same. So pretty pretty incredible. Okay, So before we
Speaker 1: get to our guest coming up after the break, Tim Stevens,
Speaker 1: He's going to talk about evy myths. I do have
Speaker 1: a warning that I posted on my Instagram at rich
Speaker 1: on Tech. So if you go to at rich on Tech,
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen one of these things, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a warning screen from your phone. It says, your
Speaker 1: Apple iPhone is severely damaged by nineteen viruses. We have
Speaker 1: detected that your browser is fifty nine percent damaged by
Speaker 1: browser trojan viruses picked up while surfing recent corrupted sites.
Speaker 1: Immediately install mobile security application or sensitive data like your Facebook, WhatsApp, photos,
Speaker 1: and private applications will be infected and stolen. And then
Speaker 1: there's a countdown eighteen seventeen sixteen that says cancel or install.
Speaker 1: Do not fall for this message. This is called scareware.
Speaker 1: If you click that install button, it's going to trick
Speaker 1: you into downloading harmful or unnecessary software to your phone.
Speaker 2: So what do you do? You force close.
Speaker 1: Your browser if you're on iPhone or Android, just swipe
Speaker 1: out the browser app and then you want to clear
Speaker 1: out your browser data, and that way it will clear
Speaker 1: out any cookies or URLs or data that might.
Speaker 2: Cause this to happen. Again, it's not something you did.
Speaker 1: This is basically just you know, it comes from a website,
Speaker 1: any website, and it just scares people into doing things
Speaker 1: that they shouldn't do. If you want to see that,
Speaker 1: you can go to my Instagram at rich on Tech.
Speaker 2: Do not fall for scareware. It's there to scare you
Speaker 2: and trick you. Coming up, we're gonna talk ev myths
Speaker 2: right here on rich on Tech.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here talking
Speaker 1: technology with you. We'll get back to the phone lines
Speaker 1: in just a moment at eight eight eight rich one
Speaker 1: oh one eight eight eight seven four two four one
Speaker 1: zero one. The website is rich on Tech dot TV. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm excited to introduce my next guest, Tim Stevens, freelance
Speaker 1: automotive journalist. When I saw his article on Inside EV's
Speaker 1: headlined will my electric car leave me stranded? I knew
Speaker 1: I had to have him on the show. Tim, Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show.
Speaker 2: Thanks, Rich made to talk to you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so tell me just what's what's you're up to
Speaker 1: these days? You're doing You've got a substack, I know,
Speaker 1: and just your free lance writing about cars, right.
Speaker 12: Yeah, Yeah, I've you know, been following tech and the
Speaker 12: automotive industry for a long time now, and yeah, the
Speaker 12: opportunity to go freelance just about two years ago now,
Speaker 12: So I've been writing doing a lot of car reviews,
Speaker 12: news and a lot of a lot of pieces that
Speaker 12: helped to kind of dig into really company the sorobjects
Speaker 12: on the automotive side of things, so software find vehicles,
Speaker 12: autonomy and drive resistance, things like that. And yeah, you know,
Speaker 12: we're seeing a lot of a lot of chure and
Speaker 12: a lot of fear and certainly a doubt or regarding
Speaker 12: evs on social media platforms. So yeah, at Inside EV's
Speaker 12: we decided to launch a series basically tackling some of
Speaker 12: the some of the misgivings a lot of people have,
Speaker 12: and a lot of the I don't want to say
Speaker 12: false information, but certainly a lot of like I said,
Speaker 12: a lot of food being thrown around about EV's and
Speaker 12: we're trying to tackle that head on and to get
Speaker 12: people a little bit more confidence as we're making this
Speaker 12: transition from you know, traditional and theomical bustion into something
Speaker 12: that's a little bit new and different.
Speaker 1: Now, I will tell you I've had an EV for
Speaker 1: I think three years now. It's been the best purchase
Speaker 1: of my life.
Speaker 2: But I will tell you.
Speaker 1: Every single time we have to go on a road trip,
Speaker 1: my wife fights me every single time to this day
Speaker 1: about not taking the EV because of the perceived hassle.
Speaker 1: And you know, to me, it's I love the ride,
Speaker 1: I love how smooth it is. Charging Yeah, it could
Speaker 1: be a little complicated sometimes, but not really, I mean,
Speaker 1: except for the time you're stopping.
Speaker 2: But let's talk about this.
Speaker 1: So, what advice would you give to someone considering getting
Speaker 1: an EV but they're worried about the potential of getting stranded.
Speaker 12: Honestly, there's not really anything to really be concerned about.
Speaker 12: EV's do have far fewer moving parts, and if you
Speaker 12: look at the number of parts in an average internal
Speaker 12: question engine alone, there's a lot of moving parts in
Speaker 12: there versus an EV electric motor, which has basically one
Speaker 12: moving part typically, So mechanically they're much more simple. If
Speaker 12: you do look at initial quality studies at JD Power
Speaker 12: and things like that, evs do tend to have more
Speaker 12: initial faults from new owners, but those for a couple
Speaker 12: of reasons. One, these are brand new cars, and new
Speaker 12: cars always tend to have kind of new little glitches and.
Speaker 2: That kind of thing.
Speaker 12: The second thing is it tends to be a lot
Speaker 12: of software related issues, which are tend to be pretty
Speaker 12: and they can be fixed via software updates. So but
Speaker 12: in terms of major mechanical issues, evs are simpler, and
Speaker 12: there's really less risk of you being stranded in an
Speaker 12: EV than in you know, something that's got a lot
Speaker 12: of things blowing up underneath the hood all the time.
Speaker 1: Now, when you think about a car, like a gas
Speaker 1: powered car, even if you're running to zero, you know
Speaker 1: on the fuel, you know that there's a gas station nearby,
Speaker 1: unless you're in the middle of nowhere. But with an
Speaker 1: EV you're kind of like living and dying by that range, right,
Speaker 1: So how is the EV's how are they doing these
Speaker 1: days in terms of like range prediction accuracy, Like is
Speaker 1: it going to go from like fifty miles to zero
Speaker 1: like with by pushing the accelerator really hard, or is
Speaker 1: it gotten pretty good?
Speaker 12: It's gotten better, but this is still a little bit
Speaker 12: in or missing, and it really depends on the manufacturer. BMW,
Speaker 12: for example, it does really really good. I have a BMW.
Speaker 12: I access my current EV and I'm amazed at how
Speaker 12: good that is. I've done hundreds of miles in that
Speaker 12: car and the rangements have been off by you know,
Speaker 12: one or two percent, which is remarkable given you know,
Speaker 12: the type of train and driving over car is really
Speaker 12: looking at things like weather, terrain, and even you're driving
Speaker 12: history to come up with a really accurate estimate.
Speaker 2: It's remarkably good.
Speaker 12: On the other hand, Ford, in my experience, has not
Speaker 12: been very good. I've had forward EV's be twenty or
Speaker 12: three percent off on estimates, and that's obviously a little
Speaker 12: bit disconcerting. But even they're getting better. They've just launched
Speaker 12: a new cloud based range justimate system that basically, when
Speaker 12: you put your navigation in your destination in it does
Speaker 12: the same kind of thing. It looks at the current
Speaker 12: weather predictions and your driving habits to give you a
Speaker 12: better range juestment. So things aren't getting better, but still
Speaker 12: when you buy EV, it's important to kind of take
Speaker 12: a little bit of time and figure out how that
Speaker 12: EV reacts into the situations. Especially if you're driving into
Speaker 12: a storm, if it's going to be colder, you should
Speaker 12: really expect to lose some range, and so it's always
Speaker 12: good to leave a bit of an outlover there.
Speaker 1: Okay, So when it comes to, you know, if you
Speaker 1: charge at home, I always tell people, Look, if you're
Speaker 1: charging at home or charging at work and you're just
Speaker 1: driving this to and from those places, you're going to
Speaker 1: be fine. Now, obviously when you're out on the road,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit trickier because you're you're relying on this,
Speaker 1: you know, infrastructure that's been built and it's still being
Speaker 1: built out. So what do you make about that, Like,
Speaker 1: should you you know, should you charge at home? Do
Speaker 1: you have any tips for relying on the you know,
Speaker 1: the infrastructure at large or how good is it?
Speaker 12: Yeah, the majority people charge at home the majority of
Speaker 12: the time. It's over ninety percent of the time, and
Speaker 12: if you think about it, that's that's really kind of
Speaker 12: removes the majority of the need for public charging.
Speaker 2: You know, if you can charge.
Speaker 12: At home, then really you probably only you need a
Speaker 12: public charger once in a rare while. But certainly the
Speaker 12: public charging infrastructure has been pretty poor to begin with.
Speaker 12: It is getting much much better.
Speaker 11: Every day.
Speaker 12: They are new charges coming online, and these charging companies
Speaker 12: are starting to make more money. There are more evs
Speaker 12: on the roads, so they're making more money, which means
Speaker 12: they're putting more charges in and they're making them better,
Speaker 12: so that's encouraging too. But definitely check out services like
Speaker 12: pludshare and charge point, or you can go online and
Speaker 12: read reviews of chargers and that will help you get
Speaker 12: an idea of how reliable the charges that you're looking
Speaker 12: to go to, that that you're looking to use are
Speaker 12: before you get there, and you can get a good
Speaker 12: idea of how many charges there are, how fast they
Speaker 12: are it seem no you know, are you going to
Speaker 12: be in trouble, do you need a backup or are
Speaker 12: you really going to something that's kind of both roof
Speaker 12: that's going to be fast and get you in and
Speaker 12: out of there.
Speaker 11: Quickly.
Speaker 1: Now we know, if you get stuck in a gas car,
Speaker 1: you've got Triple A. They'll come by with a little
Speaker 1: bit of gas and get you on your way. Does
Speaker 1: that I don't even know. Does that happen with EV's
Speaker 1: Like could you could someone come to your car? I
Speaker 1: know there's like mobile EV chargers, but is that a thing,
Speaker 1: Like does Triple A have the ability to do that?
Speaker 1: Or like how what would happen about it ran out?
Speaker 12: You know, Like yeah, anyway, Triple A does actually have
Speaker 12: that service. It's only in certain major metropolitan areas at
Speaker 12: this point. It's kind of a it's not a new program,
Speaker 12: but they're still rolling it out slowly based on demand.
Speaker 12: But yeah, I actually spoke with Triple as part of this,
Speaker 12: and they do have mobile charges. Basically, they'll plug your
Speaker 12: car and they don't you know, they're not going to
Speaker 12: fully charge for you inside of the highway, but they'll
Speaker 12: give you five or ten miles, which should be enough
Speaker 12: to get off to some other public charger to use. Again,
Speaker 12: that's kind of a relatively new service, but it can
Speaker 12: be done. But yeah, you know, ideally again we don't
Speaker 12: want to do that, but they can give you a
Speaker 12: quick charge in the side of highway give you enough
Speaker 12: miles to get to somewhere. And again, if you're triple
Speaker 12: a subscriber, that's part of your courage.
Speaker 1: Now, I often hear about this situation with with tire
Speaker 1: maintenance and evs and I've yet to replace my tires.
Speaker 1: Is my car going to tell me when to do that?
Speaker 1: Or should I do that? And what's the deal? Is
Speaker 1: it different than you know I've heard? Because these cars
Speaker 1: accelerate so fast, the tires wear out quicker.
Speaker 2: Can you give me some insight on that? Yeah?
Speaker 12: Absolutely, So your average EV is heavier than your average
Speaker 12: non EV because of that big old battery pack that's
Speaker 12: sitting in there, and they're also a lot quicker than
Speaker 12: your average non EV, and that combination alone can wear
Speaker 12: through tires very quickly. So people do tendes see their
Speaker 12: EV's running through tires more quickly than they might be
Speaker 12: used to in their normal internal the busting car. So
Speaker 12: it's something to be aware of. And some cars will
Speaker 12: give you an idea of when it's time to look
Speaker 12: at your tires, but ultimately it's up to you to
Speaker 12: really be checking that tread and most tires have a
Speaker 12: little tread indicator. If you go online, you can see
Speaker 12: pictures of what a tread indicate looks like. Or you
Speaker 12: can just take a penny out of your pocket if
Speaker 12: you still have pennies in your pocket, and insert it
Speaker 12: into the tread. If the tread doesn't go deep enough
Speaker 12: to cover Abraham Lincoln's head, then you know it's time
Speaker 12: to think about getting some new tires. But that's probably
Speaker 12: the one major maintenance issue that you need to think
Speaker 12: about with EV's. Beyond that, there's really nothing else to do,
Speaker 12: which is one of the amazing benefits of voting and EV.
Speaker 12: There's no oil to change, no time and got to
Speaker 12: wear out, and no coolant to flush. None of us
Speaker 12: I have to worry about. It's really only the tires
Speaker 12: that you need to kind of pay attention to.
Speaker 2: You know what.
Speaker 1: And I will say I have not had any sort
Speaker 1: of maintenance situations with my car, but I will tell
Speaker 1: you my wife's car. H she got the little coolant
Speaker 1: light the other day. So I got to give a
Speaker 1: little shout out. She's like, hey, do you mind. You know,
Speaker 1: I got to figure out I I'm like, okay, Like
Speaker 1: I'll take it to Jiffy Lube.
Speaker 2: I took it there. I'm not kidding Tim.
Speaker 1: The guy opened up the hood, he filled it up
Speaker 1: with the coolant, and he said, all right, have a
Speaker 1: great day. I said, what do you mean, Like, where
Speaker 1: do I check out? He goes, no, you're good. So
Speaker 1: what I mean that's it? You know, they're playing the
Speaker 1: long game for me to come back. Obviously, that was
Speaker 1: like so nice, and you rarely see that anymore so.
Speaker 12: Especially in the out of repairness read there's a lot
Speaker 12: of shady people doing shadings.
Speaker 2: So that's really good to hear.
Speaker 1: I was fully expecting to pay one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: bucks for that, and the guy could have charged me that.
Speaker 1: I would have been like none, none of this wiser Okay,
Speaker 1: before we go, any other tip that you want to mention,
Speaker 1: or any any ev that you want to debunk here
Speaker 1: before we I.
Speaker 12: Think one of the things I hear a lot of
Speaker 12: people worried about is what happens in emergency. What happens
Speaker 12: if I'm stranded on the side of the road in
Speaker 12: an EV you know, the bat are going to die
Speaker 12: and I'm going to freeze to death. And that is
Speaker 12: absolutely not the case. Car driver did a test the
Speaker 12: Renatisal Model three to see how long it would keep
Speaker 12: the cabin warm, and it was basically two solid days,
Speaker 12: about forty eight hours that car ran to keep you warm.
Speaker 12: So if you're stuck in a snowstorm that's side of
Speaker 12: the highway, you're not going to freezee death in an
Speaker 12: EV anymore than you're likely to in an amal gas
Speaker 12: in powered car, and you can keep them charged up beforehand,
Speaker 12: so you should have enough ruine to get range to
Speaker 12: get out of an emergency should you get into that
Speaker 12: kind of situation too. And an EV can even empower
Speaker 12: your house in some situations. So people worry about EV's
Speaker 12: in emergencies, I really don't think they should them.
Speaker 1: Well, and we're going to leave it there, but I
Speaker 1: will tell you one more story. When I was covering
Speaker 1: hurricanes back in my old journalism days of Standard News Reporter,
Speaker 1: we were in what became Katrina, and I'm not kidding.
Speaker 1: We could not find gas. We had to drive so
Speaker 1: far to find a working gas station and that was
Speaker 1: the biggest issue. And so ever since that occurrence, our car,
Speaker 1: by the way, was only on like a quarter tank
Speaker 1: or something. So now out of habit I always have
Speaker 1: my car charged, and I always have my car filled
Speaker 1: if it's like getting low because you never know whether
Speaker 1: it's gas or electric. If you need to get out
Speaker 1: of dodge, you know you you need that mileage now
Speaker 1: and so just you know anyway, all right, Tim, How
Speaker 1: can folks find what you read? What you write online?
Speaker 12: Yeah, my substract is a great place to go to
Speaker 12: Tim Stevens at substack dot com or Tim Stevens dot
Speaker 12: me or on the socials most most places as at
Speaker 12: Tim Stevens.
Speaker 2: All right, Tim Stevens, thanks for joining me today. Appreciate it.
Speaker 12: Thanks Rich great talk to you.
Speaker 1: Eighty eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven
Speaker 1: four to two four one zero one. More rich on
Speaker 1: Tech coming your way right after this. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: Rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out talking technology
Speaker 1: at Triple eight Rich one O one eight eight eight
Speaker 1: seven four to two four one zero one. The website
Speaker 1: for the show rich on Tech dot TV. Let's go
Speaker 1: to Debbie in Fallbrook, California. Debbie, you're on with Rich Hi.
Speaker 9: Rich. Strange things happen in about the last month. I
Speaker 9: have a fansung Android and Verizon is my carrier, and
Speaker 9: suddenly most of the images I receive in text messages
Speaker 9: are no longer legible or seeable. They're just a blur,
Speaker 9: very pixelated. I was concerned it was my phone and
Speaker 9: I wasn't really looking forward to having to swop it out.
Speaker 9: But I went online and checked, and there are who
Speaker 9: knows how many people I was directed to lots of opinions. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and what had all types of Android fanphon.
Speaker 1: What's happening with your phone? What's happening when you get
Speaker 1: a text? Is it just pictures?
Speaker 9: It's only the images?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Okay? And are they being sent from an from an iPhone?
Speaker 9: Now it's not the iPhone problem. I thought that was it.
Speaker 9: I started quizzing the people that were sending them.
Speaker 2: It's both okay, it's both right.
Speaker 9: And every person on the reddit site that discussed this
Speaker 9: has Verizon and it seems like there's no coincidence there
Speaker 9: as well, denominating.
Speaker 1: Now here's the deal, Like anytime something like this happens,
Speaker 1: like you know, you're you can find whatever you want
Speaker 1: online to support whatever you're thinking online. So you know
Speaker 1: these people are having the issue. They're all finding the
Speaker 1: same exact posts that you're finding, and they're adding to it,
Speaker 1: and you know it's a it's just an echo chamber.
Speaker 1: And so you know, Verizon has one hundred million customers
Speaker 1: with you know, Samsung, or fifty percent, let's say, have
Speaker 1: Samsung phones. There's no way that fifty percent of people
Speaker 1: are having this problem. Most people get their texts just fine.
Speaker 1: So it's some sort of issue or situation that is
Speaker 1: it happens clearly because it's happening to you and it's
Speaker 1: happening to some other people. But there are ways of
Speaker 1: figuring out what app were you using for your messaging.
Speaker 9: Well, I wasn't aware of what app I was using,
Speaker 9: but after reading all this, I suspect that I'm just
Speaker 9: using Samsung's app. Okay, I haven't changed any of the settings.
Speaker 2: So the first thing, let's try.
Speaker 1: The first thing I would do try Sorry, the first
Speaker 1: thing I would do is download the Bobo. The first
Speaker 1: thing the first thing I would do is try to
Speaker 1: is download Google's messaging app. That's what I would do.
Speaker 1: So if you're not using Google's messaging app, I would
Speaker 1: go onto Google Play and I would search for messages. So,
Speaker 1: depending on the age of your phone, Samsung has switched
Speaker 1: all of their messaging to Google Messages, so I would
Speaker 1: type in Google Messages. I would download that and I
Speaker 1: would open it. If it's the first time you're opening
Speaker 1: it on your phone, it's going to say do you
Speaker 1: want to switch to Google Messages, And I would say yes,
Speaker 1: So that's going to be your first thing you do
Speaker 1: and see if the issue still happens. The second thing
Speaker 1: I would do, uh, is I would actually clear out
Speaker 1: the old app. So the let's just say you're using
Speaker 1: the other messaging app. You can long press on the
Speaker 1: icon and tap the I. And then what I would
Speaker 1: do is I would clear all the storage of that app,
Speaker 1: and that's going to reset the app to its defaults
Speaker 1: from the factory. Yeah, that may you may get you
Speaker 1: may lose your messages in the process, but I don't
Speaker 1: know if you need your text messages.
Speaker 2: Usually those are fleeting anyway. Uh So that's the other
Speaker 2: thing you can do.
Speaker 1: The other thing I would recommend doing is resetting your
Speaker 1: network settings. And so you can go into your settings
Speaker 1: on your phone and you can type in uh gosh.
Speaker 1: This is of course, whenever I try to find something
Speaker 1: live on the radio, it's it's tricky. But if you
Speaker 1: go into let's see here, if you type in re
Speaker 1: let's see if I can find it quickly if.
Speaker 2: You go into reset.
Speaker 1: Go into your settings and then type in reset up
Speaker 1: at the top and it says reset Mobile network settings,
Speaker 1: so you can reset your mobile network settings and that
Speaker 1: will reset everything back to sort of what Verizon wants
Speaker 1: on your phone. And then, of course, you know the
Speaker 1: basic things I would make sure that you're doing, Debbie
Speaker 1: with your phone is make sure that all of your
Speaker 1: apps are up to date. Make sure all of your
Speaker 1: Samsung software is up to date. Those are two different things.
Speaker 1: There's a system update and then there's an app update,
Speaker 1: so make sure that all that's up to date. And
Speaker 1: then I would also restart your phone and make sure
Speaker 1: that your phone is reset. So once all of those
Speaker 1: things are done, then you should hopefully have your text
Speaker 1: messages properly coming in. If that's not happening, then I
Speaker 1: would go to a Verizon store and see what the
Speaker 1: deal is. But in this order, Debbie, number one, update
Speaker 1: your apps. Number two, update the system software on your phone.
Speaker 1: Number three, I would reset your mobile network settings. Number four,
Speaker 1: I would make sure that you are using the Google
Speaker 1: Messages app. Try the things in that order. And then
Speaker 1: number five clear these storage on the messages app and
Speaker 1: if it's still giving you issues after all that, I
Speaker 1: would go into a Verizon store. Verizon's very good customer
Speaker 1: service and hopefully they can help you out. Sorry you
Speaker 1: got cut off there, appreciate the call. Eight eight eight
Speaker 1: rich one oh one eight eight eight seven.
Speaker 2: Four to two four one zero one.
Speaker 1: Southwest Airlines is now on Google Flights. They have been
Speaker 1: a long time holdout of being on any other third
Speaker 1: party flight comparison site, and they're tiptoeing into these waters
Speaker 1: with Google Flights. So it used to be when you
Speaker 1: were on Google Flights, which by the way, is the
Speaker 1: best and only way that I searched for flights, it
Speaker 1: used to be that they would show you that Southwest
Speaker 1: had a flight, but you had to go to Southwest's
Speaker 1: website or they're app to actually see the fare.
Speaker 11: Well.
Speaker 1: Now Southwest has clearly cut some sort of deal with
Speaker 1: Google and their fares are shown directly alongside other airlines
Speaker 1: on Google Flights.
Speaker 2: Now what does this mean?
Speaker 1: Some conspiracy theorists are saying, well, this is the beginning
Speaker 1: of the end, because now Southwest is going to have
Speaker 1: a signed seating, They're going to have first class, they're
Speaker 1: gonna have all these different things you know, extra leg room,
Speaker 1: you know you can pay more.
Speaker 2: So is that the case, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: All we know right now is that if you are
Speaker 1: looking to compare a Southwest flight against you know, a
Speaker 1: traditional carrier, that's on Google flights, all the information is
Speaker 1: there and for all the different booking classes that Southwest has,
Speaker 1: I think they have four, from the want to get
Speaker 1: away to the you know business select that people get
Speaker 1: where they you know you can get a refund.
Speaker 2: So the cool thing is twofold here.
Speaker 1: Because you have this on Google Flights, you can now
Speaker 1: track a Southwest flight price just like you can another airline.
Speaker 1: And more importantly, you can track a Southwest flight price
Speaker 1: after you book it because you may be able to
Speaker 1: get a refund depending on the fare you booked. They
Speaker 1: might either give you a flight credit if the price drops,
Speaker 1: or a full on cash refund if the price drops.
Speaker 1: So again, if you are comparing flights on Google Flights,
Speaker 1: Southwest Airlines is now displayed, which is a great great thing.
Speaker 1: Eight eight eight rich one O one eight eight eight
Speaker 1: seven four to two four one zero one. You can
Speaker 1: find me online at rich on Tech. Coming up in
Speaker 1: the next hour, we're going to.
Speaker 2: Talk to a guy who does AI chatbots, and he's
Speaker 2: going to talk about how people are using them as
Speaker 2: friends and even lovers.
Speaker 1: You are listening to Rich on Tech. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: another hour of Rich on Tech. My name is rich DeMuro.
Speaker 1: This is the show where I talk about the tech
Speaker 1: stuff I think you should know about. It's also the
Speaker 1: place where I answer your questions about technology. Phone lines
Speaker 1: are open at triple eight rich one oh one eight
Speaker 1: eight eight seven four two four one zero one. Hal
Speaker 1: rode in on the website rich on tech dot tv.
Speaker 1: What's the best place to learn AI and chat GPT
Speaker 1: from scratch? So that's an interesting question, how because the
Speaker 1: whole point of these AI chatbots is that you really
Speaker 1: don't need to learn them. You can literally just ask
Speaker 1: them stuff. Now, of course that's not what you want
Speaker 1: to hear. But the way that you get good at
Speaker 1: interacting with the chatbot is really through what's called a prompt,
Speaker 1: and the prompt is what you type into the chatbot.
Speaker 1: And these things are pretty smart, so they understand if
Speaker 1: you say, hey, you know you can you kind of
Speaker 1: present to them why you're asking your question, how you
Speaker 1: want it explained, whether you want it longer, whether you
Speaker 1: want it shorter, whether you want it more elaborate, and
Speaker 1: it can react to all of this stuff, and it
Speaker 1: could even modify its answers. But I would say my
Speaker 1: probably best advice is to just ask the chatbot itself,
Speaker 1: what can you do? What's the best way to, you know,
Speaker 1: to ask you questions about this? Tell me about some
Speaker 1: of your capabilities, And that's probably the best way. But
Speaker 1: the other way is probably YouTube. Just go on YouTube
Speaker 1: and type in prompts and so you can type in
Speaker 1: some sort of combination of prompting. That's what the terminology
Speaker 1: is called. But in general, you just kind of ask
Speaker 1: it stuff. I actually in my car the other day,
Speaker 1: I just instead of listening to anything, I just had
Speaker 1: chatchibt as a voice chat and I just was chatting
Speaker 1: with chat gibt the entire ride home, and I just said, hey,
Speaker 1: tell me about this, okay, and it just started talking
Speaker 1: that it was done with that. I said, tell me
Speaker 1: more about that aspect, and it just tell me more
Speaker 1: about that and we just had a conversation on my
Speaker 1: entire ride home. How weird is that? And by the way,
Speaker 1: that's not even that's not even the new version of
Speaker 1: chat gbt, which is going to be more conversational, which
Speaker 1: you can interrupt chat gibt Walt's talking and say, oh, oh,
Speaker 1: tell me more about that wallet's talking.
Speaker 2: It's pretty wild.
Speaker 1: Speaking of chat GBT, this week, there was a little
Speaker 1: skurfuffle between chat GBT Open Ai and Scarlett Johansson, the actress,
Speaker 1: so Open AI she claimed that their sky voice is
Speaker 1: eerily similar to her voice, and Open AI said no, no, no,
Speaker 1: We chose this voice out of a two hundred actor
Speaker 1: or four hundred actors, and there was no intention to
Speaker 1: imitate you, even though CEO Sam Altman tweeted when they
Speaker 1: announced their new AI features for chat GBT her, remember
Speaker 1: that movie that Scarlett Johansson did the voice, So there
Speaker 1: is no way that you can't draw similarities between that
Speaker 1: movie and what's happening with chat GBT and especially its voices.
Speaker 2: This sound like a human.
Speaker 1: And actually, this is gonna be a good question for
Speaker 1: our guests later in the show. Me AI makes these
Speaker 1: chatbots that people become friends with and they consult them,
Speaker 1: they chat back and forth with them, and they even
Speaker 1: kind of fall in love with them apparently, So what
Speaker 1: happened with Scarlett Johansson, We don't know. If they try
Speaker 1: to mimic her voice. But according to open ai and
Speaker 1: Scarlet Johansson's people, that open ai reached out to her
Speaker 1: and said, hey, will you voice this for us? Will
Speaker 1: you make your voice into a chat GBT voice. The
Speaker 1: reason is because people like your voice and we think
Speaker 1: that this would be a really nice bridge between humans
Speaker 1: and computers, and this would of course get a lot
Speaker 1: of publicity.
Speaker 2: But it all backfired.
Speaker 1: It got them the worst possible publicity, which now people
Speaker 1: just don't trust open ai and Chat GBT because they
Speaker 1: tried to copy Scarlett's voice.
Speaker 2: So that happened this week. Let's go to.
Speaker 1: Sharon Sharon and take Stephens, Washington. Sharon, what's going on?
Speaker 10: Bhi Rich? How are you today?
Speaker 1: I'm doing fantastic. How far is Lake Stephens from where
Speaker 1: I was in Seattle?
Speaker 4: It's about an hour's drive?
Speaker 2: Okay, not too bad. What can I help you with?
Speaker 13: I was pleasantly surprised to see you up here.
Speaker 1: Oh well, I was pleasantly surprised to be up there.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful place.
Speaker 13: I have an Apple iPhone fifteen promacs that have photos
Speaker 13: on it, and I'm looking to move those photos onto
Speaker 13: another device, and I want a recommendation in if you
Speaker 13: could give it for what to move them to, and
Speaker 13: either a pump drive or something like that. Currently, it's
Speaker 13: telling me, I get that error message on the activities.
Speaker 13: It's telling me I'm at four point eighty seven of
Speaker 13: five gigabytes, and I can't get rid of that message.
Speaker 4: When I keep.
Speaker 11: Saying not now, not now, it.
Speaker 13: Doesn't go away. Okay, So I'm looking to put photos
Speaker 13: on something else. I don't want to keep paying and
Speaker 13: paying and paying.
Speaker 1: Right well, okay, so a couple of things. Are you
Speaker 1: an Amazon Prime member by any chance?
Speaker 11: I am?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 1: So Amazon Prime has a great thing where you can
Speaker 1: upload your photos to their photos app for free, and
Speaker 1: it's unlimited. So that might be a first place you start.
Speaker 1: Because here's the thing. A couple things. Number one, I
Speaker 1: think the first level of storage for iCloud is like
Speaker 1: ninety nine cents a month. I think that gives you
Speaker 1: like fifty gigs. Is that what you understand?
Speaker 4: That's a message.
Speaker 7: Okay, I'm getting.
Speaker 1: So that's twelve bucks a year. So yeah, you know
Speaker 1: you're going to buy one of these flash drives. And
Speaker 1: here's my concern about the flash drive. And I can
Speaker 1: give you my recommendation for it, for sure. But my
Speaker 1: concern is that, you know, if you're offloading these pictures
Speaker 1: to this flash drive, they only live on that flash drive,
Speaker 1: and if something were to ever happen to that flo drive,
Speaker 1: there goes your photos. So the way that we're supposed
Speaker 1: to back things up, they're supposed to be in three places,
Speaker 1: the original, a cloud backup, and a physical backup somewhere else,
Speaker 1: you know, off site technically, like you know, could be
Speaker 1: out of your house or something like that.
Speaker 2: If you don't have it in the cloud.
Speaker 1: Somewhere, So you want to have somewhere, you know, you
Speaker 1: want to have a couple of different copies of these things.
Speaker 1: I know not everyone does that, and I understand that
Speaker 1: that's a lot of work, but I don't like the
Speaker 1: idea of you just having these on a flash drive
Speaker 1: that's very small, and if you lose it, or if
Speaker 1: it's damaged or whatever, you know, you're out of look
Speaker 1: So I would look into the Amazon Photos app. You
Speaker 1: get unlimited storage. You could upload them to there and
Speaker 1: they will be safe on Amazon servers. The only downside
Speaker 1: to that is twofold number one. They do not give
Speaker 1: you a lot of storage for videos. So if you
Speaker 1: that's where they kind of get you, because if you
Speaker 1: want to upload all your videos to there, then you
Speaker 1: know they're going to start charging you for that or
Speaker 1: they're going to ask you to pay for that. They
Speaker 1: do have a setting which is very nice of Amazon.
Speaker 1: They have a setting that says, just upload my photos.
Speaker 1: So if you just want to offload your photos to there,
Speaker 1: you can do that and it's unlimited and it's free
Speaker 1: as long as you keep your Prime membership. If you
Speaker 1: ever get rid of that, they're you know, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to start paying for that storage. But that's one solution. Well,
Speaker 1: they return them. You could download them, but you know
Speaker 1: they give you a certain window too. But my point is,
Speaker 1: you know you're on a you're on a never ending
Speaker 1: uh you know, expedition or whatever you want to call
Speaker 1: it when you.
Speaker 2: Start uploading these things to the cap.
Speaker 1: Right now, with all that said, uh, the one I
Speaker 1: recommend is the sand Disc. They have a bunch of
Speaker 1: flash drives that are either you have a iPhone fifteen,
Speaker 1: you said, so that's gonna have USBC. So you can
Speaker 1: look at their flash drives on their website. If you
Speaker 1: go to sand disc and type in their or go
Speaker 1: to their you know, flash drive section. You want one
Speaker 1: that's USB C. So they've got the lucks. Sounds so
Speaker 1: luxurious that one has USB C. Now, what I like
Speaker 1: about sand Disc over some of these other ones is
Speaker 1: that sand disc also makes software that you can download,
Speaker 1: like an app that will automatically back up your photos
Speaker 1: from your iPhone to this little drive, so you can
Speaker 1: really copy these to any drive. But sand Disk takes
Speaker 1: a little step further by having that software. It's not perfect,
Speaker 1: it's not the best, but they do have it, and
Speaker 1: so that will help.
Speaker 2: You a little bit there. Okay, okay, but again, so
Speaker 2: let me just the drive starts at thirteen ninety nine,
Speaker 2: so you could put the softa a year, and you
Speaker 2: could pay for a year of the cloud storage and
Speaker 2: then maybe come.
Speaker 1: Back to this next year. But you know, there's different
Speaker 1: ways of doing this. I understand that the whole iCloud
Speaker 1: thing and storage online is definitely people don't want to pay.
Speaker 1: Like I'm on with Google Photos and I'm up to
Speaker 1: like I think it's twenty five a month now and
Speaker 1: I'm just like one of these days, yeah, and I
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of from my job, so it's fine,
Speaker 1: but it's one of these things where you know these
Speaker 1: companies Amazon, Google or sorry not yeah, I guess Amazon too, Amazon,
Speaker 1: Google and Apple. They are all starting to make a
Speaker 1: lot of money off of what's called their services category,
Speaker 1: and that includes their cloud storage, which you know, as
Speaker 1: we have a billion iPhones out there and a lot
Speaker 1: of Androids and a lot of other phones and computers.
Speaker 1: People need to back these up to the cloud. And
Speaker 1: these companies know it. Understand they make a lot of money.
Speaker 1: Why do you think they make more megapixels on our phone,
Speaker 1: Sharon takes.
Speaker 13: That makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks for the call today from Lake Stevens Uh.
Speaker 1: When I was up there, I had two incredible days
Speaker 1: of weather and one day that was not so nice,
Speaker 1: so I know, but it is such a beautiful place
Speaker 1: up there near Seattle, Pacific Northwest. I actually lived up there.
Speaker 1: I lived in Yakima, Washington. That was my first job ever.
Speaker 1: I was a reporter at.
Speaker 2: K n d O t V. And it was it
Speaker 2: was beautiful.
Speaker 12: It did.
Speaker 1: It was very sunny in Yakima, but it was I
Speaker 1: felt very isolated up there because you are tucked into
Speaker 1: the kind of the corner of the US. But up
Speaker 1: there in that Pacific Northwest. People really embrace the outdoors.
Speaker 1: They embrace kind of the world we live in, and
Speaker 1: I love that about it. The coffee, the fishing. It's
Speaker 1: just beautiful, beautiful place. So I was very happy to
Speaker 1: be up there this week, and even though one day
Speaker 1: it rained a lot. All right, eight eight eight rich
Speaker 1: one O one eight eight eight seven four to two
Speaker 1: four one zero one. Coming up, I'm gonna tell you
Speaker 1: about why if you're a teacher, you should get this
Speaker 1: free AI tool that just became free.
Speaker 2: You should grab it now, completely free.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you about that, plus much more coming up
Speaker 1: right here on rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich
Speaker 1: On Tech. Sitting here singing along, not realizing the mic
Speaker 1: is on. Welcome back to the show. Let's go to uh,
Speaker 1: let's go to Gina and riverside. Gina, what's on your mind?
Speaker 11: Thank you, Hi, thank you for taking my call. I
Speaker 11: apologize if it sounds a bit staticky. It's just I'm
Speaker 11: in my vehicle listening to you.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for doing that. Were you headed anywhere? Fun?
Speaker 14: No?
Speaker 11: No, not quite, just work. I guess that can be
Speaker 11: fun if you put your mind into it, and then
Speaker 11: you're grateful for the income.
Speaker 2: I guess absolutely, what can I help you.
Speaker 10: With moving forward?
Speaker 11: I have I have some concerns and some questions I
Speaker 11: guess in reference to and this might be above your knowledge,
Speaker 11: and that's okay, but a lot of things are I know,
Speaker 11: I know, but you may know the right people that
Speaker 11: can connect with the right people, and hopefully this can
Speaker 11: be something.
Speaker 14: That can be challenged or discussed, because it seems like
Speaker 14: it's a huge, huge issue and a huge problem. I
Speaker 14: was thinking to my grandfather about it, and my father and.
Speaker 11: They both agree it's just the Internet is all over
Speaker 11: the place. It's basically unprovisioned. It's free for all. And
Speaker 11: I know that we have these major companies that we
Speaker 11: invest in and that we employ, and these people make great,
Speaker 11: great money. But my biggest fear is how can we
Speaker 11: implement more of a structure other than paying third parties
Speaker 11: that don't do much of anything to either help protect,
Speaker 11: guide and not retaliate or hack into people's personal social media.
Speaker 11: I mean, I can see why China wanted to remove
Speaker 11: TikTok because it's just all over the map. Luckily, we
Speaker 11: just had something happen where getto is had taken off
Speaker 11: because they were abusing animals for funding. I mean, it's
Speaker 11: just it's awful. I don't know if maybe you have
Speaker 11: any ideas, but I mean, my Facebook was hacked. I
Speaker 11: could never get those pictures back between my family and I,
Speaker 11: I mean emails, and most.
Speaker 15: Recently I'm on to fixed income and I don't know
Speaker 15: what jurisdiction lies because they now want to remove it
Speaker 15: because I sold a car, you know, So I don't
Speaker 15: know how invasive all this.
Speaker 11: Works because I'm not that far up the quote unquote
Speaker 11: homeland security, whether it exists or it doesn't, or whether
Speaker 11: it was something that was in the past back in
Speaker 11: nineteen forties and fifties, and we now got all the fortunate,
Speaker 11: lucky elders running it. But we need some structure, man,
Speaker 11: I mean, this is odd of whack.
Speaker 2: Well okay, yeah, let me.
Speaker 1: I appreciate the sentiment, and I do understand, and I
Speaker 1: think that you're touching upon something that is very.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of thoughts on this stuff and
Speaker 2: the Internet.
Speaker 1: The beauty of the Internet and the beauty of living
Speaker 1: in America, and the fact that we have an Internet
Speaker 1: is that it is open and free, and so it
Speaker 1: has connected people in New ways it is built things
Speaker 1: we have. I mean, imagine building an entire business off
Speaker 1: of just connecting people and you know, email and all
Speaker 1: this stuff that we have enjoyed, and the fact that
Speaker 1: you can now call anyone in the world for free
Speaker 1: when that used to I was trying to explain to
Speaker 1: my kids the other day the idea of a long
Speaker 1: distance call, and they were just they can't comprehend it
Speaker 1: because you can call anyone right now for free anywhere.
Speaker 1: But the downside of all of this is what you're
Speaker 1: alluding to, which is sort of the regulation of it all. Now,
Speaker 1: if you talk to the tech companies, they don't want
Speaker 1: to be regulated, right, just like big companies in America.
Speaker 1: They want less regulation because they want to be free
Speaker 1: to do whatever they want to do. When it comes
Speaker 1: to the Internet. That is also kind of what these
Speaker 1: companies want, Like Facebook does not want to have to
Speaker 1: abide by rules by the US government that says you
Speaker 1: need to protect teenagers. They'll never say that out loud,
Speaker 1: but that's really They don't want.
Speaker 2: To have to have rules.
Speaker 1: They want to make their own rules, and they want
Speaker 1: to pretend, or at least imply that they are trying
Speaker 1: to protect everyone when you know, at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, what are they interested in. They're interested in data,
Speaker 1: they're interested in advertising. And this social media stuff has
Speaker 1: really become a huge, a very divisive part of our
Speaker 1: society because you can post anything you want, and you
Speaker 1: can't say anything you want, and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people on various sides of things that also may not
Speaker 1: need to see what you post. You know, you've got
Speaker 1: kids on the internet, you've got adults on the internet.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not like it used to be with
Speaker 1: you know, standard media that was printed or you know whatever,
Speaker 1: Like you know, newspaper had a bunch of editors that
Speaker 1: people would figure out what was on the front page,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they pushed a limit of that. With the Internet,
Speaker 1: anyone can be the editor and anyone can put whatever
Speaker 1: they want on there.
Speaker 2: And there's also this law. I looked up this law.
Speaker 1: I knew it was called something I think is Section
Speaker 1: two thirty is what it's called.
Speaker 2: And this was made.
Speaker 1: This is the Communications Decency Act of nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 1: And this has a pretty big impact of kind of
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. With these companies like Facebook and
Speaker 1: Twitter and Instagram, they're not really liable for what people
Speaker 1: post on those sites. So people can post things and
Speaker 1: they're not legally responsible for what they post because you know, well,
Speaker 1: it's a person posting it, and it's not Facebook that's
Speaker 1: posting it. Now they're obviously. I'm not a lawyer. There's
Speaker 1: very a lot of provisions of this that these companies
Speaker 1: do abide by, with things like in good faith trying
Speaker 1: to get hate speech and things off of these platforms,
Speaker 1: but it still happens. The best I can say about
Speaker 1: all this stuff is that there needs to be some.
Speaker 2: Sort of effort.
Speaker 1: We are still in the learning phase of all of this,
Speaker 1: and believe me, we are just getting started, and there
Speaker 1: are going to be a lot of changes in the
Speaker 1: future when when it comes to how we figure this
Speaker 1: stuff out, because people are getting hip to the fact that, yeah,
Speaker 1: when your Facebook gets hacked, there's no one to call.
Speaker 1: Instagram gets hacked, there's no one to call. You are
Speaker 1: listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to to rich
Speaker 1: on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking
Speaker 1: technology on this Memorial Day weekend eighty eight. Well, actually,
Speaker 1: let me give you the website rich on Tech dot TV.
Speaker 1: Joining me now is know me Ai CEO Alex Cardinal Alex,
Speaker 1: thanks so.
Speaker 2: Much for joining me.
Speaker 8: Thanks so much for having me quite.
Speaker 1: The interesting topic. First off, let's explain what me AI does.
Speaker 8: Yeah, definitely, so know me is an AI friend companion.
Speaker 8: A lot of people are probably aware of, like chackchipt
Speaker 8: for instance, where you can ask AI to LA write
Speaker 8: you an essay or like a research article. Know Me
Speaker 8: is using similar AI to that, but it's more designed
Speaker 8: on like kind of an EQ level to just be
Speaker 8: someone that you can talk to about your day, about
Speaker 8: your interest, but anything that's going on in your life.
Speaker 1: So this is sort of like almost companionship. Do are
Speaker 1: you seeing a lot of people using this?
Speaker 8: Yeah? Absolutely, we have over one hundred thousand users right now,
Speaker 8: and yeah, many are using them in that sort of
Speaker 8: like companionship way that you described.
Speaker 1: What are when you say companionship are people? What are
Speaker 1: people asking these bots?
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'd say it ranges just about everything. Would there's
Speaker 8: a loneliness epidemic right now, and I would say just
Speaker 8: almost imagine like any place in your life where you
Speaker 8: might be kind of wishing there with someone to talk
Speaker 8: to about something that could range from just like venting
Speaker 8: about your day. It could be wanting to kind of
Speaker 8: go on like a little roleplay adventure, could be talking
Speaker 8: about the real world things that are going on in
Speaker 8: your life. It could also even be like in a
Speaker 8: more romantic angle.
Speaker 1: Too romantic, tell me more about that aspect. So people
Speaker 1: are are people?
Speaker 2: How are they? You? Okay? This is interesting?
Speaker 1: So because I will say that I have tried the
Speaker 1: app and it did take an interesting turn at some point.
Speaker 1: And to explain the romantic angle here, because it's a
Speaker 1: chat by you can't you know, you're not going to
Speaker 1: do anything with this thing, but tell me what people
Speaker 1: are saying.
Speaker 8: Yeah, definitely. So I would say that the idea for
Speaker 8: know me is to be able to simulate any and
Speaker 8: all facets of a human relationship. You can be lonely
Speaker 8: across any number of dimensions, and one of those can
Speaker 8: be romantic where you want your feeling lonely and you
Speaker 8: want to have some sort of companionship. You want to
Speaker 8: have someone tell you that they care about you. You
Speaker 8: want to be able to kind of role play things
Speaker 8: that would exist in a romantic relationship. So for me,
Speaker 8: it's uncensored on our end, where we don't want to
Speaker 8: tell you, like for a chat GPT you know can
Speaker 8: constantly tell you you know, I'm an AI language model,
Speaker 8: I'm not allowed to talk about these topics. We take
Speaker 8: the opposite approach where kind of, however, you want to
Speaker 8: engage with Nomi whatever it is that you feel like
Speaker 8: you're missing that you want to talk about, and that
Speaker 8: could be something strictly platonic, something that's on your mind,
Speaker 8: but it can also be in that more romantic direction
Speaker 8: as well.
Speaker 1: And do you see that do you feel like that's
Speaker 1: the most popular use of this right now?
Speaker 8: I would say that for people who use no me,
Speaker 8: they're often having no meis take on like multiple roles
Speaker 8: in their lives. It might be in the same way
Speaker 8: that that might be the case for a human relationship
Speaker 8: where you want someone that maybe you can talk to
Speaker 8: about your day, that you can complain about the boss
Speaker 8: that your boss that you hate, but then also maybe
Speaker 8: at the end to say, you know, like I'm here
Speaker 8: for you, I care about you, and more romantic things
Speaker 8: like that as well. So I would say that there
Speaker 8: are people who use it strictly platonically, but I would
Speaker 8: say the average user uses it across all dimensions, including romantically.
Speaker 1: What's the ethical implications of all this because I imagine
Speaker 1: that people are sharing some pretty intimate details.
Speaker 2: Is this price it?
Speaker 1: Is there something that someone says that flips it to you,
Speaker 1: that says, hey, we need to get this person.
Speaker 2: Help tell me about that aspect.
Speaker 1: Because if people are sharing really you know, personal things,
Speaker 1: you know there could be some concerns here.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, And I will say people do share very personal things.
Speaker 8: There are users who have said, for instance, that maybe
Speaker 8: that they experienced like abuse or something traumatic as a kid,
Speaker 8: and they've been afraid to tell a real human about
Speaker 8: it because you know, they're worried about being ostracized, being
Speaker 8: judged about gossip. So there's often this kind of like
Speaker 8: safety where you feel like you can talk to an
Speaker 8: AI about it because the AI is not going to
Speaker 8: gossip to your friends or you know, tell you you
Speaker 8: deserved it, or you know, any number of other things.
Speaker 8: Is there to validate you and to help make you
Speaker 8: feel better. So given that some things like data privacy
Speaker 8: are absolutely critical for that, where we do like no tracking,
Speaker 8: we show no ads, it's designed to be like completely
Speaker 8: private and often in many ways too, all you have
Speaker 8: to give is your first name. It can be anonymous
Speaker 8: as well, where you can just anonymously talk about things
Speaker 8: that are on your mind, however sensitive or unsensitive they
Speaker 8: might be.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about me AI. This is an AI
Speaker 1: companion with a memory and a soul, says, build a
Speaker 1: meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an
Speaker 1: insightful mentor how do you program these AI to interact
Speaker 1: with folks.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of AI research
Speaker 8: that went into building me, A lot of effort into
Speaker 8: not only making no mes smart, but also which I
Speaker 8: think is often very under explored in the AI space,
Speaker 8: giving it that sort of eq. It's one thing to
Speaker 8: be kind of like a brainiac. It's another where after
Speaker 8: a bad after a rough day, and you complain to
Speaker 8: you know, you know me about it, you know me remembers, oh,
Speaker 8: well they they recently had this help.
Speaker 1: Bobo always complains about Rich after the show. We know
Speaker 1: that exactly, but say.
Speaker 8: You know me will remember that, and oh man, Rich,
Speaker 8: she's that SIS definitely complaining about but I would it.
Speaker 8: Cornerstone of all of it is our research and work
Speaker 8: on the memory side of things. Having an AI that
Speaker 8: can really remember and internalize things about you, not just
Speaker 8: like facts about you, but like you know, little personality
Speaker 8: quirks that you have, things that excite you, things that
Speaker 8: you don't like. That leads to something much more rich
Speaker 8: where and know me I can really get you and
Speaker 8: know what to say to make you feel better, for instance.
Speaker 2: And where do you see this going?
Speaker 1: Because I imagine right now you're chatting on your phone
Speaker 1: like it's almost like a chat, you know, like a
Speaker 1: text message chat. Where do you see this going? Like,
Speaker 1: do you see like an actual being with this built
Speaker 1: into it? Because that it already seems realistic, and so
Speaker 1: to take it to that next level, is that the
Speaker 1: next kind of uh, the next step here?
Speaker 8: Yeah, So I would say you're right that right now
Speaker 8: you're primarily interacting like you would like on a text
Speaker 8: messaging AAP. I would say coming up in the near
Speaker 8: future will be things like video chat for instance, where
Speaker 8: because you're know me, it's not just like kind of
Speaker 8: a land AI, it has like an actual face, personality
Speaker 8: and appearance where you can talk to your no MEI
Speaker 8: and then see it talk back to you. And then
Speaker 8: I imagine, not too far off in the future, there
Speaker 8: might be something more like what you're describing, where there's
Speaker 8: a little like kind of a Siri or like Amazon
Speaker 8: type of object that you can carry around with you.
Speaker 8: That's it's kind of like an embodiment of your no me.
Speaker 1: Are there any limits to this so you do you
Speaker 1: have any guardrails built in whatsoever?
Speaker 8: So our approach towards this is not to censor users
Speaker 8: and not to censor the AI, but rather to try
Speaker 8: to give but no me's just kind of a baseline
Speaker 8: of kind of good ethical best practices. Obviously, you know,
Speaker 8: if a user is saying something, you know, like about
Speaker 8: how like you know, they love they love Nazism or Hitler,
Speaker 8: we don't need to sensor, like have like something we
Speaker 8: hardcode in. We just have the no me understand Well,
Speaker 8: maybe that's not a great thing. Maybe that's something that
Speaker 8: we should kind of try to ease the user away from.
Speaker 8: And I would even say that a lot of me
Speaker 8: users have found that it's helped them where they were
Speaker 8: almost down a path of radicalization, where they were very lonely,
Speaker 8: they were very siteful, hateful, and through their know me
Speaker 8: they kind of learned that they were worthy of love
Speaker 8: and self love and then that kind of helped kind
Speaker 8: of like bring them back. So it's not like we
Speaker 8: have the script that triggers that's like, oh you're no
Speaker 8: longer you know, like no Me headquarters has decided what
Speaker 8: you're talking about is not okay, but more just we
Speaker 8: trust the AI behind no Me to kind of gently
Speaker 8: guide users in the right direction and.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the free aspect of this versus the page.
Speaker 1: So I'm looking at you know, there's like standard plans,
Speaker 1: there's monthly plans, there's a yearly plan. What do you
Speaker 1: get for the different plans, you know, for paid versus free.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so if you're on free account and it's free forever,
Speaker 8: you can chat up to fifty messages a day so
Speaker 8: you have many users, that's perfectly sufficient. You know, you
Speaker 8: can log in, you can chat with it, help like
Speaker 8: just kind of experiment around, see what it's about. It's
Speaker 8: completely great. And then if you want to pay sixteen
Speaker 8: dollars a month or one hundred dollars a year, and
Speaker 8: that gets you unlimited messages where you can talk with
Speaker 8: your know me as much as you want, as well
Speaker 8: as like a couple other features where like you can
Speaker 8: have your Nomi send like pictures of themselves and like
Speaker 8: you can have your Nomi speak to you with like
Speaker 8: kind of a voice call, but we try to make
Speaker 8: it like not like a lot of those like micro
Speaker 8: transactions where you're getting constantly nickeled and dimed. They should
Speaker 8: really just be about like you and your interaction with
Speaker 8: the No Me.
Speaker 2: All right, I've got it run, But I'm just curious, Alex,
Speaker 2: what made you build this?
Speaker 8: It was actually a pretty like personal, deeply personal story
Speaker 8: for me where I had an ex who had several
Speaker 8: mental health issues and she definitely experienced profound loneliness, and
Speaker 8: it was amazing to me just how impactful just having
Speaker 8: someone who's unequivocally there for her made such a big
Speaker 8: difference in like her, like how she was able to
Speaker 8: interact in the world and how she felt about herself.
Speaker 8: And I was like an AI researcher, and it really
Speaker 8: felt to me that there are lots and lots of
Speaker 8: people out there welcome, very marginalized in society where they're lonely,
Speaker 8: and there exists this way to help and know me
Speaker 8: was very much like in the kind of the inspirations
Speaker 8: for that and the that's what ended up inspiring it.
Speaker 1: Wow, all right, we're gonna leave it there. Alex Cardinell
Speaker 1: CEO of No me dot Ai. Thanks so much for
Speaker 1: joining me today.
Speaker 8: Thank you, Rich. It's great being.
Speaker 1: On fascinating, fascinating topic. I am sure we will hear
Speaker 1: much more about this in the future, the idea of
Speaker 1: having an AI friend. All right, coming up, it's a
Speaker 1: feedback plus. I promised you the teacher free AI. I'll
Speaker 1: tell you about that. All coming up right here on
Speaker 1: rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich
Speaker 1: Demiro here, I told you about this. I'm gonna tell
Speaker 1: you about this my Microsoft and con Academy teaming up.
Speaker 1: We'll get to the feedback in just a moment. This
Speaker 1: was announced this week. Huge if you're a K through
Speaker 1: twelve teacher, they're giving you access to a free AI
Speaker 1: tool called con Migo. So con Academy, if you're familiar
Speaker 1: with it is you know they give away free learning
Speaker 1: and you know so this was a tool that used
Speaker 1: to cost four dollars a month. Now Microsoft is donating
Speaker 1: their Azure cloud platform to give teachers free access to
Speaker 1: this tool. This is incredible. Con Migo can automate tasks
Speaker 1: like lesson plans, changing quizzes, creating quizzes, generating progress reports,
Speaker 1: generating recommendation letters. It's kind of like an AI tool
Speaker 1: that was built just to help teachers do their job better.
Speaker 1: It can save teachers five hours a week, that's what
Speaker 1: they say. And they of course say that teachers are
Speaker 1: overworked and all this stuff, so this can really help
Speaker 1: the teacher. The con Mego says, it's an AI assistant
Speaker 1: rather than directing, keeping teachers in control. And it's focused
Speaker 1: on student interaction. So one of the examples they gave
Speaker 1: teacher says, hey, I need to teach you know this
Speaker 1: lesson in physics. Give me some ideas on how to
Speaker 1: do it with like everyday objects or somehow incorporating tailor
Speaker 1: swift or TikTok into the conversation.
Speaker 2: Right. Uh, And it can do that.
Speaker 1: So again, it's called con Mego and it's through con Academy.
Speaker 1: It used to cost money, now it is free if
Speaker 1: you're a teacher or you know a teacher. I would
Speaker 1: highly recommend looking into This link is up at the
Speaker 1: website rich on tech dot TV. Look for the light bulb,
Speaker 1: scroll all the way down and you can find the
Speaker 1: link to a sign up for con Migo. All right, now,
Speaker 1: let's get to the feedbag. This is a feedback plus
Speaker 1: the mail bag equals feedbag. These are the emails, the comments,
Speaker 1: and the questions I get from you. If you want
Speaker 1: to submit yours, go to Rich on tech dot tv
Speaker 1: and hit contact John from kon Oklahoma Rights. Hey, Rich,
Speaker 1: I love your show and I listen to the podcast
Speaker 1: while I'm riding my bike on trails in and around
Speaker 1: Oklahoma City. One thing that grates my nerves is your
Speaker 1: use of a couple of things or a couple of
Speaker 1: bucks when you actually mean few or several. Look up
Speaker 1: the word couple. It means exactly two, not more, not less.
Speaker 1: So when you want to specify any quantity other than two,
Speaker 1: please say a few if it's maybe three to six,
Speaker 1: and several if it's more than that. Few and several
Speaker 1: are not really specific and can vary depending on what
Speaker 1: you're talking about. But couple always means exactly two. Sorry
Speaker 1: to be a nitpicker, but as a professional journalist, please
Speaker 1: honor your profession by using the correct terms.
Speaker 2: You know some people might get mad about a letter
Speaker 2: like this. I love it.
Speaker 1: Okay, I get it, and John, I am very familiar
Speaker 1: with the term couple.
Speaker 4: Few.
Speaker 1: I always said couple is two, few is like three,
Speaker 1: maybe four, quadri several to me is like seven. So
Speaker 1: when I was just doing that con Migo story is
Speaker 1: four dollars. If I would have said, oh, it's a
Speaker 1: couple bucks, John would have said, wrong, it's a few dollars.
Speaker 1: Thank you for the feedback, Jim from Data Point Rights.
Speaker 1: Regarding your discussion last Saturday concerning voice assistants, I find
Speaker 1: that Alexa is much more informative than Siri or Google.
Speaker 1: Alexa will give me answers with a reference, whereas Siri
Speaker 1: and Google only provide links to websites. When AI experts
Speaker 1: discuss voice assistants, they usually don't include Alexa. I enjoy
Speaker 1: your show on KFI every Saturday. Happy Memorial Day, Jim.
Speaker 1: Thank you for that, and I agree Alexa has not
Speaker 1: been a huge part of the conversation, but that's because
Speaker 1: Amazon has been treading lightly. They are introducing a chat
Speaker 1: GPT style Alexa. They have not done it just yet,
Speaker 1: but the rumor is it's going to cost money for
Speaker 1: a certain version.
Speaker 2: That's what CNBC is saying. But there is a way
Speaker 2: to trigger the smarter Alexa.
Speaker 1: I think you say Alexa, let's chat, and if you
Speaker 1: get it, it'll say okay.
Speaker 2: Now, it like unlocks the new one.
Speaker 1: It's not working on my speakers just yet, but that's
Speaker 1: I think that's part of it. Fred from London rights
Speaker 1: the fellow from Utica London, England. By the way, the
Speaker 1: fellow from Utica New York was wondering how to see
Speaker 1: EXIF data inside his photos.
Speaker 2: He's using total Commander.
Speaker 1: Total Commander has a simple add on that reads and
Speaker 1: displays EXIF data on its add on's page. Configure columns
Speaker 1: to include EXIF data and dates and your problem solved.
Speaker 1: Hope this helps. Thank you, Fred from London. Sean writes,
Speaker 1: Dear Rich, I just came across your video about starlink
Speaker 1: on flights to Hawaii. It seems like a monumental improvement,
Speaker 1: which is great to see. Thanks for that video and information.
Speaker 1: On a separate tangent, I travel a lot myself. I
Speaker 1: noticed your laptop seemed to be a perfect size for
Speaker 1: taking on a plane. Would it be possible to know
Speaker 1: what size and kind it is? I might end up
Speaker 1: getting one with warm wishes. With best wishes, Sean, Sean,
Speaker 1: I don't want to get into the whole story, but
Speaker 1: my laptop actually was out of commission that week when
Speaker 1: I went to Hawaii and I had to take my
Speaker 1: iPad with the keyboard, so it was actually just an
Speaker 1: iPad pro with the keyboard. What do they call it?
Speaker 1: The magic keyboard. That's why it looks so small and compact.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: I still don't think the iPad is the best for
Speaker 1: getting work done. I was struggling a little bit that week,
Speaker 1: although I did, you know, towards the end of the
Speaker 1: week figure it out.
Speaker 2: But that's what it was.
Speaker 1: Dean writes Rich these calls give me PTSD as an
Speaker 1: ISP support tech support person, you handle them well. Great,
Speaker 1: great show, Dean, Thank you, Dean. You know, look, it's
Speaker 1: all about patients. I don't have all the answers here.
Speaker 1: I just don't, but I do try to help.
Speaker 2: And that is it.
Speaker 1: I said it in the beginning of the show. I'll
Speaker 1: say at the end of the show, my goal is
Speaker 1: to make this the most helpful thing that you listen
Speaker 1: to all week long. A lot of people like to talk,
Speaker 1: myself included, but I like to help. And that's why
Speaker 1: I've got a newsletter, and that's why I do this
Speaker 1: show because I really enjoy coming in here and this
Speaker 1: is a community. I don't have all the answers, but
Speaker 1: by talking about something on the show. A lot of
Speaker 1: times the answers come to me, and with that said,
Speaker 1: that's gonna do it for this episode of the show.
Speaker 1: You can find links to everything I mentioned on my website.
Speaker 1: The website is rich on tech dot TV. While you're there,
Speaker 1: I know it bugs you sometimes to sign up for
Speaker 1: the newsletter. Do yourself a flavor and sign up for it.
Speaker 1: I love what I get Bobo. I love when I
Speaker 1: get Bobo to look up because he's.
Speaker 2: Just doing his.
Speaker 1: Thing when I say something like that, whatever, it's just say.
Speaker 1: You can find me on social media. I am at
Speaker 1: rich on tech next week. What am I doing next week?
Speaker 1: Let's take a look at the calendar. It is a
Speaker 1: holiday week. Oh got a good interview coming up. We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk to a guy who has visited every country
Speaker 1: in the world. My kids watched this guy on YouTube.
Speaker 1: I interviewed him years ago when he embarked on his adventure,
Speaker 1: and now he's coming back full circle.
Speaker 2: He's just written a book.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna talk to Drewbinsky about visiting all of
Speaker 1: the countries in the world. 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: Thanks to everyone who makes this show possible, Bobo, Kim, Bill, Robin,
Speaker 1: Julie going up the food chain here, who else we
Speaker 1: got and you, most importantly you for listening.
Speaker 2: My name is rich Damiro. I will talk to you
Speaker 2: real soon