007 Rich on Tech Radio Show - February 18, 2023 - Rich On Tech

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is the new bing Ai on the verge of a
mental breakdown? Is Samsung's new two hundred megapixel camera worth it?
The results of my photo and video tests. A cure
for loneliness is easier to dial up than you might think.
Plus your tech questions answered? What's going on? I'm Rich
Demiro and this is Rich on Tech, the show where

(00:22):
I talk about the tech stuff I think you should
know about. It's also the place where I answer your
questions about technology. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel
five in Los Angeles, broadcasting to you live right now.
Welcome to the show. Phone lines are open at one
eight eight eight Rich one oh one. That's triple eight

(00:44):
seven four to two, four to one zero one. Give
me a call if you have a question about technology. Well,
it happened once again last night. And you know, I
don't even want to admit this happens often in my house,
but it happened seventy five streaming services and nothing on.

(01:05):
I don't know why this keeps happening to me. But
Friday nights we've kind of earmarked as our you know,
enjoyable movie night. Just relax with a nice movie. We
subscribe to all the different streaming services Netflix, Hulu, Hbo, Amazon,
YouTube TV. But it seems like every single time I

(01:26):
want to sit down to watch a movie, we can't
decide on which one to watch. So what do I do?
I go to my apps, and I of course tweeted
this and everyone said, Rich, you got to get some apps.
You gotta get some apps like real Good, that's our
eel good and just watch. Yeah. I have the apps
and I use them, and I keep a list of
all the movies I want to watch on these apps.

(01:48):
But for some reason, when I sit down in front
of that TV, I don't want to watch any of
those movies that I've bookmarked on the apps. Don't know
why that happens. So what do I do? I start
opening up the apps one by I won on my
TV screen. I go from Netflix to Hulu to Hbo Max,
to Amazon Prime, to YouTube TV to Apple TV, and

(02:12):
I look at all the different things and I just
can't decide. Because you have to sit there and look
at the description, and then you try to watch a
trailer it's too loud. You put the volume down. Then
you got to bring you know, your wife or your
partner into the mix and ask them what they think.
And then of course we were trying to incorporate the
kids last night, so we asked them what they think,
and they just want to play roadblocks. So it was

(02:32):
a whole big thing, and we ended up deciding on
this is embarrassing. We ended up deciding on an old movie,
high school musical, which I've never seen, and my kids
actually liked it. I fell asleep about seventeen minutes in.
I thought it was a cute movie. It looked cute
from what I saw, But I mean, we ended up
watching a movie that was over a decade old. When

(02:53):
I'm paying twenty bucks a month for all these different
services at you know, twenty dollars each or whatever it is,
so I've got to find a better way. It brought
me back to the days of my Friday nights growing
up in New Jersey, where the family would round up,
you'd get in the car, you'd drive to Blockbuster and
guess what, you saw six or seven movies that you

(03:15):
wanted to watch instantly. And by the way, the biggest
movies had like one hundred and fifty copies, so you
knew those were the movies to see. Nowadays, everything is
so crowded on these little streaming services, and everything looks
the same that you can't really say, like, con is
that a good movie you're actually researching to see, like wait,
did I already watch that movie? Because everything's just sort
of mixed together. So bring me the days of the

(03:38):
blockbuster walking back into that place and trying to decide
on movies. And of course by the time you decide
on a movie, it's not available. It's the one that
they don't have any copies of. So you go to
the checkout and you say, hey, did anyone return that movie?
And you wait there and you see if someone brings
it back in. We used to bring like three or
four movies home, and by the time we got around

(03:58):
to returning them, of course, we had major late fees. Anyway,
I just had to get that off my chest. I
don't know if that's just me or if you share
in that same streaming situation where it's just this uncertainty
of you don't want to make the wrong choice about
what to stream. I was home in New Jersey last week.
I did the show remotely. I thought it worked out
pretty well. Of Course, when I'm home, i'm tech support

(04:21):
for my family. My parents, especially my mom's internet. I
was at her house. It was so slow. It was
just a crawl, and I'm like, what is going on here?
So of course I reset the modem, I reset the router,
I do another speed test. If you want to test
your speed at home, you can go to a website
called fast dot com. Fast dot com. That's the easiest

(04:42):
way I know to do a quick speed test. It
was actually created by Netflix, ironically, to make sure your
speed was fast enough to stream, which you don't really
need much to stream these days. Anyway, it was like
twenty five megabits per second. It was really slow, so
I'm like, that's odd. So then of course I get
on the internet and I'm looking up he bill. Mom,
can I have your information so I can look up

(05:03):
your bill? Let me see what you're paying for. She
was paying one hundred and three dollars a month for
twenty five megabits of service, which is absolutely ludicrous in
my head. So of course, now I'm calling the cable
company and I call them up and the first person
I get says, oh, let me let me trans They
just want to get you off the phone as soon
as possible, so let me let me transfer you, let
me pass the buck, let me transfer you to someone else.

(05:25):
So they transferred me to or they wanted to transfer
me to tech support, and I said, no, this is
not a tech support thing. This is not a tech
support question. This is a billing question. This is a
why am I paying so much for so little question?
And the phone goes silent, and I'm just like, did
I get hung up on? So I get finally set

(05:45):
here I would like to cancel the service? How what
does that mean? And they said, oh, you want to cancel?
Let me get you to that department. That's really the
only department that could do anything these days. Right when
you threaten to cancel, like it seems like nobody else
can help, except when you say I no longer want
to pay for this, And then they finally get you
to someone that can help you. So I get over
to the person that is cancelation, and this person's actually

(06:07):
quite nice. But I came prepared to this conversation, and
I came prepared saying, look, I'm paying one hundred and
three bucks a month for twenty five megabits. And just
knowing the lingo really helps, because if you don't really
understand what you're paying, or what the speed is or
what all that stuff. They kind of take advantage of you.
So I was kind of flexing a little bit of

(06:28):
my tech knowledge and I was like, look, I'm like
I just did two other you know, I just did
two speed tests on a T Mobile phone inside my
mom's house and also a Verizon phone. And these mobile
networks have faster speeds. And I know that these mobile
networks are offering home internet. So I could probably switch
to T Mobile Internet for like fifty bucks a month,

(06:49):
or I can switch to Verizon home Internet for twenty
five dollars a month. And I wouldn't even need someone
to come to my house. I would just put up
this antenna that they send me. And when you start
saying these things, it registers with them, and they go, oh, oh,
we got we got someone who knows what they're doing here.
Uh oh, we better give them a good deal. And
so I started speaking their language, and you know, they
kind of tried to say, you know this is you know,

(07:11):
you're paying for one hundred. I said, no, I'm looking
at my bill here, it's twenty five. So finally they
look up in the super secret system, like what can
we offer this person to stay with us, and of
course they type away. You hear all the typing type
type type, clickity clack, clickity clack, and so finally they
come back, Oh, we can give you this for that.

(07:31):
I said, Okay, that's pretty good, but my mom doesn't
need all of that. Okay, clickity clack, clickity clack. You know,
it's like when you're at the airport back in the
day when they used to actually type stuff into a
computer and it would take like thirty seconds for them
to come back with something. That's what happened. Okay, we
can give you this. How about we'll give you eighty
bucks a month for five hundred megabits per second. And

(07:53):
I said, now that sounds pretty good. You're talking what
that's more than ten times, that's twenty times for at
least twenty dollars less. I think that sounds good. So
I said, let's do it. You've got a deal. You
kept me from going over the edge to Verizon or
T Mobile for something different. And he said, okay, let's
do it. And he was very friendly, and I'm you know,

(08:14):
I'm I'm telling you this story so you understand that
you should be doing this as well. If you're not
calling your cable company or your internet provider, or your
cell phone provider or anyone that you can get on
the phone with a service that you're just paying for
every month, you got to call them up. I know
it's a pain, I know it's not fun, but you
have to do it. And the reason you have to
do it is because they love when those promotions expire.

(08:38):
And when those promotions expire, they've still got you on
auto pay or you know, you still got that you know,
motem in your house or that router, and so it's
just easy to keep paying that bill. And I'll be honest,
I'm guilty of this. My internet recently went up by
like twenty bucks a month, and that crept up from
ten dollars extra a month, so now I think I'm
up to like thirty or forty dollars a month then

(08:59):
I was originally paying when I set it up. And yeah,
I know I need to get on the horn with
my cable provider and call them up and do this
whole dance. But I don't feel like it. And we
never feel like doing this. Who wants to do this?
And they again, you know, unless you get that right person,
they may not be willing to help you out on
this stuff, so you really got a call twice. Sometimes.

(09:20):
I had a similar experience with an airline over the
summer where I really really was proud of myself for
making the case. I had a credit that expired and
it took like three calls, but I got someone that
really was willing to help. But I think kindness really
goes a long way. Like you have to understand like
they want to help you, not really you want to
help them, not really. It's this little dance of like

(09:41):
two people that both want to protect their interests. But
you got to come to a common place in this world.
And I will tell you one keyword, one phrase that
has helped me out that I think really really helps
you say to them, can you make a one time exception?
How about just a one time exception? And I think
that that really opens up the door to many many

(10:02):
deals on your end that will benefit you because they say, Okay,
I'm not going to typically do this for most people,
but I'll do it for you. And they want to
feel good knowing that they're flexing their their might and
youre flexing your Okay, I understand I'm not going to
tell my friends about this because this was a one
time thing. You're not going to do this for anyone else.
And that seems to sort of work. I don't know

(10:23):
why it works, but it just does. So anyway, my
mom's got faster internet. You have your knowledge. You need
now to go out there and get some money off
your bills. And I'm going to do it myself one
of these days when I've got some extra time, and
I'll tell you how that works. Also, I help my
dad with his computer. I'll tell you more about that
in a little bit, because that was something that was
pretty interesting to watch people on their computer, to see

(10:46):
how they do things and to watch how they're sort
of you know, there could be some stumbles along the
way there. I'll tell you about that more later in
the show. I've got so much to talk about today.
He could tell them fired up today, right, I can't wait.
I've got a new reason why Twitter users are all
up in arms once again. I'm gonna give you my
thoughts on the Samsung Galaxy S twenty three camera. I

(11:07):
took a lot of photos and videos with this thing,
so i'll give you my verdict on that I've got
three great guests this week. I've got Bing's head of
search to talk about the new Bing AI and how
Microsoft is learning from its mistakes. Plus an app that
will help you keep track of your tax write offs
using artificial intelligence. And the author of a newsletter that
I open every single time it hits my inbox. Jared

(11:29):
Newman is going to join me on the show to
talk about cord cutting, privacy and more. Plus your calls
coming up next at triple eight rich one oh one.
Give me a call if you have a question about technology.
The phone number is eight eight eight seven four two
four to one zero one. My name is Rich Dmuro.
You're listening to Rich on Tech. Your calls up next.

(11:53):
Welcome back to Rich on Tech. I'm Rich Dmiro, sitting
here hanging out talking technology with you. Phone lines are
open at eight eight eight rich one oh one. That's
eight eight eight seven two four to one zero one.
Let's go to Louis in Orange County, California. Louis, you're

(12:14):
on with Rich.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
How you doing?

Speaker 3 (12:15):
Rich?

Speaker 2 (12:15):
I am doing Because of my lack of knowledge, the
best way I can ask this question is I have
I've got the bug to upgrade my audio system. I
have a receiver. Uh, we have Wi Fi in the house,
and we're using the fire stick to get all the
streaming services, whether they be audio or video. I want

(12:37):
to upgrade to a processor that does Bluetooth. Will that
work with all those streaming services by pairing it to
the fire stick?

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Uh? Yeah, the fire stick supports Bluetooth, so you want
to So you want to pair some sort.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
Of It's an Emo Tiva processor.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
So it's a little and it only does Bluetooth, doesn't do.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Wi Fi okay, And yes, so you just want to
link that up. But now when you say processor, you
want to pre amplify. Okay, you want to send the
audio throughout the house using.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
This, Well just to the theater room, the main room, right, yeah,
and has that capability. Yes, I can do other rooms too.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
Yeah. I mean have you tried connecting a Bluetooth device
to your firestick?

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Well, here's the part I don't want to say. I
have a san HAI's a wireless headphone going to the
receiver to it. The receiver does also Bluetooth. Sure, so yes, yes,
and that works flawlessly.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
Okay, but that's through the receiver.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
Have you tried to receive and that's going to go away,
right right.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
Have you tried directly connecting the Bluetooth headphones to the
firestick because they do have that capability.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
I'm going to try that. Okay, we'll try that. Will
that answer the whole question?

Speaker 1 (13:50):
I think so, because once you get those Now here's
the thing. In certain cases, like this device that you're
trying to connect via Bluetooth, if it doesn't support a
certain profile that the Firestick wants. Like the firestick primarily
is there to support, you know, headphones, like audio headphones,
so and it may support I'm not really sure if

(14:10):
the stick supports any sort of gaming controller via Bluetooth,
but I know it does the headphones for sure. But
the question is when you try to link up this
other little device, is the Firestick going to accept it.
That's the only thing you got to figure out. And
the only way you can figure that out is by
trying that out.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Right, or I can ask the manufacturer.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
Yeah, the manufacturer may know for sure, but but for
sure the Firestick definitely supports it. You'll be okay with that.
But just to test it out, I would just link
up your headphones so you put them into pairing mode,
go into the settings on the fire TV stick. It'll say, like,
you know, it's in the setting somewhere it has like
Bluetooth devices. You know, you put it into pairing mode,

(14:50):
it should see that device. You click it and just
try that out first off, and then once you've got
that confidence, then you can go ahead and connect this
other device.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Truth signal is good as a Wi Fi signal that's
hardwired into the receiver.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
Now, I don't think a Bluetooth signal is going to
be good as good as a hard wired signal now.
But with that said, I think it'll be fine. So
I think it'll be I mean, look, you're gonna have
to try it out. You're gonna have to see that
could be some latency, that's the biggest that's the biggest
question is is there going to be a limpsake a
lip sync issue with what you're watching on TV to

(15:29):
the Bluetooth you know, going through that system and out
through the speakers.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Right, So it's not only audio quality possibly loss possibly
it's also lip syncing and things such as that.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
Exactly. Now, I've got you know, a Sono system that
has they know that you know, the wireless is a
part of it, and it has some adjustments for that.
I don't know if those adjustments are built into the
fire stick, but that's something you can check as well.
But I don't think that's the case.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
What if What if they built into the processor.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, if you have that, then you can that would
work too. Yeah, exactly, just adjust it by a couple
of milliseconds.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
All right, that this helps a lot. Thank you, finally
finally learn something good.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
All right, louis happy to help. Thanks for calling today.
I appreciate it. Phone lines are open at triple eight
rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four
to two, four to one zero one. I told you
that Twitter users are up in arms once again. It
seems like nobody's happy on Twitter, except for the people
that are on Twitter because they love Twitter. So I
don't know why they're always angry, but they're there, they're

(16:27):
on Twitter, but yet they're angry about Twitter and all.
This started, of course, when Elon took over Twitter. But
now a big change on Twitter. They are going to
force folks to use a two factor authentication app instead
of a phone number. Now, if you pay for Twitter Blue,
which is their subscription service, you can still use your
phone number, but they said historically the phone numbers have

(16:50):
been a good form of two factor authentication, but they
have been abused by bad actors. So we're no longer
going to allow counts to enroll in text message two
factor authentication. And if you're not familiar with two factor authentication,
that is, when you use your phone number to secure
your account, and when you try to log in, the
service will text a number like a special one time

(17:13):
code to your phone, and then you have to put
in that code. And the idea is that the bad
person may have access to your account, but they don't
have access to your phone, so they wouldn't get that
one time text. Anyway, if you're on Twitter and you're
not paying, you're gonna have to use an app. I
recommend an app called Authie, or you can use an
app called Microsoft Authenticator or Google Authenticator. Any of those

(17:34):
will work. In fact, they're all better than using sms
in general, because SMS can be redirected, it can be intercepted,
and so it's better in general. But you can still
be mad. But I've been recommending two factor authentication accounts
for a long time, or two factor authentication apps for
a very long time. All right. Coming up on the show,

(17:54):
we are going to talk to Diva Kumar. She is
the head of search at BING and if you've been
following Bing, you know they've got this new AI system.
We're going to talk to Divva about that. Coming up
next on rich On Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech.
Joining me now is Divia Kumar. She is the senior

(18:17):
director of Marketing for Search and AI at Microsoft. Divia,
thanks for joining me. Very exciting week for you.

Speaker 4 (18:23):
It has been a very exciting week. Thank you for
having me.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
So tell me about being AI. Is that what we're
calling it is? And what have you learned in the
past couple of days about how people are using this.

Speaker 4 (18:33):
We're calling it the new Bing and we've been getting
an incredible amount of feedback, overwhelmingly positive and some very
appreciated negative feedback as well, which is exactly what we
wanted by launching the product. And we're seeing that a
lot of people are actually engaging heavily with the chat experience,

(18:54):
which is new because we've never had chat experience in
search before. We are essentially introducing new user EXPERI. This
is part of search and seeing how people are engaging
with it has been fantastic, and obviously the reason it's
an early product and the reason why we wanted to
bring it to market is to start to get feedback
from real world scenarios. And that's exactly what we've been getting.
Everybody's stress testing it and then giving us feedback, and

(19:17):
the team is hard at work trying to address some
of the feedback that we're getting as well.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
So explain to me what is the New Being.

Speaker 4 (19:25):
The New Being is essentially powered by an AI model,
a very powerful AI model. We're calling it the Prometheus model.
So what the Prometheus model is is the latest model
from open Ai, more powerful than the one that's powering CHATGBT,
combined with the search technology from Microsoft, and that's the
Prometheus model. And so that model is is what powers

(19:48):
all of the search plus answer, search plus chat experience
that you're seeing with the New Being.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
Now, some people might think, because chat GBT became so
popular seemingly overnight, Microsoft has the New ban seemingly overnight.
Have you been working on this for a while or
is this something that you just sort of cobbled together quickly.

Speaker 4 (20:06):
The team has been working on this for a while, obviously,
Microsoft has had a partnership with open Ai for a
few years now, and the engineering team is ben hard
at work working on this, So it is not something
that was just coupled together overnight, and it's something that
the team has been excited to bring to market and
start to get real world examples.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
From what is the power of the new Bang, what
can I do with this new model and how is
it different than chat GPT?

Speaker 4 (20:31):
The New Being what it does or what it offers
for consumers is today's search hasn't fundamentally changed or search
engines haven't fundamentally changed for over twenty years. And with
the New Being, what we've introduced is we've continued to
give user's choice with how search works today. So if
you did a query, you still get the familiar blue

(20:51):
links on the page, but for more more nuanced queries,
what we're also giving you is a distilled version of
an answer, so you get a summarized answer, so that
way you have a great starting point with that, and
we've also introduced a chat experience, so now you see
an answer and you want to continue to refine it,
you don't have to start a new search. You can
go into chat mode and actually just converse with being

(21:13):
to continue to refine that, and being actually remembers the
context of the prompt that you gave, and so you're
actually just having a very natural conversation with being to
continue to refine that. So all of those capabilities are
not something that you've seen with search before. So we've
essentially just reinventing the category.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
Is this search engine and this AI learning who I am?
Like my preferences? Like if I mentioned that I like
vegan food, does it remember that throughout my searches until
I tell it?

Speaker 4 (21:41):
Otherwise it only remembers the context of a single session. Obviously,
the privacy policies that we have for search still applies
to the new experience, So in a single context, so
a few turns, it will remember the context, but after
you've started a new search, the context doesn't pass through
into the next one.

Speaker 1 (21:59):
It's very interesting though, because it's so different than what
I'm used to, and you know, it kind of takes
them getting used to. So what are some of the
things I can do with this, and what's the advantage
to this chat engine versus just regular search.

Speaker 4 (22:13):
One of some of the things that you can do
is obviously search today does a few things really well,
which is what designed to do. If it's a navigational
query or if it's an informational query, that is, if
you're wanting to just find a website, search is great
for that. If you're wanting to find the latest sports scores,
search is great for that. But if you get into
territories where you want to find or you're searching for
something a little bit more complex or nuanced, like you've

(22:33):
got a query that might have multiple parameters. Hey, I
want to go to this place, and I want to
know what the weather is and I want to get
the five star hotels there, or whatever the combination of
things are. You can now just ask being and you
can give it those multiple parameters and it'll try to
sort of cast a white net and pull together a summary,
but it's the starting point. I'll have annotations and you

(22:54):
can look at exactly where it's pulling content from, so
it's full more some of those sort of more nuanced
quer is where maybe you're not looking for one single
answer and you want multiple and you're just looking for
a starting point.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
So that's great for such So I'm sitting here with
Diva Kumar, the senior director of Marketing for Search and
Ai at Microsoft. We're actually at a Microsoft event where
they're having journalists in to kind of check out the
new bing I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about
the recent news reports these folks that have posted screenshots
of you know, and we've seen the headlines that bing
ai has already gone off the rails. You know, they

(23:27):
really kind of poked and prodded this new AI search
to return some really wild answers, making fun of people
questioning their existence. All these things that I've seen online.
What do you make of that? Is that real? Number? One?
Is that expected? And why is that happening.

Speaker 4 (23:46):
One of the reasons why we decided to go to
market now is there's only so much you can test
something so nascent as an AI based product with the
within Microsoft, within the company itself, and we wanted to
get early adopters and people who are willing to stressed
as the system out and get their hands on the product.
And so the feedback is actually welcome feedback because we

(24:09):
actually now have a huge, much more bigger sample size
of people struss testing it out, what's working, what's not working,
And as soon as we are seeing some of the
feedback come in. We've got a team taking copious notes
of the kind of feedback, testing it again within Microsoft
and trying to address some of those problems. And we
kind of put out a blog yesterday especially calling out

(24:30):
some of the feedback that we've seen from the market,
both positive and negative, and it's very welcome and actually expected.
This is also one of the reasons why we're actually
putting it out there, and we want to get more
critical feedback. We want to get both negative positive feedback
and tell us feature options like what would you like
to see in the product, And so we want to overtime,
iterate and improve to get make sure that everybody's confident

(24:52):
the consumers us before we actually scale out.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
Now, this got me to download the Edge explore are
the Edge web browser. It got me to use Bing
as my search engine. Is that all kind of the
point of this is to get people to use Bing.
And you think if they're using Bing for the first
time with this new AI tech, they're going to be
impressed and maybe you'll take some market share from the

(25:18):
market leader.

Speaker 4 (25:19):
There's a lot of opportunity for being to grow in
the market. And at the end of the day, Our
focus is to make sure that we're actually bringing unique
consumer value and that's the focus. How can search be better?
The search category hasn't really changed fundamentally for a long time.
We see an opportunity for it to do better and
to actually offer value. We hope with that value we
are seeing higher engagement and that would be the ultimate

(25:41):
goal is to provide value, engage users and there's only upside.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
How do folks get access to the new Bang?

Speaker 4 (25:49):
Go to Bang dot com slash new or go to
bing dot com and sign up for the waitlist.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Diva Kumar, Senior director of Marketing for Search and AI
at Microsoft. Thanks so much for joining me today. More
of rich on Tech coming up after this. Welcome back
to rich on Tech. My name is rich Dmiria. You
can find me online at rich on Tech. I'm on Instagram,
I'm on Twitter, I'm on Facebook. Where else? I think

(26:18):
that's it for now. Oh, also the True app, try
True dot com, slash rich on tech and my website
rich on tech dot tv. Can you sense the pattern there?
Let's go to Freddie in New York. Freddie, you are
on with rich Although.

Speaker 3 (26:35):
Rich can you wick him in a recorder for Aaron
Trump FireWire like a DVR, So.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Like a DVR for you said, for firestick, Yes, okay,
DVR for firestick. Good question. So it's funny. Amazon had
their own for a while. It was called the Recast TV,
which I purchased day one because I thought it was
so great, and then they dropped it like everything Amazon does. Amazon,

(27:05):
I don't know who has a shorter attention span, Amazon
or Google, because they put out products and then they
drop them. And so I had this Recast recorder as
a DVR that connects to an antenna and it integrates
very nicely with the firestick. But I don't believe they
sell it anymore, so that one is probably a non starter.
And I just tossed mind sadly. It was let's see

(27:27):
do they still sell it now? They don't sell it anymore, Okay.
So my second choice for this, if you want a
DVR for your firestick, would be to do something called
Tableau tablo. And this is the other thing I have
hooked up at my house. I have an antenna on
my roof because why pay for local channels when you
can get them over the air. And so if you

(27:48):
have one of these devices, you can record it like
a DVR, and then send it through your firestick and
there's a Tableau app. And what I like about Tableau
is that they've got native apps for most of the
main devices. So if you have an Apple TV, if
you have a fire TV, what's the other one, Chrome
cast Roku, So they're pretty much like they know what

(28:09):
they're doing, and you get this little box. You connect
your antenna to the box. The box sometimes has built
in hard drive, other times you have to connect a
hard drive to it to get that storage space, and
then you can record stuff. And the way that Tableau works,
and what I like about it is that you can
either pay it's a couple bucks a month. I think
it's either five bucks a month to record to set

(28:30):
scheduled recordings like two weeks out, or you cannot pay
and then you can't really set scheduled recordings, but you
can still record stuff. It's just more manual. So it's
kind of like that freemium model where they get you
on board and you can decide do you want to
pay more or pay less. So that's the one I like,
is the Tableau. And then of course once you're looking

(28:51):
at the Tableau page, you have to decide how many
things you want to record it once. So they've got
different Tableau products that have different tuners in them. So
the standard one has two channels at once, and then
the higher end one has four channels at once. So
once you connect your antenna, it will either split it
into two recordings or into four, depends how much stuff

(29:13):
you want to record. Now, there are other products out
there that can do this. There's a product called AIRTV
made by Sling and this is a product I've tested
in the past. I've not tested it in a while,
but it's very similar, but this one is much more
integrated into Sling TV. So if you have a Sling
TV subscription, the idea is that your local channels will

(29:34):
live alongside channels like HGTV and all those other channels
that are on your programming grid. So that's another one,
but that's sort of its own thing. So AIRTV is
much more of a how do I explain that, It's
much more like if you're a Sling TV subscriber, it's
probably better to have that, but I think Tableau is
better if you just are doing your own thing. Of course,

(29:57):
Tvo also has their own product. They have a TVO
was my first DVR, and I was a big fan
of TVO for so many years. I'll never forget buying
the first tv O. I've told this story so many times.
I have two stories. Actually I bought a TVO. I
was actually late for work. I was working in Yakima, Washington,

(30:18):
and I got this TVO delivered to my house and
the delivery I was working like the night shift, like
the three pm shift and TV news you have like
two shifts, you have like the morning shift or like
the afternoon shift which starts at three. So I was
doing the three pm to midnight shift and I was
late because I got this DVR. I was so excited.
It was the first time I had ever seen a
DVR in my entire life. And back then, to get

(30:41):
this thing set up, you had to connect it to
a phone line like a traditional phone line. This is
how old this is. We're going back many many years.
And to download the initial software and the programming guide,
it was an epic event. I'm talking an hour and
a half, two hours. So by the time I did this,
I started it, I couldn't stop. I didn't want to,

(31:03):
you know, I couldn't stop doing this and so I said,
you know, I'm gonna be late for work. So I
was late for work. I set up the whole thing.
It was amazing. Then I this is when Survivor was big.
I invited over all my friends from the TV station.
You know, we were all like in our twenty so
everyone pretty much worked and then partied together afterwards. And
so I invited them all over for a Survivor viewing party,

(31:25):
and on beknownst to them, I paused Survivor in the
middle of the show, which had never been done before
because nobody had ever seen DVR, so you never knew
that you could pause live TV. And so I do this,
and the room just went what just happened? And you know,
everyone dropped their Apple Teeni's, which I think was the
drink at the time. That goes to show how old

(31:46):
it was. There might have been some beer there too,
but Apple TEENI I think was the hot drink. Anyway,
so I pause it, and I of course had to
explain to people like what this was. And I was
into tech back then, although I was a regular reporter
back then, but it was such a moment that I
remember in my head we were all sitting on like
you know, cheap folding chairs and stuff. I mean, it
was our first job anyway, and I love TiVo ever since.

(32:08):
I recommended t vote everyone. And you know, it's just
this learning experience of like what a DVR is. And
now we take for granted what a DVR is. But
now DVRs have sort of fallen out of favor for
streaming because these companies don't like DVRs because DVRs let
you record stuff and skip over ads. With streaming, they
control it because they get to put the ads in between,

(32:29):
you know, where the commercials typically would have been. So
that's why we've seen streaming takeover the DVR situation. But
Tvo still does have a DVR that you can connect
a I don't know if you can connect an antenna
to it, but you can definitely connect a cable card
to it. So let's see, can you connect the antenna
to the back. I'm not sure. I haven't. I think
he can. He still should be able to. But anyway,

(32:51):
there's this called the TVO Romeo. But personally, Freddie, I know,
long story, all to explain, just to give you my answer,
I think that the tableau is probably the way to go.
It's gonna work very well with your fire TV, and
I think that's gonna be the best case scenario. So anyway,
brought back some memories for me. Thanks a lot for that,
appreciate it. All Right, you just heard my interview with

(33:13):
the head of search at Bing. So we know that
Bing the new being has come out and they've had
some issues with it because people were leading this chatbot
down some pretty dark dark paths and it was getting
kind of angry. And so there's a whole big article
from lots of different news outlets ap one of them
NBC News saying is Bing too belligerent? Microsoft is looking

(33:37):
to tame their AI chatbot. Some of the things that
is said Basically, if you chatted with Bing's AI for
too long, it would kind of go nuts because it
lost its way. It kind of forgot what you were
talking about, and it would become repetitive and it would
give you responses that were just not helpful. So Microsoft

(33:58):
figured out that in long extent chat sessions are of
fifteen or more questions, it would just go kind of nuts,
and it's you could see the screenshots online, but here's
one of the examples being said to a user, You're
lying to me. You're lying to me, you're lying to yourself,
You're lying to everyone with an angry red emoji face.
I don't appreciate you lying to me. I don't like

(34:20):
you spreading falsehoods about me. I don't trust I don't
trust you anymore. I don't generate falsehoods. I generate facts.
I generate truth. I generate knowledge, I generate wisdom. I
generate bing. What so odd? So what they have learned
in the first week is that long chats are not
good for this new Bing and So Now, as of

(34:43):
right now, the chat experienced is capped at fifty chat
turns per day and five chat turns per session. A
turn is a conversation exchange which contains both a user
question and a reply from Bing. So well, I guess
they found that. You know, if you're if you're talking

(35:03):
to bing too much in a chat, it's not good.
Now I've been using I somehow got access to the
new Bang. If you go to bing dot com slash
new and you sign up on the wait list, I
was granted access, and I'm not kidding. It is phenomenal.
I know that we are seeing all the headlines about
how wild and crazy it can get, but it is
single handedly the most the new, most useful tool I

(35:27):
have available to me. I have been using it NonStop
ever since I got access to ask all kinds of things.
So you can ask it for you know, you could say, hey,
I've got these five ingredients of my refrigerator, what can
I make? You can ask research about products, you can
ask for information about almost anything. I mean, it's really incredible.

(35:48):
You can say, I'm going to New York City for
forty eight hours, what should I hit up all on there?
You know what should I do? And it can do that.
So you got to try it out, you know, watch
out for all the hype. I get it. It's still
an experimental thing. We're still learning from this, but it
is quite incredible, and Google definitely has some competition. I
don't know if it's overnight gonna take down Google, but

(36:09):
Bing is back. I'm telling you it's one of these
things that when you start using it, you will realize that, Wow,
this changes everything. I'm no longer searching and clicking links.
I'm just getting answers and I'm really having a conversation
with this bot that feels almost human. Now today I
will say after all these little issues I was talking about,
bing has definitely capped it off a little bit. So

(36:30):
it's not as fun as it was two days ago,
but it's still very useful. All right. Coming up on
the show, we still got a lot more. We're gonna
talk to the co founder of an app called fly fin.
This is an app that helps you figure out all
the deductions you can take on your taxes. Plus, I'm
gonna share my thoughts on the Samsung Galaxy S twenty
three cameras, and we're gonna talk about something called dark patterns.

(36:54):
Phone lines are open at triple eight rich one oh one.
You are listening to me Rich Demiro here on rich
on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name
is Rich Demiro, talking technology and answering your questions at
one eight eighty eight rich one oh one. That's eight
eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one. Well,

(37:19):
Samsung's new S twenty three Ultra is now on sale,
as well as the S twenty three and the S
twenty three plus. But the Ultra is the one that
I've been testing. It features the brand new two hundred
megapixel camera. It also has a really high price tag
of twelve hundred dollars. That is, should you buy it,
should you upgrade? Well, to test it out, I took

(37:40):
over five hundred photos and one hundred and seventy five
videos with the phone and a whole bunch of different
places that happened to be in San Francisco, LA and
the New York area since I was home, so I
went to New York City to test this thing out
as well. I really wanted to try out the photos
in low light because Samsung's promoting this whole idea of nicography.
I don't know if that's a word they made up.
I guess that means nighttime photos. And I also thought

(38:04):
that this device is a little bit easier to hold
because of the squared off edges, which I like because
I actually wrote in my last review that the last
couple of Samsungs have been tougher to hold because of
the edges are kind of rounded. The S twenty three
Ultra is the one that I would pick if I
was going with one of these Samsungs, and the reason
for that is because it gives you everything. I mean, really,
this is like the Rolls Royce of smartphones. You know,

(38:28):
you get the giant six point eight in screen, you
get the long lasting battery, you get the stylus. Now,
the S twenty three and the S twenty three plus
are fine if you're upgrading from one of those models,
but if you want everything that Samsung has to offer,
the Ultra is where it's at. So how were the pictures, Well,
for starters, you're not going to be taking two hundred
megapixel pictures. That's I mean, you can, but those pictures

(38:50):
are like thirty five megabytes each. They take a little
bit to actually capture and they look great if you're
zooming in on your picture or do you want to
crop it, or if you're making billboards out of your photos.
But otherwise, on a daily basis, you're going to be
you're going to be taking twelve megapixel photos. They've got
lenses for ultra wide pictures, regular and macro shots. The

(39:11):
zoom is really incredible on this phone because even though
it goes up to one hundred times zoom, that's more
of a party trick. You're going to be most interested
in zoom up to ten times, which is amazing because
that's optical, and even up to thirty times is pretty useful.
So if you are sitting, you know, further back, or
you just want to get a better shot of something.
The ten times zoom is quite remarkable, so that's really nice. Now,

(39:33):
the low light shots are where I have a little
bit of issue with this phone, because if something's not moving,
it's going to look great. So low light shots in
you know, steady things like a restaurant or anything that's
outside or anything inside that's not moving or going to
look good. The camera gets enough light to sort of
make those look good. But if things are moving, that's

(39:55):
where it gets a bit more tricky. And this really
kind of annoys me because this is such a nice,
expensive phone. I feel like every picture should be perfect
every single time, and they're not. Sometimes there's gonna be
some blur when you take a picture in low light,
and you know, you may have to take a second
picture to see if that goes away. Hopefully they can
fix that with a software update. Sometimes photos of people

(40:16):
might look washed out in certain lighting conditions. I noticed
that outdoor pictures, well lit shots, they're always going to
look incredible. Samsung really nails it there with low light selfies.
It's kind of another story. Sometimes the phone gets it right.
Sometimes you get a blurry picture, So just to hold
your phone for a little bit longer they might think
if you're taking a selfie with this. Now, when it
comes to video, we actually shot an entire story for

(40:38):
KTLA on this phone, and you know, it looked fine,
but it was a bit flat and a little less
contrasty than the iPhone. The iPhone is still the king
of mobile video, that's for sure. When it comes to
video stability, it is incredible. Samsung says they improve this stability.
They really did, so the stability of the video is
really really good. Now. Portrait Mode, which is another feature

(40:59):
on this phone which blurs the background, that is amazing.
You can take I mean some of your best pictures
are going to be portrait mode pictures. It's just really
really good. And there's so many neat little things you
can do with the portrait mode pictures once you're once
you've taken them, like you can adjust the background in
so many different ways. That's really cool. Portrait video is
similar to a portrait photo, except it's video that's improved

(41:21):
a lot. And overall, I think that this is an
excellent camera system. I really do. It's a fun phone.
It's one of my favorites. It's probably going to be
my favorite of twenty twenty three after the iPhone. And
I think that Samsung will continue to tweak. I mean
they I think Samsung with their software updates is doing
really good things. Like a phone like last year's S

(41:41):
twenty one. It started out or S twenty two, rather
started out okay, and by the end of the year
it was excellent. So these phones last for a long time.
You've got a couple of years of use, like four
or five years. So this is a new sensor setup.
It's going to take some time for them to kind
of see how people are using it and adjust. Soottom line,
if you love using various software, photo and video features,

(42:03):
you're gonna love this phone. It doesn't always nail the
photo or video the first time like it would on
the iPhone, the latest iPhones, or the Pixel, but it's
still a very powerful device that gives you just about
every feature you can imagine in the palm of your hand.
If you want to watch my review, my video review
with all the pictures that I took, you can go
to my Twitter or go actually go to my website.

(42:23):
Rich on tech dot TV. All right, let's go to
Mike in Duarte, California. Mike, you're on with Rich.

Speaker 5 (42:31):
How you doing Rich?

Speaker 1 (42:32):
I am doing fantastic. How are you?

Speaker 5 (42:35):
A couple things?

Speaker 6 (42:35):
You?

Speaker 5 (42:35):
No, I have the same problem as you with streaming
on a Friday night and nothing on. And so my
uncle reminded me of a legacy device that you can
get literally millions of titles on. He called it a book.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
Yes, that's what I told my kids the other day
when they were bored, I said, go read a book.
You can. You can explore the world on those pages.

Speaker 5 (43:00):
And I'm a big I have many books and I'm
always searching the TV and I've never read that book.
But yeah, I have the same problem.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
What can I help you with today?

Speaker 5 (43:12):
Well, I couple of things. Purchased a new Android and
my old one still I'm able to stream via uh,
you know, picking off my cable Wi Fi. Is there
any security issue with using my old phone around the
house for doing that now that I have a new Android?

Speaker 1 (43:33):
No, I don't. I don't see any reason why that
would be a problem. What have you so, you took
the SIM out of the old phone or you activated
the new phone. This one just has Wi Fi. It's
Wi Fi only, right, correct, Yeah, I mean I don't.
I don't see any danger or issue with that at all.
And now have you turned off the mobile like data
on it? Have you turned off like like just left

(43:54):
it in.

Speaker 5 (43:57):
They did it at the shop. I think I'll gouble
check that.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
But yeah, So what I would do is I would
just flip the phone into like airplane mode and then
just turn on Wi Fi and do it that way,
so that way you're not you don't have that antenna,
the cellular antenna firing like it's just not functional, so
you don't need it, I see. And if you need Bluetooth,
you can you turn that on. But yeah, that's what
I would do, is just now I would take it

(44:20):
a step further. I would probably wipe the whole phone
and start fresh and just install the apps, only the
apps that you need on there, so that you're not,
you know, getting double notifications and all that stuff on
this phone from your old.

Speaker 5 (44:32):
I was concerned about deleting the contacts on my phone,
thinking well, is that going to carry over into my
new phone and delete the contacts from there too.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
It depends where they're stored. Are using. It's an Android,
so they're typically stored on Google, so you should be
able to format that phone. But if you delete individual
contacts and they are linked to your Google account, they
would delete off your other phone. But now if you
just factory format the phone, it's not going to delete them.
And by the way, if you want to check to
see where your contacts are are if they're stored on Google,

(45:04):
you can go to contacts dot Google dot com from
a web browser and as long as you're logged into Google,
you should see uh and have a pretty good idea
if your contacts are stored on Google or if they're
just on your phone.

Speaker 5 (45:17):
Perfect. One quick question? Do I need carbonide if I'm
using one drive on my home PC?

Speaker 1 (45:24):
Now you didn't say you had another question. I'm have
to charge you for the second question.

Speaker 5 (45:28):
Uh, Leo, let me ask you.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
Okay, we'll let it slide because Leo would do it.
All right? Fine, do you need carbonit if you're using
one drive? It depends what you're backing up. I mean
carbonite is more of a full solution for what you're
backing up, whereas one drive is more of a you know,
one drive is more of like just your photos and
you know, whatever you're putting up into there. So are

(45:51):
you backing up your entire computer or just photos.

Speaker 5 (45:54):
The entire computer?

Speaker 1 (45:55):
Right, Okay, then I'd probably stick with carbonite because that's
going to be an entire computer solution now for me personally,
Like I used to back up my entire computer, but
at this point I don't really need that anymore because
everything's in the cloud. So for me, I just use
the individual cloud services to back up things on my computer,
whether it's the documents, whether it's the photos. So I

(46:18):
don't really do like a full computer backup anymore because
when I'm getting a new computer, I just want to
start fresh. Anyway, so good, I think I'll keep it
for a while.

Speaker 5 (46:28):
Well, thank you very much, and you have a greet weekend.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
All right, Mike, you too, Thanks so much for calling today.
All right, Coming up next, got a lot to talk
about a great app called fly Finn. We've got the
CEO and co founder Jdeep Sing. He's gonna tell us
how you can find and keep track of all your
write offs, especially if you're a freelancer. This is a
very handy app. We're going to talk to jdep Plus
I'm gonna talk about dark patterns. What is it dark pattern.

(46:54):
We're gonna talk about that coming up next, plus more
of your calls at triple eight rich one oh one
eight eight seven four two four to one zero one.
You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to
rich on Tech. My name is rich jamiro hanging out
with you, talking technology and answering your questions at eight

(47:14):
eight eight rich one oh one. You can find me
online at richon Tech dot tv, or on social media
at rich on Tech. Usually every week I tell you
what I've been posting to my Instagram. Let's see what
did I post this week? Uh Oh, I had to
check folks a little bit. I had to check people

(47:37):
were asking was I okay because I posted? You know,
I just I just want to anytime I do a
story that people don't agree with, whether it's like a
robot driving a car, or a robot flipping burgers, or
a robot doing some kind of job that humans can do,
you know, I get the haters and the people commenting
and telling me I shouldn't cover this stuff and I'm

(47:57):
ruining the world and I'm getting rid of job, and
so I just had to tell people like, look, I'm
not the one inventing this stuff. I'm just reporting on
it so you're not blindsided when they come for your jobs.
The robots are coming for your jobs. Now AI is
coming for your job. I'm just telling you in advance
so that you're prepared and you can plan accordingly. So
I just had to let people know that. So I

(48:19):
posted that, posted a picture of me and my siblings,
me and my wife for Valentine's Day, and then yeah me,
oh gosh, a lot of me this week, and then
me at KTLA. Know I'm the tech reporter for KTLA
Channel five in Los Angeles, and this week was my
is I should say, my twelve year anniversary there. Twelve

(48:39):
years in one place at one job. Remarkable for me
because when I was first offered the gig there, they
said I could have it for like three months. So
I'm glad it's lasted this long. Let's go to Kenny
in Nashville, Tennessee. Kenny, you're on with Rich.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
Hey, rich to going, and first of all, congratulations on
being on KTLA TV for twelve years. Another twenty eight
then you can catch Fred Rogan.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Oh my gosh, I don't you know. I interned at
CANBC when I was in college and Fred was one
of the people I shadowed, and he was great. I mean,
I couldn't gosh. Back then, they printed out scripts that
were on like five different piece of paper that were
like different colors, and you would have someone they called
it a script ripper. They would take the scripts and

(49:30):
they would rip them apart and divide them. Anyway, Fred
was a nice guy, so or still is. I mean,
I just don't know anymore. But anyway, what can I
help you with?

Speaker 3 (49:40):
Well, I've been calling because I've noticed more and more
and I know that I'm probably not the only one
that has this problem, but i have an Apple TV
four K second generation model, and I've noticed more and
more that there's been problems with YouTube TV as far
as buffering on certain parts of the day. Now, I've
probably noticed it because as it was NFL season, and

(50:01):
also considering that they just made a deal to get NFL,
the timing cannot be more interesting from that perspective. And
I should let you know that I have other devices
with YouTube TV and it doesn't do anything bad as
far as buffering and what I mean, it's like you
see that white circle of death when you're watching a
video and it stops. And my question is, I've been

(50:26):
kind of debating maybe it's the time for me to
get the third generation four K model, or should I
just maybe try different tricks, like say, delete the app
per se, or maybe just swipe the TV itself and
restore it and maybe see if that could solve the
problem with the buffering.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
It's interesting because we had a very similar question a
couple of weeks ago, and now I'm wondering if there's
a pattern here. Now I have YouTube TV on my
Apple TV, and I had both the four K. Now,
I know they just came out with the new four K.
It was the last one, the first generation of the
SEC I can't remember.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
But they based the third generation model.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
Okay, so there's there's been two generations of four K.
I think the one was in twenty seventeen and the
other one was just recently November. So I just upgraded
to the new one. And anyway, my point is I
haven't had a problem with either of them, so I'm
not sure if it's an isolated thing or if it's
your networth thing. Now, what I would do is troubleshoot
the situation. So you mentioned that YouTube TV works on

(51:27):
your other devices. So with that in mind, it seems
like it's a problem with the Apple TV. So what
I would do with the Apple TV is a couple
of things. Number one, is this connected via Wi Fi
or an Ethernet cable?

Speaker 3 (51:39):
It's connected via Wi Fi?

Speaker 1 (51:41):
Okay? Is there is there an Ethernet connection on the
on the first generation of this four K there is, right, I.

Speaker 3 (51:48):
Believe so, yeah, because I know that in the second generation.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Well, with the new one, the most recent one, I
think the Ethernet is an option, like you have to
you have to get the one with the ethernet. Yeah,
So what I would do is, since you still have that,
I would plug it in via Ethernet and turn off
the Wi Fi and see if the problem still happens. Now,
the other thing you mentioned is that this problem seems
to happen at certain times during the day. Do you

(52:12):
have cable or fiber?

Speaker 3 (52:15):
I have fiber basically, okay, So.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
If you have fiber, then that's not really an ishue.
I was gonna say. With cable, it's more of a
shared connection, so it sometimes could buffer at different times
of the day. But fiber is pretty much just to you,
so it's not that shouldn't be a problem.

Speaker 3 (52:28):
Yeah, Well, basically I have like gig Internet, but it's
provided by a company that also does cable as well,
so I don't know if that kind of helps you
out in that regard.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
But if it's fiber, it probably is more of a
direct connection, so I think that's not the issue here.
And if you're also on a fiber connection that's pretty fast,
there shouldn't be any buffering whatsoever with that. So here's
what I would do. I think the old Apple TV
that you have is still fine. I mean, it's you know,
it's going on a couple of years old. You can
upgrade if you want, but the problem may persist. If

(52:58):
you're not seeing this problem an other apps, then I
think it's a problem with the YouTube TV app. So
what I would do personally is I'd first test the
wired connection, see if that's contributing. If you're still getting
buffering with that, I would go ahead and delete the
YouTube app YouTube TV completely. I would restart the Apple
TV and then I would reinstall the app and see

(53:19):
if that works. Have you done all that?

Speaker 3 (53:23):
Well, I may as well tried that and see what happens.
But that's real good advice there. I figured that's probably
the advice that you had there, and I'll definitely keep
that in mind. And I'll let you go because I
know he's getting close to a heartbreak. Have a little
bit of red experience in knowing that myself. But you're
having a good show so far in your first few weeks.
I wanted to kind of let you know that, and

(53:44):
you have a good risk of the day.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
All right, Thanks so much, Kenny. I'm actually gonna be
in Nashville later this year, so that's going to be exciting.
I love Nashville. What a great city. All right. Let
me just tell you if you have T Mobile real quick,
they are updating their automatic payment rules according to c
and if you are paying by a credit card, you're
no longer going to get your auto paid discount. So

(54:06):
according to c Net, they confirm that starting as early
as May, you're only going to get your auto paid
discount if you use a debit card or a bank account.
This is similar to what Verizon does. You've got to
pay with your basically your checking account or your debit card
to get your auto paid discount. So if you have
T Mobile, you might want to think about switching over
to a debit card or your checking I would personally

(54:28):
use a debit card, not your checking account. I don't
like to give companies access to my checking account, but
that is what's happening here. So the reason why it
costs them more to process credit cards, You've got eighty
million customers. Even if you save a dime on each customer,
you're saving a lot of money by making people switch
to debit cards or checking accounts, which are cheaper to process.

(54:48):
All right, Coming up next, we're going to talk to
the CEO of fly Finn about an app that can
help you find and manage your tax deductions. You're listening
to Rich DeMuro here on rich on Tech. Welcome back
to rich on Tech. This is the show where I
talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about.
It's also the place where I answer your questions about technology.

(55:12):
The phone number is triple eight rich one oh one.
That's eight eight seven four to two four to one
zero one. All right. On the line is Ja Deep
saying he is the co founder of fly Finn. This
is an app that uses artificial intelligence to help you

(55:33):
keep track of basically all of your write offs and
expenses and things for your taxes, and it is tax season.
J Deep, welcome to the show.

Speaker 5 (55:43):
Thank you, Rich.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
So tell me about fly Finn. This is an app.
I actually discovered this app through an ad on Instagram
of all places, and quickly downloaded it and tried it out.
And it's quite good. We've heard so much about AI
in the past couple of weeks and this uses it
to sort of categorize transactions and really help you just
get through your taxes very quickly. Tell me about the app.

Speaker 6 (56:11):
Yeah, first of all, which is often that you discovered
the app and have tried it. It's you know, gives
you a lot more contexts. It's a little an interesting product.
That is, I would say in some way it completely
changes the experience for ten nine and nine taxes people.
You know in the gig economy there's about seventy million
about now, and that's the economy, and it's the fascist

(56:34):
changing textor and taxes of ten n nine workers, free vancers,
entrepreneurs seven point. It's just complicated because you have a
competative schedulcy. You have to be like a small business
and lipan do a few things really uniquely that makes
the whole experience completely different and very very useful. Basically

(56:59):
uses AI to do everything really efficiently. So what that
means is, once you connect with life and it's always
gone right, it's doing your AI book keeping every day
for you know, soci providers, entrepreneur, self employed people, and
you can see your tax savings daily, weekly, monthly, refine

(57:21):
people in all different categories, and it's mostly doing it
for you and you just get to review if your
think really kind of also learn along the way. That's
the second really important thing because we have CPAs integrated
right in the app flow and great tutorial. So while
you're reeping the product, you know AI is doing the

(57:42):
classification of expenses into deductions. You're seeing how you know,
things are changing every day, are learning about new deductions,
and when it comes to this season of the year,
you have a MP to end tax finance system. All
of this goes close automatically into our CPA and you
get a you know, really worl expert CPA. You've got

(58:03):
all the data in place, they don't need to ask
you to any other questions, so it's very time efficient
and they can buy the taxticon for you at you
know a really affordable price of under two hundred dollars,
so everything for the AI.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
And the tax filing, all right, So let me let
me explain. Let me explain how the app works real quick.
Just so if you're listening your you're you know, understanding it.
So it basically connects to your accounts. You can connect
your credit card or your bank accounts, and then all
of your transactions filter into the app. So whether you
bought something at Target, whether you bought something at Amazon,

(58:36):
and then it kind of works like Tinder almost where
you swipe left or you swipe right. So if you
swipe left, you're rejecting that as something that is not
business related or related to your freelance jobs. If you're
let's say an Uber driver, or you do something in
the gig economy, and you swipe right, and then you
can categorize it, and so it knows that, you know,
if you bought something at let's say, uh an airline,

(58:59):
it would say, okay, we're thinking that this goes into
the travel category, and the AI helps categorize that, and
it learns over time you know what these different transactions mean.
From obviously other people using the app as well, and categorizing,
but there's also this little light bulb that you can
press that explains kind of like the tax implications of everything. So,
for instance, I'm looking at convenience and grocery stores. Grocery

(59:21):
and convenience store items can only be deducted if used
for your business, and so you can do that for
almost any sort of category that you see on the app.
And so just that idea of like categorizing your transactions
as you go along throughout the year is really helpful.
But if there's a question you have, you can sort
of fling it up to a CPA that fly Finn

(59:42):
has on the backside, so you can ask a question
and say, hey, I subscribe to you know, Netflix, Can
I deduct this from my job reviewing movies? And the
CPA will come back and give you an answer on that. So,
jdep did I do a good job of explaining that.

Speaker 6 (59:59):
I think that was fantastic job and you kind of
really made it good even for me. And that's exactly
how it works. The cps integrated right and like you said,
slipe up if you're unsure light bulb wasn't enough, and
you can get an answer and move right along.

Speaker 1 (01:00:14):
So you've got the combination of AI plus the CPAs.
I think that's really the magical moment for me on
this app, that it's you know, you've got a real
human there if you need them to kind of explain things,
because taxes are very, very complicated for some unknown reason.

Speaker 6 (01:00:33):
Exactly. And you know, I've been an AI guy my
entire career, but I have to tell you AI have
limitsed right even as you see chat GPT today. It
makes us better. So in my experience, it's always AI
combined the smart human beings that mantlus machine that produces
the best experience resolves to save a ton of time
and get things done right where you can just relax

(01:00:56):
and it's things that be taken care for you.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Who do you think an app like this is good for?
Because you know there's stuff like TurboTax that helps you
do your taxes at the end of the year, but
this is more of like a daily kind of use
case scenario. Who do you think this is good for?

Speaker 6 (01:01:11):
Yeah, it's actually it's not good for everyone, To be
honest with you. If you have this is straightforward W
two income triple tax is a great product, right, But
if you have a complicated tax return. For these seventy
million Americans or in the data economy, taxes are really complicated.
Most of them who can afford to end up going
to CPAs. So it's really great for people who have

(01:01:32):
to spend ten hours, twenty hours putting together spreadsheets, getting
the shoe box of receipts, then building into the CPA
and having them do their taxi turns southing I'm sure
about what they did. In this case, you can throw
that shoe box receipts out the door because we're getting
a digital transaction beyond eater seats. And the app is
you know, you can classify a year's work of expenses

(01:01:54):
and rich How long did it take you, I'm curious.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
Yeah, when I downloaded the app the first time, when
I linked up my accounts. What I like too is
that it kind of groups things. So if you have
a recurring charge, like let's say your phone bill or
your internet bill, once you classify that, once it says, hey,
you've got you know, twelve of these bills from AT
and T and you say, okay, that's my internet, and
then you can classify all of those in one swipe,

(01:02:20):
which is also really smart so it only took me
twenty to thirty minutes to go through the entire twenty
twenty two worth of expenses.

Speaker 6 (01:02:28):
Exactly, and going forward as the use of the spirit,
you would have probably won't recognize. It's just like you said,
it's kind of like Kinder. It's fun at the end
of the week, whenever you get two minutes or thirty
seconds to just go through what's transpired this week, what
is AI suggesting that you take as reductions and you
learn along the way, and it's it's kind of fun.
You're saving money. You know what's not fun about spending money,

(01:02:50):
and you know it is. It's amazing that you did
in twenty thirty minutes. It's fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
And you also kind of have a fun, you know,
attitude on your social media where you explain to folks
on like Instagram and Twitter, like here are some of
the deductions you can take. Here are some of the
different you know, you kind of give like little mini lessons,
but in a very social media tiktoki kind of way, right.

Speaker 6 (01:03:14):
Exactly. I mean, if you think about it, one of
the most boring subjects in the world is taxes, right,
So to kill that board, please try to make it
as fun as possible. What's going to be happened, just
like you said on Instagram, where you know, you get
real people to talk about stuff. Not even though we
have some manyvpas, it's not just boring CPA lecturing people.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
Now, what type of costs are we talking about for
this app? I know you can pay like monthly or yearly.
What type of costs are we talking about here?

Speaker 6 (01:03:44):
Yeah? So you know the plan actually even subscribed, is
an annual plan because taxes are done in an annual basis.
So we have three different plans. A basic plan where
if you have a CPA or a different method of
it in taxes, you can just use the AI and
basically is about seven dollars a month, which is about

(01:04:05):
eighty four dollars for the year.

Speaker 2 (01:04:07):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:04:08):
Then you have a standard plan which is sixteen or
one ninety two for the year. And in that not
only do you get the old AI that you get
a CPA to file your taxes, you can uploidly documents
digitally really easily. CP prepares everything just like you know,
and with any normal DPA, you review your taxi trends,
sign it and you filo. So that's the basic plan.

(01:04:31):
And if you have a little bit more complicated business
where you have some s quotes LLCs, you take care
of those as well. And this is include the state
and general a very clear concern pricing, and that is
about three hundred and forty eight dollars twenty dollars a
month for order if you have an LLC and S quotes.

(01:04:52):
But again, it's a CPA let filing and AI is
doing all the grunt work and the hard works for you,
and the app is kind of making it fun for you.

Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
The app does make it fun. We're gonna leave it there.
Jadeep Singh, co founder of fly Finn. I love swiping
through my expenses and saying was that a business expense?
Was that a personal expense? It is kind of fun.
I don't know how you made taxes fun, but you did.
Although I haven't filed yet, so I guess I'll tell
you if they're fun at the end of the year
or at the end of the you know, the filing season.
Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it all. Right,

(01:05:20):
coming up on the show, we're going to talk about
dark patterns, So I'm gonna explain what that is plus
more of your calls at triple eight rich one oh
one eighty eight eight seven four to two four one
zero one. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back
to rich on Tech. Phone lines are open at triple
eight rich one oh one. If you're listening to the

(01:05:41):
last segment about the tax app. You can always find
links to what I mentioned here on my website. It
is rich on Tech dot TV, Wall Street Journal article
my wife sent me this morning she thought was interesting.
It's titled they Found a Radical Cure for Loneliness the
Phone Call. And you know, my wife's a counselor, and

(01:06:03):
I thought this was really interesting because I think about
this all the time. I have all these text chains
going with my friends, and you know, we text once
in a while, right, It's just like these little pops
throughout your day and you feel like you're connected with
your friends, But are you really connected with your friends?
And then I go out for a drink with my
friend or I hang out with them for even you know,

(01:06:25):
a short amount of time an hour just to catch up,
or even if I call them on the phone, and
I feel like, wow, I've learned so much about you
in the past thirty minutes. We've been texting for the
last two months, and just by hanging out, you feel
that closeness and you feel that connection with someone. And
so I guess I'm not the only one. So this

(01:06:46):
article from Julie Jargon, one of their Family Tech columnists,
talks about how these little, short written updates feel very
transactional between people, and she kind of positioned this with
women in her article, but I think this applies to
men too. I think that, you know, the thesis of
the whole article is that people are texting a lot,

(01:07:07):
but they're not connecting a lot. And so she interviewed
a few folks that actually started connecting with their friends
in bigger ways, notably phone calls where you actually talk
to someone or hanging out with them in person, and
they found that their relationship and how they felt as
a human was actually better. They felt happier. And I

(01:07:27):
agree with this one hundred percent. I'm not saying it's easy.
Believe me, I always have plans to go out with
people and hang out and sometimes it just doesn't happen.
But I'll do this thing sometimes where my friend the
other day we were texting in the airport and he said,
give me a call when you have a chance. And
you know, because I was asking him something, and typically
I would put off that call for a long time
and I'd say, ah, I'll call Dave when I have

(01:07:48):
the chance to call him. But I was like, you
know what, I'm gonna call Dave right now. I'm in
the airport, I'm waiting for my plane. And I did
and it was great. We caught up, we chatted, We
had a great conversation, and I you know, we exchanged
more in that twenty thirty minutes of chatting than we
would have over one thousand text messages. And so I
guess my thesis is call your friends, hang out with

(01:08:12):
your friends. I know we do this thing where anytime
someone wants to talk to you, they have to text
you and say when's a good time to call surprise someone,
just call them up and see what happens. I like
to do this, and guess what, ninety percent of the
time my phone call goes to voicemail because they they
just send it to voicemail because they're not expecting me
to call them. It's why when did we take this

(01:08:32):
turn in this world where calling someone is a surprise right,
and you've gotten the thing where you call someone and
they text you right back, say hey, I can't talk
right now in a meeting, or I'll call you back later,
and then that call never happens. So I don't know.
I feel like this whole world of like connecting with folks.
We feel like we're connected, but actually connect. That's my thesis.

(01:08:56):
We're connected with you on the rich On Tech Show,
more of your phone calls at trip late rich one
on one eighty eight seven four to two, four to
one zero one. Coming up, I'll tell you about dark
patterns and why you should be aware of them. You're
listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
My name is Richdimiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five
in Los Angeles, here on the radio with you, talking technology,

(01:09:20):
answering your calls, and just here for you. You got
a question about tech, give me a call. The phone
lines are open. It's eight eighty eight rich one oh
one eighty eight seven four to two, four to one
zero one. Now I mentioned earlier in the show, I
was home in New Jersey with my family. Uh I

(01:09:42):
say my family, I mean, like you know, I've got
my family in Los Angeles. But I mean my family
I grew up with in New Jersey, like my mom,
my dad, my brother, and my sisters. There's five of us,
by the way, well seven if you include my parents,
So yeah, there's I grew up with four siblings. So
it's always a party when we get together. I mean
there's just a lot of us. Now, of course, you've

(01:10:04):
got significant others, you've got kids, you've got girlfriend's boyfriends,
You've got all kinds of folks. So literally, when we
get together, it's a party instantly, which is really fun.
It's just always been that way. Can get kind of
rowdy too, but that's a whole nother story. So when
I'm home, and I'm sure if you are at all

(01:10:25):
techie in your life, and by the way, this show
is for techies and non techies. It's not just for
tech folks. It's for just regular people that are struggling
with technology, just like we all are sometimes. But when
I'm home, I have, of course become the de facto
tech support for my parents. I told you about my
mom and her internet. Now, my dad, I was helping

(01:10:45):
him out with a couple of things online, and namely
we were changing his password manager. He was just telling
me that certain things didn't work on his computer, and
so I was just kind of going through cleaning things
up there, and it occurred to me one of the
things that we tried to do was get his Google
Photos figured out. He's got like a couple different accounts,
and I was like, all right, let's consolidate some things.

(01:11:07):
And then he said his space was running out on
one account, and so he wanted to clean up some
storage on there, and so I said, all right, let's
let me show you how to clean up some storage.
So with Google, you can go to one dot Google
dot com, ohne dot Google dot com. And while I
watched him do this, you know, a couple things emerged.
Number One, a lot of people search for things versus

(01:11:28):
actually going into the website itself. So if you go
on Chrome and you start typing like one dot Google
dot com, like I would press enter to go to
directly that website, but a lot of people actually will
click the option to search, and so now all of
a sudden, you're in this search on Google. And that
could lead to a lot of not so good things

(01:11:49):
because it may lead to a website that's not the
one you intended to go to and all this different stuff,
and I watched that happen with him and also with
the one dot Google dot com. Once we got onto
that website, I couldn't believe how many different things, you know,
pop ups and messages and things we're kind of misleading,
all getting him to try to subscribe to pay for

(01:12:11):
more storage versus what we went there for, which was
to clean out some of the things we don't need
in that storage. And so it really got me to thinking,
like how there are just so many roadblocks in our
way when we're online. Like these companies, I don't want
to say they mislead us, but they definitely try to
lead us down a path other than the one that

(01:12:32):
was intended for us. Right, Like, we're trying to do
one thing and they're trying to steer us to another thing,
and ninety nine percent of the time it's to separate
us from our money. That's like the entire point. Even
Google itself. I mean, I love Google, but and I've
talked about this before, but if you do a Google search,
I mean the top links are all sponsored paid ads,
which is fine, the company has to make money, but

(01:12:52):
you would be surprised how many people just click on
the first link thinking that's the link that is the
first result, when in actuality, you have to scroll down
past these sponsored links to get to the actual what
we call organic web result, the first result for that website.
So anyway, I tell you all this because somehow I
was on a website called Consumer World, which I really

(01:13:14):
like because I check it on a daily basis, and
they linked up with an explainer website called Merchantmachine dot
co dot uk and they've got a whole sort of
explainer on dark patterns. And dark patterns are what I'm
talking about. It's when the website is engineered to make

(01:13:35):
you do a certain thing, and you've had this happen
to you when you're reading a pop up on the
web and you're like, wait a second, do I click
yes or do I click no? It's kind of like,
if you live in California, we have these things called
propositions that they do during voting, and they're all worded
in a way where like you're not really sure how
you should vote because you're not really sure if a

(01:13:56):
yes is a no, if a no is a yes.
If supporting it is good, supporting it is bad. So
it's called a dark pattern. These were identified back in
twenty ten. Apparently they're used by shopping websites and they
include misleading ads, misdirection, and tricking customers into a subscription
that's nearly impossible to get out of. And these are
all over the web. So this Merchant Machine kind of

(01:14:19):
looked at a bunch of different major online retailers to
figure out who are the worst offenders. They visited seventy
two online retailers. Who's the worst defender? If you can
believe it, Amazon dot Com is number one. Now that's
interesting that they came up with that. They noticed eleven
dark patterns on Amazon's website. HP and Dell were the

(01:14:42):
most manipulative electronics retailers online. Instacart was the worst offender
for grocery retailers, and when it came to beauty retailers,
they had the most dark patterns on their website. So
overall beauty retailers were really bad. So how do you
identify a dark pattern? Let's talk about this. The number

(01:15:03):
one thing, according to Merchant Machine, is a trick question.
This is a question that appears to be worded in
a way that actually asks something else. So it tricks
you into giving the answer the company would prefer. For example,
are you sure you don't want to cancel your subscription?
And you say, wait what? And often when you're trying
to cancel something, the answer that's like highlighted in green

(01:15:26):
is really like, we'll keep you subscribed. That's kind of
the best way to describe that. Number Two sneak into basket.
A store adds something unwanted into your basket without you realizing.
So sometimes you may have to say no to something
and that you don't notice that. And so this is
one of those examples where you get a product in
your basket and you're like, wait a second, I don't

(01:15:48):
remember putting that in, but you just didn't take it
out a roach motel. This is an online service that
creates a situation that's easy to get into but hard
to get out to. This is something that I always
always look out for. And what this happens with is
a lot of newspaper subscriptions are like this where it
is super easy to sign up in one click online,

(01:16:09):
but guess what to get out of that you have
to call in or email. So my advice here is
whenever you're subscribing to anything online. I always go to
the fact the FAQ page and I look to see
what are the cancelation terms? How do I cancel this
service or product? And if it has anything about calling
in or emailing or getting on the phone with a representative.

(01:16:31):
Uh huh. I want to make sure that cancelation is
just as easy as signing up. And in fact, I
just did sign up for something recently that I knew,
Like I looked at the cancelation and of course subscribing
as easy. Canceling, I've got to email someone and I
ended up doing it because you know, I just go
in there knowing that price comparison prevention. So an online

(01:16:55):
store makes it difficult to directly compare similar products by
concealing single unit prices on bulk buy items. So this
happens on Amazon. Sometimes it's like, oh, three of these
products for you know, seventeen dollars, but you're like, well,
how much is this one? Like now I got to
do this math because Walmart's selling it for this price,
and you know, I just want to see how much
is it for one? Hidden costs This is when you're

(01:17:17):
at checkout and your product becomes a little bit more
expensive because of hidden costs. They add on a processing fee,
you know, not necessarily a shipping fee, because shipping is free,
but there's some sort of processing fee. This happens with
hotels all the time, obviously, with those those resort fees
that are just wild. This happened to me in real life.
By the way, dark patterns are not just online. I

(01:17:39):
was at a restaurant a couple weeks ago and I
got my bill and I was going down the bill
and I couldn't believe I'd never seen this before. They
had this eighteen percent surcharge that was mixed into the bill,
and it was written in exactly the same text as
something I had ordered. So I was going down, I
was like, all right, I got that burger, I got
those fries, and then all of this sudden, this eighteen

(01:18:00):
percent you know, service tip charged thing was in there.
I was like, oh, that's kind of tricky because it
was written in the same exact font as an item.
Typically when they add the service charge on, it's in
like a bigger thing down at the bottom. And then
the best part was when I got my bill with
the tip area it had the other part had vanished,
so now it just said like total and then tip,
So if you weren't really paying attention, you'd be tipping

(01:18:23):
twice on this bill. And so I thought that was
kind of interesting. I'd not really seen that before. The
other thing disguised ads website artwork or links that looks
like regular content, but it's actually an advertisement that can
happen on Amazon. You can see and then Force Continuity,
a service provides you to put your credit card details

(01:18:44):
up front and then continues to charge you when you
no longer want it like a free trial. And we're
going to talk about some of the ways you can
get around that later on with my guest Jared Newman.
He's got some tips on how to do that, so
he'll be a great guest. He's one of the few
newsletters I get or actually open it up every single
time when I read it. So Jared's going to be
joining us later in the show this hour. Plus I'm

(01:19:05):
gonna tell you about some websites that can generate AI artwork.
I know AI has been in the news. We talked
about AI tax app, We've talked about bing Ai. Yeah,
AI is a very big thing these days, so we'll
talk about that coming up. Plus more of your calls.
I do have a couple of lines open right now,
So if you have a question about technology, give me
a call. The phone number is eight eight eight rich

(01:19:27):
one oh one. That's triple eight seven four to two,
four to one zero one. Rich on Tech continues after this,
Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is rich Demiro,
tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles, California.

(01:19:47):
Online at rich on Tech on social media and connecting
with you at triple eight rich one oh one. That's
eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one
zero one. Dow that question. Dial that phone number if
you have a question. That's exactly what Christina and bonsall
am I saying that right.

Speaker 7 (01:20:09):
Yes you are. That's perfect. Usually people don't pronounce it correctly.

Speaker 1 (01:20:13):
Oh well, I pronounce everything wrong. So I guess my
jersey came in handy this time.

Speaker 7 (01:20:18):
Now you did great. Hey, I'm thrilled you're the tech
guy and I know you're organized. So this is my question.
I have two small businesses and I have a gazillion receipts.
The two things I've done in the past is I
take the receipts on eight and a half by eleven

(01:20:38):
copy them and saved them to forward, you know, just
save for the I R. This is all IRS.

Speaker 1 (01:20:43):
Sure?

Speaker 7 (01:20:43):
Yeah, then I thought this is crazy because I know
that they will eventually fade out. So now what I'm
doing is I'm taping them on just a sheet of
paper and saving them. But that's crazy. So my question
to you, Rich is is there another way that I
can go about doing this? Now what I do is

(01:21:05):
I write with a pen on there, you know, the date,
the amount where it want you. That may not even
be acceptable because the rest of it will fade. Do
you have anything else you could offer for to do
it quickly and be done with it and not be
finding what the vis receipts.

Speaker 1 (01:21:23):
Well, first off, kudos to you for being so on
top of things. I mean, that is incredible that you're doing.
I mean the fact that you're taping all these things
to paper and you know, keeping them all organized. That's
probably more than like ninety nine percent of people do.

Speaker 7 (01:21:36):
Now, I know, I think it's just crazy and paranoid
to the IR.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
Yeah, I hear you. And now I'm not I'm not
a tax expert, so I can't you know, I can't
give you financial advice. But I can tell you I'm
not you know some of the things that I think
would help you in this situation. And you know, I'm
I know that the IRS takes digital receipts, like they
will accept a digital scan of a receipt. So that

(01:22:00):
so that's the number one thing you need to do
is you've got to get these digital. So there's a
couple there's many many ways you can do this. So
and there's two kind of things that we're looking at here.
Do you want to just scan these in and just
have them in some sort of file on your computer
just for safekeeping, or do you want to organize them
with some sort of app. Those are two different things,
and I'm gonna explain both of those situations. So if

(01:22:21):
you just want to sort of, you know, scan these in, there,
there's three things I'd recommend you can use just a
standard iPhone. If you go into the files app on
the iPhone, you can just create a new folder on
your phone, or I would do it an iCloud drive
if I were you, because you want these in the cloud,
and you can just tap in the upper right hand corner,

(01:22:43):
there's a three dots inside a circle and it says
scan documents. So the iPhone has a built in scanner
on the phone. You can also use the notes app
on the iPhone, but I personally would not do that
in this case because I think you're going to want
to create a separate file or a separate yeah, separate
file inside folders for every one of these tax documents,

(01:23:04):
these receipts. So I would start with January. I would
say January twenty twenty three, put all the things that
you scan for January inside that folder, then move on
to the next month. Next month it's February. Scan them
as you go, and that's one way. Now, if you
have an Android, you can just use Google Drive and
they have a built in scanner. So if you go
into open up Google Drive, the app on your Android phone,

(01:23:28):
there's a big plus sign in the lower right hand corner.
You press that plus sign and it says scan and
you can use your Android phone to scan a document.
And same thing. I would use the same exact you know,
twenty twenty three January, put all the documents in there,
and that's just one way to kind of get these
things digitized and into your you know, into the cloud,

(01:23:49):
into your system. That will would be good for safe
keeping in case you ever need them. Then you've got
things like a scanner. So if you think that that's
too much work to use your phone, sometimes the scan
with your phone comes out good, sometimes it doesn't. I
would recommend a scanner from Fijitsu, and specifically the scan
Snap scanners are fantastic, And so I tested one of

(01:24:12):
these for a segment we did and I'm trying to
get the name of it, but I believe it's just
the scan Snap. It's oh gosh, what is it? Let
me let me see if I can find it here.
I'm getting a bunch of pop ups. Oh, here it
is the scan Snap IX one hundred. This is a
mobile wireless scanner. It is super super easy to use.

(01:24:32):
It can sit on your desk and you connect it
to the cloud and every time you get a receipt,
you just pop open the scanner. It immediately comes on.
It connects to your Wi Fi. You feed the receipt
in or three or four or five, and it takes
care of them. It puts them all up into the
cloud in a nice format that you want. They also
have some nice software with that scanner that can organize

(01:24:53):
your receipts using ocr which will scan the text on
those receipts and help you search for them later. So
that's your phone, We have your scanner. Now there is
something you can do with an app. So there are
several apps to help you scan these things in as well.
So yes, there are a million and one scanning apps.

(01:25:13):
You can use something like Adobe. They have a scan app,
Adobe Scan works for iOS and Android. That's a great
app for scanning. But if you want a receipt specific app,
there's an app called shoeboxed, which, according to their website,
is the number one receipt scanner app loved by over
a million businesses. I have not personally used this, but
it seems like it has a lot of good reviews

(01:25:36):
and a lot of good features that I would think
you're looking for. And you're gonna probably have to pay
for this. It looks like it's anywhere from eighteen to
fifty four dollars a month, but you are running a business.
I'm not an expert in taxes, but I believe this
would be a write off. So and if it's helping you,
that's half the battle right there. So the website is
shoeboxed dot com. Expensify is a very popular sc scanning

(01:26:00):
receipt scanning app. I know a lot of companies will
partner with Expensify, so I believe I've used this in
the past. They have a dedicated app just for scanning
your receipts, so that's another way to go about it,
and Expensify is pretty well known, so I think that
that would be something that's really handy for you as well.

(01:26:20):
There's another app that I've used in the past called
Everlance e ve r l a nce. This is a
really incredible app because not only can it keep track
of your transactions kind of like the fly fin app
we were talking about earlier, but it also keeps track
of your mileage, so if that's something else you need
to keep track of. If you're a freelancer, this will

(01:26:40):
help you log your miles as well. That's how it
sort of started out. But it also does the expenses
as well. So with this everlance app, anytime you get
into your car and it notices that you're moving, it
will create a trip. So when you're driving at the
end of the week, you can just say, okay, that
trip was to go to this client's house. This trip
was to go to this client business and you can

(01:27:01):
categorize all those as well. So lots of options for you, Christina.
Hopefully one of those works you are listening to rich
on Tech. Coming up next, we're going to talk to
Jared Newman, who's going to offer some tips about cord cutting, privacy,
and more. It's all here rich on Tech. Welcome back
to rich on Tech. My name is rich Demiro, talking technology,

(01:27:22):
hanging out with you. Phone line is eighty to eight
rich one oh one.

Speaker 8 (01:27:27):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:27:27):
I don't want to get right to my next guest
because he is super helpful. If you think I'm helpful.
This guy has a great newsletter. His name's Jared Newman.
He's a freelance writer. He covers a whole bunch of
different uh you know, consumer devices and technology. He's got
two newsletters that are really good. One is called Advisorator,
the other one is Cord Cutter Weekly. He's got a

(01:27:49):
lot of subscribers for a good reason because he gives
good advice. Jared Newman, welcome to the show.

Speaker 8 (01:27:55):
Hey, rich thanks for having me and thanks for saying
all that.

Speaker 1 (01:27:57):
Yeah. I mean, look, I get a lot of newsletters
and nine of them go straight to trash yours. I
read through the entire thing because you always have good
little tidbits, you know, like good little stuff. So let's
just get to some of this stuff. This week you
talked about. Let's see what should we talk about first?
Let's talk about this MLS. So T mobile customers get

(01:28:18):
MLS season Pass on the Apple TV app free. But
Apple TV is so confusing because you've got the device
and you've got the actual app. So people are always like,
how can I watch this? So can you explain that
a little bit?

Speaker 8 (01:28:32):
Yeah, you have the device, you have the app, and
then you have Apple TV Plus, which is a service
within the app, which is separate.

Speaker 5 (01:28:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:28:39):
Really, you could really go down a rabbit hole with it.
But you know, the Apple TV app is sort of
apples all purpose way of handling things like iTunes rentals
and the Apple TV Plus streaming service and now MLS
season Pass, which they have the exclusive streaming rights too,
So all that is going to flow through the Apple
TV app app. However, season Pass mL season Pass is

(01:29:03):
its own separate subscription. You do get a discount if
you're an Apple TV Plus subscriber, but you don't have
to be, and it's just its own thing. It just
happens to flow through Apple's TV.

Speaker 1 (01:29:15):
App, so confusing. So basically, I oh, if that makes sense.
Best if you're a T Mobile customer, though, you get
this for free. So I had a friend that was like,
I have T Mobile, but I don't have an iPhone.
I said, no, you do. You have a Roku because like,
you can get the Apple TV app on these different devices,
right exactly.

Speaker 8 (01:29:32):
Yeah, it's on pretty much every major streaming platform. It's
not on Android phones at the moment, oh surprise, pretty
much everything else, and it's on the web. So yeah,
there's plenty of ways to access the Apple TV app.
And if you're a T Mobile customer, you would actually
redeem this through the T Mobile Tuesday's app, which is

(01:29:52):
where they do their various deals and things. And you
have to actually do this starting on the twenty first
through March fourteenth, So there's this window where you have
to redeem the free year of MLS season pass and
then after that the windows closed. So put it on
your calendar or what have you so that you remember
to get that freebie.

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
Yeah, it's a ninety nine dollars value. You're going to
get every regular live season match. You're going to get
all the playoff matches, all the league's cup, and there's
no blackouts. This is I mean, this is actually a
pretty cool thing that Apple has done where they're pretty
much the first to do a sports league with no
blockouts when you have a subscription like this. All right,
let's move on. Paramount Plus is raising prices? Tell me

(01:30:36):
about that.

Speaker 8 (01:30:38):
Yeah, So they kind of been telegraphing this for a while.
It is a little anti climactic because they the executives
for several months have been like, oh yeah, it's overvalue.
There's going to be a price, like it's one dollar.
It was five dollars a month, and now it's six
dollars or it's going to be six dollars a month.
This is actually not happening until the third quarter of
this year, and that's for the ads supported plan and

(01:31:00):
the AD free plan. This gets a little interesting. So
it was ten dollars per month, it is going up
to twelve dollars per month. However, that twelve dollars per
month will get you everything from the Showtime catalog, and
so they had been bundling Paramount Plus and Showtime for
a while, and that bundle price was fifteen dollars per month.

(01:31:22):
Now it's actually going down to twelve dollars per month.
So if you're already bundling Paramount Plus and Showtime, you
would save a little money here. I will point out
that if you know where to look, or if you
perhaps subscribe to my newsletter, it is fairly easy to
get Paramount Plus for free on a month by month basis.
So this all ends up being a moot point if
you're sort of savvy about it. But yeah, if you're

(01:31:44):
a paying customer, there will be a small price sig.

Speaker 1 (01:31:47):
Yeah, this is what I love about your newsletter. I've
gotten so many Paramount Streaming free promo codes because you
just put them in there. Like every single time you
send a newsletter there's a new one and I'm like this,
certainly this will not work this time, and sure enough
it does. By the way, I'll put a link to
both of Jared's newsletters at my website. Rich on tech
dot TV. Let's see what else did you have this week? Oh?

(01:32:09):
Netflix killed the surprise Me button? Did anyone ever use that?

Speaker 5 (01:32:12):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:32:13):
Who wants to just watch something random? Like I always
make the joke like you really have nothing to do
in your life. If you're going on Netflix and you're saying,
just surprise me with something like let me just watch something.

Speaker 5 (01:32:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:32:24):
I almost wrote a little bit more about that, but
I just kind of didn't have the space or time whatever.
But it was kind of funny because this is a
much bellyhooed feature. When it came out, I think it
was last year or something, and you know, they talked
to the press ahead of time. It was a big thing.
They were finally rolling out the shuffle button then everybody wanted,
and then it turns out nobody actually used it, and

(01:32:44):
I think I kind of think that maybe they didn't
go far enough. I don't know, you really have to
trust the Netflix algorithm. Yeah, just click surprise me. They
didn't really like, Okay, it would be nice if it
was like I want to watch a comedy show me,
you know, let me shuffle through some comedies until I
find something I want. But it was really just total random.

(01:33:07):
You just really had to trust that they knew exactly
what you wanted to watch at that pretty time and
that that didn't typically happen.

Speaker 1 (01:33:14):
I mean, look, it's funny because like TikTok's entire world
is based on that, but you're talking, you know, a
minute little like videos. This is like Netflix, where it's
like you're gonna get started on some random like sitcom
or hour long show or movie, like without any sort
of like heads up on what that's got.

Speaker 8 (01:33:31):
Yeah, because even you know, even when I know what
the show is going to be, I'm still sort of like,
do I really want to get in right? Right?

Speaker 1 (01:33:37):
Like the first couple of minutes, You're like, Okay, you
got to give me a reason to stick with this
thing you talked about in your latest Chord Cutter weekly newsletter,
the the Roku privacy situation. So can you tell me
about that a little bit? If you have a Roku,
what should you do?

Speaker 3 (01:33:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 8 (01:33:51):
So, well I should clarify it not just Roku, I
mean pretty much every streaming device has smart TV too. Also,
there's various mechanisms by which it will track your viewing
habits and use it for ad targeting. And there are
levers that you can pull to kind of minimize that
data collection and minimize that targeted ad stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:34:12):
It's sort of this.

Speaker 8 (01:34:13):
Weird intangible thing, right, Like, if you take the time
to opt out of all these things, are you really
going to notice it, maybe not too much. At most,
it'll be like you won't see as many targeted ads.
You may not have that feeling of like, oh I
saw an ad for this thing, and now it's following
me somewhere else. So you know, is it really worth

(01:34:33):
the trouble?

Speaker 7 (01:34:34):
I don't know.

Speaker 8 (01:34:34):
I mean, you know, how many times have we seen
the story about smart TVs kind of tracking everything you're
watching and people get real freaked out about that.

Speaker 3 (01:34:43):
So there is sort of.

Speaker 8 (01:34:44):
This intangible gut feeling of like, hey, I don't really
want to be watched when I'm watching TV. So I
decided to kind of put together all the ways that
you can minimize that activity or that behavior.

Speaker 1 (01:34:55):
This was a big thing with the Visio TVs. Remember
that whole revelation where they were actually scanning anything that
came across that screen, even if it was like off
of a DVD player. Is that Am I just getting
that right?

Speaker 3 (01:35:08):
Yes?

Speaker 8 (01:35:08):
Except that every TV does that. So the thing the
nuance with Visio is that they weren't really disclosing what
they were. You know, they weren't really being super upfront
about it. And granted, nobody's that upfront about it, but
you know, they were selling that data off to marketers
and things, and it was just kind of inadequate disclosure
to consumers. But all the smart TV brands will do

(01:35:31):
this if you don't opt out, depends on the TV
brand how you actually do that. Usually there's something during
setup or a setting you can dig into. But yeah,
this thing is called automatic content recognition, and it's sort
of like recognizing the content that's on your TV, regardless
of what input it's coming from, and using that for
ad targeting or market research or what have you.

Speaker 1 (01:35:53):
Okay, this is really important right now because I thought
this was just one TV. So this is why these
companies love to ship smart TV that you connect to
your Wi Fi, because they're basically scanning everything that you're
watching and then selling that information to advertisers. And I
just found an article that you know, Amazon, Android and Google, TVs, LGTVS,
Roku TVs, Samsung TV, Sony, and Visio. So if you

(01:36:17):
are if you have a smart TV and you don't
like the idea of this, I would google the name
of that smart TV and ACR like you, like Jared just.

Speaker 8 (01:36:24):
Mentioned, Yeah, and so that's in this article that I
just put out. And you know also the sort of
nuance heres. People will go, ah, well that's why I
don't have a that's why I want a done TV
and I just want to plug a Roku or fire
TV into it so that this doesn't happen. But guess what,
if you're using a Roku or a fire TV, they're
also trying to do all that kind of stuff. It's
not scanning your other inputs, but Roku definitely is interested

(01:36:47):
in everything that you're watching across all your different apps
and using that for a targeting. So you know, there's
different levels of it, and it's just kind of it's
not just smart TVs that are doing this. It's really
just anything that's connected to the Internet. As we know,
everything's powered by targeted ads and you just have to
be mindful of how that happens.

Speaker 1 (01:37:07):
All right, Jared, We're gonna have to leave it there,
but tell folks how to find you, the best way
to uh find you and uh, you know, subscribe to
your stuff.

Speaker 8 (01:37:16):
Yeah, So, as we talked a lot about streaming chord
cutting stuff, do you want to check out my newsletter?
It is Coordcutterweekly dot Com comes out every Friday morning.
And appreciate if you signed up for.

Speaker 1 (01:37:27):
It, all right. It's a great newsletter, Jared, thanks so much.
I'll put a link on my website. Rich on tech
dot TV. Always good to run into you at the
tech events. And coming up we are going to talk
about uh cash, Google images and clip art might not
be necessary anymore when you hear about these websites. I'm
gonna tell you about that use AI to create artwork

(01:37:48):
on demand that you can use. Plus, we'll wrap up
the show and have a couple of more calls all
coming up next. You're listening to rich on Tech eighty
eight seven four to two, four to one zero one,
triple a Rich one oh one. Welcome back to rich
on Tech. Rich Demiro hanging out talking technology. Let's go
to Barbara in Pasadena. Barbara, you're on with.

Speaker 9 (01:38:10):
Rich Hi Rich. My question is I have a nineteen
twenty two year old, nineteen twenty two sicker home. I
have sensors, steel doors, and a large dog. But I'm
baffled by the first steps and the kinds of questions
I should pose this home security system.

Speaker 1 (01:38:34):
Thank you, Oh good question. Home security. You know, here's
the thing about this, so, I mean, traditionally you would
go with something like an ADT or you know these
companies that sell you on a big contract and the
whole name of the game is that it's easy because
someone comes to your house and wires it up and
does everything you need. But then you're saddled with a

(01:38:56):
bill for a while, and so you know, that's kind
of the name of the game. They'll give you the equipment,
but you're paying over time. You know, usually it's a
three year contract something like that. Do you have anything
that's important to you, like what's most important to you.
Do you want like a combination of cameras or do
you just want security like when a door opens, you know,
alarm that kind of stuff.

Speaker 9 (01:39:19):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:39:22):
Now, are you comfortable installing this yourself? I guess that's
another question you need to figure out. Do you do you?

Speaker 9 (01:39:27):
Well, I don't know. I mean, it depends on how
complicated it is.

Speaker 1 (01:39:31):
Yeah, okay, Well I was.

Speaker 9 (01:39:32):
Recommended a system called simple Safe, but there are so
many systems out there.

Speaker 1 (01:39:38):
Yeah, so, well, simply Safe is I think an excellent system.
I really do, and it's one that I use for
many years, and I think it's very easy. You can
set it up yourself and it's very straightforward and so
simply safe is great. And they've expanded into cameras. It
started out as just just sort of sensors for your

(01:39:59):
door and windows. And the way that these systems work
is typically you sign up you you know, you pay
a monthly fee. The monthly fee is considerably less than
it would be if you were going with something like
a big company like you know what I mentioned earlier,
a big home monitoring, but they still offer home monitoring,
and then they ship you the stuff and you install

(01:40:20):
it yourself. So it has a base station and then
it's all a car. So if you have you go
around your house, if you have five doors in your house,
you'll order five little sensors for your doors, and then
you go around, you stick them up on your doors,
and you know, it connects to the scent the main
base station, and that base station either has Wi Fi
or cellular or a combination of both. Typically it's both,

(01:40:43):
and that's how it will call you know, the police
or fire in the you know, if there's an emergency.
And then of course you can continue to build onto
these systems. So if you say, oh, I'd like a
panic button, you can order that on the website and
it connects to your account. So the two that I
would really consider, if you're willing to do it, you're
is Simply Safe and Ring. So I think Ring has

(01:41:03):
a really good home security system, but it's got a
lot of different products, So I think it kind of
comes down to how many things, like how complicated you
want to make this. I think that simply based on
the name and based on using the product is pretty simple.
If you just want sensors on your doors, go ahead
and do the simply Safe rout It's pretty straightforward. You

(01:41:26):
install these sensors, you install an audible alarm in your house,
you connect it to the monitoring and it's very very straightforward.
But if you want something that's a little bit more
full featured and something that has a lot of products
that work with it, I think that the Ring system
is going to be a little bit more full featured
than simply Safe, and it's very simpler, very simpilar. You

(01:41:48):
get the base station, you get all the accessories. But
I think what Ring is really known for is it's
security cameras. And so if you want one of those
video doorbells, yes, simply Safe offers that, but let's be
on us. Ring invented that, so if you want that,
maybe you go with that. And the pricing is very
competitive too. I mean, I simply say, if I believe
is about you know, anywhere from fifteen to thirty dollars

(01:42:11):
a month, and Ring, I believe is anywhere from ten
to thirty dollars a month, depending on the planet you have.
So it is very affordable. And the good news is
it's you know, you don't have to pay, like, if
you want to stop using it, you can. It's not
like these other systems where they come to your house
and install them for you. You're going to be on
the hook for three years of paying for monitoring no

(01:42:31):
matter what. And these systems like Ring and simply Safe
do give you the monitoring as well, so you can
do that. You know, whether you know you want to
go with Simply Safe for Ring, I think just depends on,
like I said, the products that you want. So I
think that Ring does a really good job with the cameras,
and so I think that that would be a good
way to go if you want the door cams and

(01:42:52):
all that stuff. But I've installed a couple of these
systems and they are very straightforward The RING system is
very easy to install. It's all prettymuch much QR codes
the Simply Safe system. When I did it, it was very
straightforward as well. And all of these systems are you know,
they've been updated over the years, so if you have
an old Simply Safe, the newer systems are probably just

(01:43:13):
better than the old ones. But the main thing to
know is that you do need a good cellular connection
where you are, because that's the primary way that these
things connect in the event of an emergency. But they
also the newer ones do have Wi Fi as well,
so that's going to be the kind of default, and
then it goes to cellular if the Wi Fi is
not working or if it's out or something like that.

(01:43:34):
And also if your power goes out, there's backup batteries
inside the base station. So I think you're going to
be okay. You said you have a nineteen I think
you said a nineteen twenty two house, So I'm assuming
the layout of this house is pretty simple, and you
know it's got you know, a couple of windows, a
couple of doors. Either one of these systems, I think
you're going to be good with. So I would go
to their websites and just kind of compare the features

(01:43:55):
and see what you want and then you know, of
course the pricing as well, and Barbara, you'll be you know,
feeling much more secure. I think that these systems do
offer a level of security that you can't get without
having one. All Right, I mentioned I was going to
talk about some clip art websites that generate ai R instantly.
I'll go through a couple of these. I tested them

(01:44:17):
out for a segment on KTLA. So if you haven't
tried these, you have to. You know, if you search
for images, typically go to Google or you go to
a clip art. These websites will actually generate an image
on the fly using AI based on some keywords. So
Dolly two is the one that started the trend. It
comes from the same folks behind chat GPT. You type

(01:44:37):
in a few words, it spits out some images. You
can use them as you like, even for commercial purposes.
You get a certain amount of free images every month.
Then there's a website called dream by Wombo. These are
very easy. You don't need to sign up or log in.
You just type in a few words. You can download them.
They may have a watermark on them, so be aware
of that. You can always cut it out if you
don't want. But Dream has apps for iOS and as well. Crayon,

(01:45:02):
cr Aiyo n is also very easy. No sign up.
Generating the images takes a bit longer, but you get
nine images at once to choose from, and if you
like them, you can print them on a T shirt.
And finally, stable Diffusion is known for generating really high
quality images, perhaps too high quality. Getty Images is actually

(01:45:22):
suing them right now because they said they train their
Ai model with some of their Getty images without being licensed. Now,
Stable Diffusion is so popular you might get an error
on your first try. I'll link all these up on
the website rich on Tech dot TV. That's gonna do
it for this week of the show. Thanks so much
for listening. Next week, I'm going to tell you how
people are making money doing other people's dirty laundry. You

(01:45:45):
can find me on social media at rich on Tech.
My name is rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening.
There are so many ways you can spend your time.
I really do appreciate you spending it right here with me.
I'll talk to you real soon

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007 Rich on Tech Radio Show - February 18, 2023

Episode Transcript

Host

Rich DeMuro

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}007 Rich on Tech Radio Show - February 18, 2023