Tonie Box, Siri, Apple and Google news

00:21 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from August the 20th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia radio associated stations of the Radio Reading Network, formerly RPH Australia 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 you can all 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, someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well: Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology, David Woodbridge. David, let's start with the product minute information about a product from the Vision Store of Vision Australia. What's the Tonie Box?

01:18 S2

It's basically a little foam box, that you put these little characters on. I should say up front, the whole range is from Disney. And depending on what the character is, it will tell you stories. It will basically play a range of songs. So really, it's your your special treat from the character, using it with this little soft box and what the soft box is doing, really, it's magnetically connecting to the if you like the circuit chip stuff in the character, and then it's got a built in speaker, and you can also plug in headphones and do other sort of cool things. And if you think of all the major characters from Disney, then you've already got them covered. 

So I've already ordered one, of course, for my three year old grandson. So what happens is you order a starter kit and that normally comes with like a default character. So the one that I got was It's a light blue Tonie box and it comes with a little puppy. Now, I've got no idea what the puppy is yet, but we'll soon find out. And then, of course, because my grandson's into Mickey Mouse, I had to buy the Mickey Mouse one. But there are lots of other ones that I'd love to buy. Things like Thomas the Tank Engine, Nemo, and The Little Mermaid. And I just hope The Little Mermaid has got that, you know, the... Sebastian, the crab. He's so laid back and cool. And I just hope we have some songs from him as well. 

So the final thing I want to say about is you can also get a pirate and a unicorn. Now those ones are what are called sort of the open-ended characters. And that's where parents and grandparents and anybody else, you can do your own music and stories and everything else on those as well. But I believe all up, I think there's about 30 or 40. We're not certainly stocking all of them, but price wise you're probably looking at about $200 for the the box. So the starter kit, like I said, it comes with the puppy and the box. And then each character is round about $29. Now when I checked the comparable price on Amazon in Australia, we're selling it for exactly the same price. So, that's actually a really good thing as well, but it just sounds so fantastically cute that I just could not resist buying one.

03:43 S1

So you mentioned your three year old grandson. What's really the market for this... the age group?

03:50 S2

Around about that age. So you know, three to probably, 3 to 5 literally. It's like having your own personal speaker. Or a very simple sort of, almost like not a Bluetooth speaker, but having a speaker. There used to be... oh, it used to be a character that used to get a long time ago and they were called Skylanders. And what you do with the Skylanders was, you've got the the physical Skylander character and then on your smartphone, Android and iPhone. It would detect that you had that character and then the really cool things on the app. 

So it's been tried lots of different times. The influencer that my wife follows on Instagram, she said it was really good for her son that was a bit reluctant to speak. And now that he's been listening to music and stories on the Tonie box, he asks Mum and Dad at the kitchen table a lots of times about Can he get another character and what's his story about, and can he listen to that song again? And so it's really increased his participation, particularly in speaking.

04:56 S1

The Tonie box, Tonie box from the Vision Store of Vision Australia. The cost for the basic unit, you said $200.

05:06 S2

$200, including the puppy, and then each character is around about $29. Now, I said roundabout because of course, I guess the more branded well-known ones are going to be a bit more expensive, but average-wise it's about $29.

05:19 S1

To find out more, go to shop dot Vision Australia dot org.... shop.visionaustralia.org ...  for Vision Australia's Vision Store. Let's talk about iOS 18, which will be with us publicly in a few weeks time. And you found something doing a comparison of the current Siri in iOS 17 and the early days of iOS 18.

05:46 S2

Correct. And look, what it really boils down to when you look at it... as far as we're concerned, yes, we are getting better voices with Siri, which to me as a blind person is actually very important because I particularly like nice voices running on my iPhone. But the second thing to remember is that Siri is no longer just a smart speaker Siri thing, like the... lady in Australia. OK G in Australia and so on. What it's turning into is more of a conversational type personal assistant, and when it comes in properly, it'll remember things that you've spoken about in the past. It'll also remember your conversations. So, for example, in the next story, we're going to be talking about the pixel phones... and I understand that you can say things like, Tell me about the pixel phone, and then you can say, OK, well, tell me about the second phones you mentioned. Then you can go back and say, okay, so you've talked about the second phone. What about the first one? 

So you don't have to keep reminding it what you're talking about. It's very much a conversational type system now. And you can do all sorts of other things coming up. You can ask it to summarize a screen, summarize a document. It's got better... to do with messaging and all that sort of cool stuff. But at the bottom line, Siri's been so prescriptive, I want to say from the years dot 2010 roughly, that I think we're going to get a huge surprise when it starts behaving properly. And there's really been no excuse about why Apple shouldn't have done this a lot earlier, in some ways.

07:30 S1

And it's going to take weeks and possibly months for each of us to adjust to it and realise the potential of it, and it's going to grow as the different updates come out as well, isn't it?

07:44 S2

That's right. I'm probably going to still keep treating my S lady as the dumb S lady, so it's going to take me a while to sort of get used to the new, improved workability stuff that we'll be able to do with it now.

07:55 S1

So you mentioned these phones. Let's talk about the Google event that took place recently.

08:00 S2

Indeed. So basically we've got four new Pixel phones. So the Pixel 9, the Pixel 9 Pro, the XL which is the bigger one, and then the Pixel Fold, which is Google's second version of their folding phone. So that's actually really cool. That's similar in some ways to the Samsung Fold. What's really interesting about, of course, this new series is, funnily enough, it's all about AI. So Google's Gemini AI, it's going to be sort of baked into the operating system. It's going to integrate the, you know, the EKG function as well as all the conversational AI type stuff summarising, helping you write emails, helping you rewrite stuff, all that sort of cool stuff. 

And the other thing they released alongside the phones, and of course, they've got better screens, better battery, better camera, different colors and so on was the Pixel Buds. And what's really cool about the Pixel Buds is you can use all the Gemini commands. At least you understand on the... internet with the Pixel Buds. So you can do you know, your hands-free communication to your phone. And the other thing they also released was the Pixel Watch. Now, what's important about the Pixel Watch is you may remember I think it was a year or two ago, or maybe even longer. Google bought Fitbit and the new Pixel Watch replaces the Fitbit. I don't know if that means they've just dropped the whole line of Fitbit, but they did say in an article that I read, or one of them on the internet that said, the Pixel Watch is actually replacing the Fitbit, so we'll see what happens from there. 

And as far as accessibility is concerned, there's been some, lots of talk on the... internet about how Google is improving things like the lookout app, which is the eye thing for object recognition and so on, and text OCR. So that's going to be all improved... and also, the other thing to remember about these Pixel phones is that you're getting the original Android version from Google itself, because when you get phones from Samsung, Motorola or those other companies, they they put their own overlay or flavor, if you like, of Android on that phone. So I've always preferred Samsung to some extent, but if I was to recommend a good solid phone that's going to get updates, I think it's for the next seven years. I always go for the Pixel phones. 

And of course with other stuff coming out that will plug into phones like the smartphone for doing orientation mobility, the Pixel phone is absolutely, extremely well situated. So if you're in the market for a new Android phone, I would certainly have a look at the Pixel 9 series of phones. Plus the watch, of course, and the buds.

11:04 S1

Let's talk about another podcast that you found recently about the sounds of Apple... and Apple devices do make lots of different useful sounds.

11:14 S2

They do. Now, this was a podcast on a podcast called 20,000Hz, and it's from a company or a studio that does lots of stuff to do with audio. And they had a combined podcast presentation with Apple itself on how all the different sounds that Apple device uses, particularly the iPhone, how they customise them, how they come to actually arrive at a certain particular audio tone, and so on. But it was just fascinating because what they said now, these these tones are sort of so famous now. So in movies and so on. If you hear the default iPhone ring, you know it's an iPhone. If you hear that little ping sound, you know you've got a male, if you've got other different types of sounds going on, like if you're seeing a send a thumbs up, it's a pop-up sound, and if you send us a thumbs down, it's a pop pop sound and so on. 

So they were just going through the whole thing about how they were designing the sounds, what effect they had on people actually using the phone. And I thought, It's not just Apple type stuff. When you think about sounds in the community now, you really associate it with different types of things. So that very famous sound with the audio traffic light signals with the beep, beep and then the Beep beep beep beep beep to across the road, there's all these sort of ubiquitous sounds that we have, you know, just not just on technology. So things like the start up sound for the Mac, but also in the general community. 

So I just think it's amazing that, you know, we we live our lives surrounded by visual stuff. But as they said in the the podcast on 20,000Hz, sound is just as important. And they said from a design point of view, they put as much work into sounds as they do into creating graphics and icons.

13:17 S1

These podcasts go into a fair bit of detail, don't they? There's actually two episodes.

13:22 S2

There is. The first one is sort of more of an overview of the default sounds from the Mac, the iPhone and those sort of stuff. And then the second one really goes into how they constructed the sound. And, you know, they take a particular sound that a kalimba makes, and then they look at the beginning, middle and end of the sound and then sort of try and tweak it a little bit until they get the ultimate type of audio tone they want. But it was just incredible how they have to go into this huge amount of detail and make sure that these sounds are sort of like more common sensical type ones that you'd find everyday in the community.

14:02 S1

And you've got links to these podcasts in the show notes.

14:05 S2

I certainly do, and like I said, they were absolutely brilliant to listen to.

14:09 S1

The podcast is called 20,000Hz. Very good. Now, before we go, a reminder of where there are details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.

14:21 S2

Indeed. So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David Woodbridge dot podbean ... podbean.com.

14:29 S1

David Woodbridge dot podbean p o d b e a n.com to write to the program.

14:36 S2

You can write to me at Vision Australia, which is David dot Woodbridge - how it sounds - at Vision Australia dot org.

14:43 S1

david.woodbridge@visionaustralia.org ... This has been Talking Tech. With me has been Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.