December 17, 2024 • 14 mins
This week:
- With Apple software updates released last week, Damo explains highlights of the enhancements for iPhone and iPad IOS 18.2;
- With video description now possible through multiple apps, Damo describes a comparison he made with the performance of Seeing AI and Piccybot;
- We have news of significant upgrades to the capabilities of the Humanware Mantis Q40 and Brailliant braille displays, with more details at humanware.com.
To access the program, presented by Stephen Jolley and Damo McMorrow you can go to varadio.org/talkingtech
To write to the show use damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:08):
Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from
December the 17th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolly, great to have
you with us listening through Vision Australia Radio associated stations
of the Radio Reading Network or perhaps the Community Radio Network.
There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you
need to do is search for those two words talking
(00:30):
tech and Dan. It can all come usually on a
Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is
to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play.
Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking
tech podcast with me. Vision Australia's national access technology manager.
Damo McMorrow. Hey, Damo.
S2 (00:52):
Hi, Stephen. How are you doing?
S1 (00:54):
Very good. Well, it's been a big week with it
has upgrades to products, devices, etc. we were anticipating some
Apple updates last Tuesday there was a late hitch and
there was a release. Two version came down on the Tuesday,
(01:16):
and the final public version came down on the Thursday.
So that's when we got our iOS 18.2 for the
iPhone and the iPad. Let's talk about it.
S2 (01:25):
Yeah, it's quite a significant update and a very much
sort of anticipated update, this one. Um, one of the
things that there has been much fanfare about has the
Apple intelligence feature. That's the sort of Siri Mark two,
if you like, or a much improved Siri, but it
(01:47):
does a number of other things as well. So with that, uh,
the Siri voices seem to have changed slightly. The Australian
male one sort of sounds bored and rather sulky. But anyway,
that's an aside. Um, the but they've also now, um,
increased series capability Significantly to the point where, for example,
(02:10):
if you ask it something that it doesn't have in
its own databases, it will say, do you want me
to use ChatGPT for that? And you can also say
to it, ask ChatGPT about, you know, whatever it might be,
and you'll get a much longer answer. You won't get
that sort of. Here's something I found on the web
that might possibly help, which was the used to be
(02:31):
the standard response when it didn't know something. There's that feature.
You can get much more accurate sort of travel information
and those sorts of things from it. It's really just
worth playing around and experimenting, but I would be very
surprised if people didn't notice a massive difference in terms
of Siri.
S1 (02:48):
I think that's the point, isn't it, just to play
with it and you never know what you might discover.
I asked her to tell me how far it would
be by car from where I was to a particular
address in Melbourne, and it came straight back with it
and it was pretty accurate. So I don't have to
go to Google Maps or those sorts of little pathways
to find out those sorts of things now.
S2 (03:09):
You're absolutely right. And it's one of those things. I mean,
I sort of had almost stopped using Siri for a
lot of things because it just used to frustrate me,
whereas now I'm actually using it much more than any
of my smart speakers, because I'm getting better responses from it.
S1 (03:25):
Let's talk about email.
S2 (03:27):
Yes. So there's a couple of significant changes here. Part
of the Apple intelligence system, if you like, is that
it can summarize content. So when you're going through an
email thread, it will give you a summary of what
each email is about as you as you're flicking through them.
And it does the same in other things as well.
(03:49):
So it'll give you summaries on your lock screen of
your different notifications and things. But the other one that
people will notice is a significant change to the layout
of the email app. Um, what happens now is that
there's a bunch of filters at the top of the
screen and there's things like, um, primary, there's as promotions,
(04:11):
transactions and a couple of other different categories. And so
what it tries to do by default is it will
try to divide your mail up into categories, which is
very smart and quite interesting, but it will sort of
throw you off a little bit if all you want
is your email the way you've always had it. Now
(04:32):
there are a couple of ways you can get it
to that point. One is as you go through the filters,
there is a more button and there's an option there
called list, which will set it back to how it
used to be. Or you can just deselect all of
any of those filters. Um, it'll default to, I think, uh,
primary or something like that. It says, um, and if you,
(04:54):
if you double tap to unselect that, you'll get your
mail in that same sort of format that it used
to be where you'll just see everything.
S1 (05:01):
I found it convenient just to press the more button
near the top of the screen gave you a list
of things, and you just select list and away list.
S2 (05:08):
Yeah, that's probably the the easy, easiest way to do it.
I mean, it is quite clever in that you can
probably easily skim through and identify all of those, you know,
all of the Boxing Day sale and Black Friday sale
type emails that everyone's likely to get in their inbox
at this time of year, those sort of promotional things. Um,
and obviously using the transaction filter that will identify things
(05:29):
like bills and all of those sorts of things in
an easy way. So that's, um, it is quite impressive
the way that it does that. But it's nice that
you can still have your email looking and feeling the
way it always has.
S1 (05:42):
There's a thing called Image Playground and also a gen
emoji feature. So it's doing a lot with images really
isn't it?
S2 (05:51):
Yes it is. So the gen emoji allows you to
generate your own emojis for those people that use them.
I have to say, I'm not one of them. I've
never really gotten into that other than when I communicate
with my daughter. Um, because I don't know, she she
she likes it, but, uh, um, the and the image
(06:11):
playground allows you to, um, sort of use a text
description and have it, uh, generate an image for you
based on that. Um, I'll have to ask it. What
happens if I if I request a horse with no name? Um,
but you could, you know, ask for, you know, a
horse without a tail or a dog with two heads
(06:31):
or something like that, and it would be able to
generate the an image for you.
S1 (06:35):
Why you would want to, but it could do some
very useful things too.
S2 (06:39):
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely.
S1 (06:42):
So a lot to explore in iOS 18.2, which has
come to the iPhone and to the iPad. Let's move
on now to experimentation you've been doing this week with
videos and video description.
S2 (06:59):
Yes. And the thing that prompted this actually was that I,
I managed to get my boat out last weekend. It's
been I've had it since August and every, every weekend
is just about been either too windy or too rainy.
And I managed to get the boat out last weekend
and went fishing, and I had my Ray-Ban meta glasses,
and I took some video while I was reeling in fish,
(07:24):
and also just some video of kind of, um, standing
in the boat and looking around at the ocean. And
that prompted me to sort of think about, you know,
being able to get the videos described. And there are
two ways of doing it. There is seeing AI now
has that ability. So it's part of the scene channel
(07:46):
in seeing AI. Um, and for a while we've been
able to get descriptions of photos or, or take a
picture and get a live description. But now you can, um,
give it a video from your, uh, from your camera
roll so you can select a video, I think, up
to ten minutes in length, and you're allowed ten videos
(08:07):
per day that you can have described. So the idea
is you, you, you pointed at the video, um, And you,
it'll sit there and do the normal seeing eye kind
of processing noise that it does for a couple of minutes.
And then what it'll do is it'll start playing the
video in short snippets with, um, descriptions read out in
(08:30):
between those snippets. So, for example, you'll hear like in
the video that I tried it with, you would hear
the sound of the water lapping against the boat and
my friend saying, oh, just bring your rod tip down
a little bit. And then the description would say, A
man in a blue shirt reeling in a fish, and
then you'll hear a little bit more audio and it'll say,
(08:50):
another man, you know, reaches over and and grabs the
end of the rod, um, you know, out of out
of the water or whatever it might be. And then
it sort of described the, the fish, and it described
my friend Jim trying to get the hook out of
his mouth and so on. So, um, it's it's quite
nice in that it gives you sort of a almost
(09:11):
real time description. And the nice thing about the way
that works, of course, is that if I was editing
that video, I could probably use that description to roughly
line it up and go, oh, hang on, I've got
15 seconds here where I was looking down, or I
was looking up at the boat canopy rather than at
the fish or whatever. I can edit that out. Um,
so that was that was part of what what prompted
(09:33):
that interest? The other way of doing it is using
an app called Pixie Bot and it's spelt p I
c c y. Um, and it is a paid product
to be able to get the, the, a lot of
the features, it does it in a slightly different way
in that it processes the video and then just gives
you a description, but it will use certain sort of
(09:55):
cues in the video to say, at this point in
the video, um, you know, there's a splashing noise as
the man throws the fish back over the side of
the boat, for example, but the description is not interlaced
with the audio, if that makes sense.
S1 (10:10):
So it actually takes notice of what it sees as
well as what it hears spoken in the.
S2 (10:16):
That's right, that's right. So it is two very different
sort of experiences in terms of having your video described.
But I think they are probably equally valuable in, in
different circumstances.
S1 (10:28):
Very interesting. The two apps you were using, their seeing eye,
which is a bit of a Swiss Army knife really,
you can do it really is, isn't it? And the
other one, Pixy Bot plc bot. So have a play
with those if you're interested in video description.
S2 (10:44):
Yeah, absolutely. It's just nice to be able to have
a go at taking a video, I think as a
blind person and then having a rough idea of what
the result was.
S1 (10:52):
It's been a big week for Humanware. People like to
get their stuff out before Christmas, I think. And Humanware
have announced some upgrades to their Braille display products, the
Mantis Braille Display and the brilliant series, the B20 X
and the B40 X. Tell us quickly about those devices.
S2 (11:13):
Sure. So the brilliant B20 and B40 X are there
refreshable Braille displays that have the Perkins style keyboard? Obviously,
the B26 is a 20 cell display and the 40
X is a 40 cell display. And then we have
the mantis, which is the 40 cell braille display equipped
(11:33):
with a Qwerty keyboard.
S1 (11:35):
The Braille enters had text to speech for some time
in this upgrade. That feature went to the mantis.
S2 (11:42):
It did, which is really quite significant for mantis users,
because that's a feature that I think a lot of
people have wished we had for quite a long time.
So yeah, the whole family now has, um, text to
speech built in, and.
S1 (11:57):
There's an interesting package of other features that have gone
to both devices.
S2 (12:00):
Yes. So there is, um, a number of interesting new features.
We now have access to Wikipedia and Wiktionary directly from
the device. That obviously requires an internet connection, but it
does mean that you can look things up directly from
your brain or your mantis without having to first pair
it to your phone or your computer. And there is
(12:21):
also an on board dictionary which you can access offline.
So even if you're not connected to the internet and
you just want to quickly look up something, you can
do that from the device as well. There are also
some significant audio improvements, so you can now pair your
device to either Bluetooth headphones or a Bluetooth speaker, or
(12:43):
even Bluetooth hearing aids. So those that use hearing aids
may actually now benefit more from the text to speech,
because you can have it piped directly into your Bluetooth
hearing aids. And there's also now support via Bluetooth for
the Apple TV as well. So definitely quite a significant upgrade.
(13:04):
And you can do that upgrade online. Just connect your
device to Wi-Fi and you can download the update that way.
There's no um, sort of you don't have to send
it back or anything to get the upgrade. That Apple.
S1 (13:15):
TV implementation. That's a big one, isn't it?
S2 (13:18):
It will be. I haven't had a chance to try
it yet on my Apple TV, but I do have
a brilliant here. So that's on my list for this
coming weekend to experiment with that, because I think it'll
be quite good.
S1 (13:28):
So that's the mantis and the brilliant series, both those
products from Humanware. Braille displays and major upgrades this week.
Before we go, a reminder that you can find details
of this program and previous editions by going to VA
radio.org/talking tech. VA radio.org/talking tech. And to right to the program.
S2 (13:52):
You can email me Damo. Damo McMorrow MSI MoU at
Vision Australia. Org and thanks to everybody who has been
doing that.
S1 (14:04):
Damo McMorrow at Vision australia.org. This has been talking tech
with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager
Damo McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolly. Take care. We'll talk more
tech next week. See you.
Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from
December the 17th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolly, great to have
you with us listening through Vision Australia Radio associated stations
of the Radio Reading Network or perhaps the Community Radio Network.
There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you
need to do is search for those two words talking
(00:30):
tech and Dan. It can all come usually on a
Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is
to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play.
Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking
tech podcast with me. Vision Australia's national access technology manager.
Damo McMorrow. Hey, Damo.
S2 (00:52):
Hi, Stephen. How are you doing?
S1 (00:54):
Very good. Well, it's been a big week with it
has upgrades to products, devices, etc. we were anticipating some
Apple updates last Tuesday there was a late hitch and
there was a release. Two version came down on the Tuesday,
(01:16):
and the final public version came down on the Thursday.
So that's when we got our iOS 18.2 for the
iPhone and the iPad. Let's talk about it.
S2 (01:25):
Yeah, it's quite a significant update and a very much
sort of anticipated update, this one. Um, one of the
things that there has been much fanfare about has the
Apple intelligence feature. That's the sort of Siri Mark two,
if you like, or a much improved Siri, but it
(01:47):
does a number of other things as well. So with that, uh,
the Siri voices seem to have changed slightly. The Australian
male one sort of sounds bored and rather sulky. But anyway,
that's an aside. Um, the but they've also now, um,
increased series capability Significantly to the point where, for example,
(02:10):
if you ask it something that it doesn't have in
its own databases, it will say, do you want me
to use ChatGPT for that? And you can also say
to it, ask ChatGPT about, you know, whatever it might be,
and you'll get a much longer answer. You won't get
that sort of. Here's something I found on the web
that might possibly help, which was the used to be
(02:31):
the standard response when it didn't know something. There's that feature.
You can get much more accurate sort of travel information
and those sorts of things from it. It's really just
worth playing around and experimenting, but I would be very
surprised if people didn't notice a massive difference in terms
of Siri.
S1 (02:48):
I think that's the point, isn't it, just to play
with it and you never know what you might discover.
I asked her to tell me how far it would
be by car from where I was to a particular
address in Melbourne, and it came straight back with it
and it was pretty accurate. So I don't have to
go to Google Maps or those sorts of little pathways
to find out those sorts of things now.
S2 (03:09):
You're absolutely right. And it's one of those things. I mean,
I sort of had almost stopped using Siri for a
lot of things because it just used to frustrate me,
whereas now I'm actually using it much more than any
of my smart speakers, because I'm getting better responses from it.
S1 (03:25):
Let's talk about email.
S2 (03:27):
Yes. So there's a couple of significant changes here. Part
of the Apple intelligence system, if you like, is that
it can summarize content. So when you're going through an
email thread, it will give you a summary of what
each email is about as you as you're flicking through them.
And it does the same in other things as well.
(03:49):
So it'll give you summaries on your lock screen of
your different notifications and things. But the other one that
people will notice is a significant change to the layout
of the email app. Um, what happens now is that
there's a bunch of filters at the top of the
screen and there's things like, um, primary, there's as promotions,
(04:11):
transactions and a couple of other different categories. And so
what it tries to do by default is it will
try to divide your mail up into categories, which is
very smart and quite interesting, but it will sort of
throw you off a little bit if all you want
is your email the way you've always had it. Now
(04:32):
there are a couple of ways you can get it
to that point. One is as you go through the filters,
there is a more button and there's an option there
called list, which will set it back to how it
used to be. Or you can just deselect all of
any of those filters. Um, it'll default to, I think, uh,
primary or something like that. It says, um, and if you,
(04:54):
if you double tap to unselect that, you'll get your
mail in that same sort of format that it used
to be where you'll just see everything.
S1 (05:01):
I found it convenient just to press the more button
near the top of the screen gave you a list
of things, and you just select list and away list.
S2 (05:08):
Yeah, that's probably the the easy, easiest way to do it.
I mean, it is quite clever in that you can
probably easily skim through and identify all of those, you know,
all of the Boxing Day sale and Black Friday sale
type emails that everyone's likely to get in their inbox
at this time of year, those sort of promotional things. Um,
and obviously using the transaction filter that will identify things
(05:29):
like bills and all of those sorts of things in
an easy way. So that's, um, it is quite impressive
the way that it does that. But it's nice that
you can still have your email looking and feeling the
way it always has.
S1 (05:42):
There's a thing called Image Playground and also a gen
emoji feature. So it's doing a lot with images really
isn't it?
S2 (05:51):
Yes it is. So the gen emoji allows you to
generate your own emojis for those people that use them.
I have to say, I'm not one of them. I've
never really gotten into that other than when I communicate
with my daughter. Um, because I don't know, she she
she likes it, but, uh, um, the and the image
(06:11):
playground allows you to, um, sort of use a text
description and have it, uh, generate an image for you
based on that. Um, I'll have to ask it. What
happens if I if I request a horse with no name? Um,
but you could, you know, ask for, you know, a
horse without a tail or a dog with two heads
(06:31):
or something like that, and it would be able to
generate the an image for you.
S1 (06:35):
Why you would want to, but it could do some
very useful things too.
S2 (06:39):
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely.
S1 (06:42):
So a lot to explore in iOS 18.2, which has
come to the iPhone and to the iPad. Let's move
on now to experimentation you've been doing this week with
videos and video description.
S2 (06:59):
Yes. And the thing that prompted this actually was that I,
I managed to get my boat out last weekend. It's
been I've had it since August and every, every weekend
is just about been either too windy or too rainy.
And I managed to get the boat out last weekend
and went fishing, and I had my Ray-Ban meta glasses,
and I took some video while I was reeling in fish,
(07:24):
and also just some video of kind of, um, standing
in the boat and looking around at the ocean. And
that prompted me to sort of think about, you know,
being able to get the videos described. And there are
two ways of doing it. There is seeing AI now
has that ability. So it's part of the scene channel
(07:46):
in seeing AI. Um, and for a while we've been
able to get descriptions of photos or, or take a
picture and get a live description. But now you can, um,
give it a video from your, uh, from your camera
roll so you can select a video, I think, up
to ten minutes in length, and you're allowed ten videos
(08:07):
per day that you can have described. So the idea
is you, you, you pointed at the video, um, And you,
it'll sit there and do the normal seeing eye kind
of processing noise that it does for a couple of minutes.
And then what it'll do is it'll start playing the
video in short snippets with, um, descriptions read out in
(08:30):
between those snippets. So, for example, you'll hear like in
the video that I tried it with, you would hear
the sound of the water lapping against the boat and
my friend saying, oh, just bring your rod tip down
a little bit. And then the description would say, A
man in a blue shirt reeling in a fish, and
then you'll hear a little bit more audio and it'll say,
(08:50):
another man, you know, reaches over and and grabs the
end of the rod, um, you know, out of out
of the water or whatever it might be. And then
it sort of described the, the fish, and it described
my friend Jim trying to get the hook out of
his mouth and so on. So, um, it's it's quite
nice in that it gives you sort of a almost
(09:11):
real time description. And the nice thing about the way
that works, of course, is that if I was editing
that video, I could probably use that description to roughly
line it up and go, oh, hang on, I've got
15 seconds here where I was looking down, or I
was looking up at the boat canopy rather than at
the fish or whatever. I can edit that out. Um,
so that was that was part of what what prompted
(09:33):
that interest? The other way of doing it is using
an app called Pixie Bot and it's spelt p I
c c y. Um, and it is a paid product
to be able to get the, the, a lot of
the features, it does it in a slightly different way
in that it processes the video and then just gives
you a description, but it will use certain sort of
(09:55):
cues in the video to say, at this point in
the video, um, you know, there's a splashing noise as
the man throws the fish back over the side of
the boat, for example, but the description is not interlaced
with the audio, if that makes sense.
S1 (10:10):
So it actually takes notice of what it sees as
well as what it hears spoken in the.
S2 (10:16):
That's right, that's right. So it is two very different
sort of experiences in terms of having your video described.
But I think they are probably equally valuable in, in
different circumstances.
S1 (10:28):
Very interesting. The two apps you were using, their seeing eye,
which is a bit of a Swiss Army knife really,
you can do it really is, isn't it? And the
other one, Pixy Bot plc bot. So have a play
with those if you're interested in video description.
S2 (10:44):
Yeah, absolutely. It's just nice to be able to have
a go at taking a video, I think as a
blind person and then having a rough idea of what
the result was.
S1 (10:52):
It's been a big week for Humanware. People like to
get their stuff out before Christmas, I think. And Humanware
have announced some upgrades to their Braille display products, the
Mantis Braille Display and the brilliant series, the B20 X
and the B40 X. Tell us quickly about those devices.
S2 (11:13):
Sure. So the brilliant B20 and B40 X are there
refreshable Braille displays that have the Perkins style keyboard? Obviously,
the B26 is a 20 cell display and the 40
X is a 40 cell display. And then we have
the mantis, which is the 40 cell braille display equipped
(11:33):
with a Qwerty keyboard.
S1 (11:35):
The Braille enters had text to speech for some time
in this upgrade. That feature went to the mantis.
S2 (11:42):
It did, which is really quite significant for mantis users,
because that's a feature that I think a lot of
people have wished we had for quite a long time.
So yeah, the whole family now has, um, text to
speech built in, and.
S1 (11:57):
There's an interesting package of other features that have gone
to both devices.
S2 (12:00):
Yes. So there is, um, a number of interesting new features.
We now have access to Wikipedia and Wiktionary directly from
the device. That obviously requires an internet connection, but it
does mean that you can look things up directly from
your brain or your mantis without having to first pair
it to your phone or your computer. And there is
(12:21):
also an on board dictionary which you can access offline.
So even if you're not connected to the internet and
you just want to quickly look up something, you can
do that from the device as well. There are also
some significant audio improvements, so you can now pair your
device to either Bluetooth headphones or a Bluetooth speaker, or
(12:43):
even Bluetooth hearing aids. So those that use hearing aids
may actually now benefit more from the text to speech,
because you can have it piped directly into your Bluetooth
hearing aids. And there's also now support via Bluetooth for
the Apple TV as well. So definitely quite a significant upgrade.
(13:04):
And you can do that upgrade online. Just connect your
device to Wi-Fi and you can download the update that way.
There's no um, sort of you don't have to send
it back or anything to get the upgrade. That Apple.
S1 (13:15):
TV implementation. That's a big one, isn't it?
S2 (13:18):
It will be. I haven't had a chance to try
it yet on my Apple TV, but I do have
a brilliant here. So that's on my list for this
coming weekend to experiment with that, because I think it'll
be quite good.
S1 (13:28):
So that's the mantis and the brilliant series, both those
products from Humanware. Braille displays and major upgrades this week.
Before we go, a reminder that you can find details
of this program and previous editions by going to VA
radio.org/talking tech. VA radio.org/talking tech. And to right to the program.
S2 (13:52):
You can email me Damo. Damo McMorrow MSI MoU at
Vision Australia. Org and thanks to everybody who has been
doing that.
S1 (14:04):
Damo McMorrow at Vision australia.org. This has been talking tech
with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager
Damo McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolly. Take care. We'll talk more
tech next week. See you.
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