Interesting moves - Apple, Google, AI and Amazon

00:08 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from February the 4th, 2025. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us - listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast - to catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words, talking tech. And it can come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast. 

With me, Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damien McMorrow. Hey, Damo.

00:50 S2

G'day, Stephen.

00:52 S1

A lot to talk about today. Let's start with some Apple news. Another release of software across all its devices last week.

01:00 S2

Yes that's right we had iOS 18.3 and we also had updates to the Apple Watch OS, tvOS, and the Mac. The latest version of Sequoia, and also the software update to the HomePod speakers. There's not a whole lot that's hugely exciting in these updates, but there are a couple of little fixes that I did want to mention. 

The first one is with the watchOS, so in the previous version of the watch operating system, there was an issue for VoiceOver users where you would turn the volume up or down and it wouldn't appreciably change. And generally the audio was either way too loud or way too quiet, and there didn't seem to be kind of any middle ground, regardless of what value it said was set, that, you know, the volume didn't change. So that has definitely been fixed, which is a welcome change. 

The other one that I don't think it affected everybody, but it certainly annoyed me for a couple of weeks, was an issue where if you were using an Apple Watch and you also had a set of AirPod Pros, I've got a Series 2 AirPod Pro. The audio... as soon as I put the AirPod Pros into my ears, it would take audio from my watch rather than from my phone. And that seemed to happen regardless of what setting I had... because there's a setting on the iPhone that you can say Always connect to this device or connect to it. 

When it was the last thing that was used, didn't matter what I did with that, it would always connect to my watch, and the only way to get around it was to restart the phone or to open the AirPods Pro case. Wait till the little dialog came up on the screen of the iPhone that showed the battery level, and then put the AirPods into my ears. Now that has been fixed, touch wood. So... my AirPods are working once again, as they should. As I say, that one I think was a little bit more unusual, but it certainly was annoying to those of us that were impacted by it.

03:06 S1

I've also found with my phone that the face ID that you need to use to unlock your phone seems to be even more reliable than before. There's less times that I seem to have to be reverting back to be entering my passcode. That might vary from individual to individual, but you might want to keep that one in mind as well, which is good.

03:25 S2

I have. I haven't seen that myself, but I have heard that from a couple of other people. So yes, any improvement I think with face ID is a welcome one.

03:34 S1

Certainly is. We've got a bit of AI stuff to talk about. Surprise, surprise this week.

03:39 S2

Yes we do. Once again.

03:41 S1

Let's talk first about Notebook LM. You've been playing with that.

03:46 S2

I have. So Notebook LM just to sort of recap a little bit is one of Google's AI products, and it's a product that calls itself your AI powered research assistant. So the idea is that you can load sort of several different sources into it, whether it be websites, whether it be documents of various kinds. And then you can do a number of things with that content. You can ask questions, but you can also generate things like a study guide. Frequently Asked Questions, and even a conversation that sounds like two people discussing the content. 

One thing, though, that I discovered recently, and it was sort of actually I did it as a bit of an experiment because of me messing about with my YouTube channel that I set up over the break, but you can actually load YouTube URLs in and then ask questions, or have it generate a summary or a sort of a quick conversation or podcast type overview of those videos, which is quite helpful, particularly sometimes if you've got content that is, you know, perhaps there's something in the video that you haven't been able to pick up from the dialogue, you know, maybe wanting to try and find out if it says anywhere what model of product is being demonstrated or how they're using it in some way. 

So you can add those URLs into notebook LM, and then you can ask questions about the video or videos if you've got a number of them. You know, I gave it three videos on a particular topic and, um, then asked it to sort of generate a sort of a conversational style bit of audio and two things that surprised me. One is the level of detail that it goes into and its ability to sort of pick out the salient points, but also just the sort of human sounding nature of the audio that it it generates. It literally does sound like two people discussing it. 

And with some of the videos that I tried of my own, while it misunderstood what my name was, which was kind of odd, it certainly did accurately describe the products that I had talked about in the video. Like all I, it's not perfect, but it it did a pretty impressive job.

05:57 S1

This is Notebook Elm. What platforms does it run on?

06:01 S2

It's a Google-based product. There is a Notebook Elm app for iOS or Android, or you can simply access it from google.com and going into the suite of apps, if you signed into it, you can find Notebook LM there, and you can also organise your notes into different notebooks depending on the topic and things like that for for reviewing. So that's quite helpful as well.

06:23 S1

Mm. Very interesting, Notebook LM. 

Something else has come out of China recently, a thing called DeepSeek.

06:32 S2

And it has taken the big tech companies in Silicon Valley in the US a little bit by surprise. And the reason for that is that they've changed the way that, you know, the model works. So generally what we're seeing with things like ChatGPT and Meta AI and so on is that the multi-billion dollar investments in, you know, like server infrastructure and power infrastructure and those sorts of things to be able to process the requests... and DeepSeek claim that they've done it in a way that uses a fraction of the processing power, which has companies like Nvidia who make a lot of the the chips that are utilised in these sort of AI type platforms.... a little bit by surprise, has them a little bit concerned. 

Now, there are some caveats, if you like, or some things to be aware of with DeepSeek. The responsiveness, from what I've seen of it is quite fast, but it's not entirely accurate and it does seem to self-censor. So, if you, for example, ask questions about Tiananmen Square or anything else that might paint... the Chinese government in an unfavorable light, it either chooses not to answer or to give you a, you know, a very, very cut down and very limited response. 

The other question, there are some concerns around the sort of the security of the platform. And if you if you register with it, you know, where where does that data go? Is it handed to perhaps Chinese government or somewhere else? And that hasn't been made entirely clear. So some of us, including me, are a little bit reluctant to sort of register and provide too many details. I think for the moment, if I'm going to experiment further with it, I'll probably use, you know, something innocuous like my Gmail account or something, and I'll probably access it from behind a VPN, just to be sure, because there are too many unknowns about where where the traffic goes. 

But certainly the interesting thing about it, from a tech point of view, is the fact that they claim that they can, you know, process this information and these requests with a fraction of the... infrastructure. I think it was for January, it was the most downloaded app in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. So there's certainly a bit of interest in it, but I would suggest just approaching it with a small degree of caution, if you're concerned about privacy and where your information is going and all of those sorts of things.

09:06 S1

How's the accessibility?

09:08 S2

It seems okay from the small amount of experimenting that I've done. But as I said, because I have some reservations about it, I haven't really spent enough time with it to comment, but in the brief look that I had, I didn't sort of run into any really significant issues.

09:22 S1

So we're talking there about DeepSeek, which the AI world has been talking about a lot over the last week. I want to put in a quick cheerio for ChatGPT. ChatGPT is what I've been using on my Windows machine, and I imagine would be the same for the other desktop platforms. Just a little application of it that I've found really useful recently is around accessing other software products. 

So I was able recently to ask it how I could invoke a URL in Linux. Then I asked it for the command to invoke a particular URL, and then I asked it to generate the script so that I could then have a command to execute that script and invoke the URL. And it was able to guide me very clearly. And the thing about ChatGPT is that it keeps a history of your conversations with it, and also at any time you can copy its response and save some of them away somewhere in a file, maybe where you have a number of interrogations to it on a particular topic, and you can have them all grouped together. So it's pretty good, ChatGPT.

10:42 S2

Just on that too, I should also mention that one of the big differences between DeepSeek and ChatGPT is that DeepSeek at this point in time does not provide the voice mode, the sort of conversational voice mode that ChatGPT does. The only way to work with it is to type to it. So that's something to note as well if you use it in that way, which I quite often do.

11:05 S1

Yes, it can be convenient to do it that way, though the voice is also very good. 

I'd like to talk to you about Amazon, Amazon Fire TV. Perhaps you could explain what that is, and the Omni Mini product.

11:18 S2

There are there are a number of these sort of... Amazon Fire TV-type devices. So they're a media-type device that attaches to your TV and allows you to stream content from Amazon Prime and other things, you know, similar in some respects to things like the Apple TV or the Google TV product. But in their next iteration, which is the Fire TV Omni Mini, they're including a feature which allows you to have two simultaneous audio streams. If you had one family member who uses hearing aids and wants the audio from the TV stream to their hearing aids, they can do that while simultaneously having it streamed to the lounge room for the rest of the family. 

At the moment, with most of these things, it's an either or scenario, or you have a situation where what gets sent to the hearing aids, there's a significant latency or delay, whereas there's now a new protocol which they're including, which allows you to simultaneously have the... audio streamed to two different devices.

12:23 S1

So how do you get involved with something like Fire TV? How do you start?

12:27 S2

You can simply order them from Amazon. I would normally recommend waiting until they have a, you know, Prime Day sale or something because you can pick them up fairly cheap and then they just generally plug into your HDMI port on the back of your television. They do have a built-in screen reader. I do find with all of these TV platforms, there are some limitations with some of the third party streaming apps. Some of them work better than others, and some of them they'll work well on one platform, but not the other. 

I had a recent experience buying a TV for my caravan. It was a Google TV - had, you know, the Chromecast and things built into it. But for some reason that particular TV manufacturer had disabled all the accessibility features. So it is a little bit hit-and-miss in that way. But yeah, the Amazon experience is probably comparable to what you might get on something like Google TV if you've already got an accessible box of some sort, whether it's an Apple TV or a Google TV for watching content, there's probably no compelling reason to race out and buy the Amazon Fire TV, except that you, of course, could control it from your Alexa device so you can tell it to stream things and that sort of thing. So that may be of interest, but it's essentially Amazon's TV streaming device.

13:41 S1

Before we go, a reminder to everyone listening that you can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program by going to VA radio  Talking Tech... VA radio, Talking Tech. To write to the program, Damo?

13:57 S2

Damo dot McMorrow at Vision Australia dot org.

14:05 S1

damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org ... This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damien McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.