February 3, 2025 • 14 mins
This week Damo takes us through:
- Some highlights from last week’s updates to Apple software products;
- A recent experience with Notebook LM, a Google AI tool;
- Some points to keep in mind about DeepSeek, the new AI tool from China;
- An update to Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini, which may be of interest to those who use hearing aids.
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
February the 4th, 2025. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have
you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated
stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network.
There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you
need to do is search for the two words talking tech.
(00:28):
And it can come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just
after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your
Siri device or smart speaker to play. Vision Australia radio
talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast. With me.
Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damien McMorrow. Hey, Damo.
S2 (00:50):
G'day, Stephen.
S1 (00:52):
A lot to talk about today. Let's start with some
Apple news. Another release of software across all its devices
last week.
S2 (01:00):
Yes that's right we had iOS 18.3 and we also
had updates to the Apple Watch OS, tvOS, and the Mac.
The latest version of Sequoia, and also the software update
to the HomePod speakers. There's not a whole lot that's
(01:21):
hugely exciting in these updates, but there are a couple
of little fixes that I did want to mention. The
first one is with the watchOS, so in the previous
version of the watch operating system, there was an issue
for VoiceOver users where you would turn the volume up
or down and it wouldn't appreciably change. And generally the
(01:44):
audio was either way too loud or way too quiet,
and there didn't seem to be kind of any middle ground,
regardless of what value it said was set, that, you know,
the volume didn't change. So that has definitely been fixed,
which is a welcome change. The other one that I
don't think it affected everybody, but it certainly annoyed me
for a couple of weeks, was an issue where if
(02:07):
you were using an Apple Watch and you also had
a set of AirPod pros, I've got a series two,
AirPod Pro. The audio. As soon as I put the
AirPod pros into my ears, it would take audio from
my watch rather than from my phone. And that seemed
to happen regardless of what setting I had. Because there's
(02:27):
a setting on the iPhone that you can say always
connect to this device or connect to it. When it
was the last thing that was used, didn't matter what
I did with that, it would always connect to my watch,
and the only way to get around it was to
restart the phone or to open the AirPods Pro case.
Wait till the little dialog came up on the screen
of the iPhone that showed the battery level, and then
(02:49):
put the AirPods into my ears. Now that has been fixed.
Touch wood. So, uh, my AirPods are working once again,
as they should. As I say, that one I think
was a little bit more unusual, but it certainly was
annoying to those of us that were impacted by it.
S1 (03:06):
I've also found with my phone that the face ID
that you need to use to unlock your phone seems
to be even more reliable than before. There's less times
that I seem to have to be reverting back to
be entering my passcode. That might vary from individual to individual,
but you might want to keep that one in mind
as well, which is good.
S2 (03:25):
I have. I haven't seen that myself, but I have
heard that from a couple of other people. So yes,
any improvement I think with face ID is a welcome one.
S1 (03:34):
Certainly is. We've got a bit of AI stuff to
talk about. Surprise, surprise this week.
S2 (03:39):
Yes we do. Once again.
S1 (03:41):
Let's talk first about notebook LM. You've been playing with that.
S2 (03:46):
I have. So notebook LM just to sort of recap
a little bit is one of Google's AI products, and
it's a product that calls itself your AI powered research assistant.
So the idea is that you can load sort of
several different sources into it, whether it be websites, whether
it be documents of various kinds. And then you can
(04:08):
do a number of things with that content. You can
ask questions, but you can also generate things like a
study guide. Frequently asked questions, and even a conversation that
sounds like two people discussing the content. One thing, though,
that I discovered recently, and it was sort of actually
I did it as a bit of an experiment because
of me messing about with my YouTube channel that I
(04:31):
set up over the break, but you can actually load
YouTube URLs in and then ask questions, or have it
generate a summary or a sort of a quick conversation
or podcast type overview of those videos, which is quite helpful,
particularly sometimes if you've got content that is, you know,
perhaps there's something in the video that you haven't been
(04:53):
able to pick up from the dialogue, you know, maybe
wanting to try and find out if it says anywhere
what model of product is being demonstrated or how they're
using it in some way. So you can add those
URLs into notebook LM, and then you can ask questions
about the video or videos if you've got a number
of them. You know, I gave it three videos on
(05:15):
a particular topic and, um, then asked it to sort
of generate a sort of a conversational style bit of
audio and two things that surprised me. One is the
level of detail that it goes into and its ability
to sort of pick out the salient points, but also
just the sort of human sounding nature of the audio
that it it generates. It literally does sound like two
(05:38):
people discussing it. And with some of the videos that
I tried of my own, while it misunderstood what my
name was, which was kind of odd, it certainly did
accurately describe the products that I had talked about in
the video. Like all I, it's not perfect, but it
it did a pretty impressive job.
S1 (05:57):
This is notebook Elm. What platforms does it run on?
S2 (06:01):
It's a Google based product. There is a notebook Elm
app for iOS or Android, or you can simply access
it from google.com and going into the suite of apps,
if you signed into it, you can find Notebook LM there,
and you can also organize your notes into different notebooks
depending on the topic and things like that for for reviewing.
(06:21):
So that's quite helpful as well.
S1 (06:23):
Mm. Very interesting notebook. LM something else has come out
of China recently, a thing called deep seek.
S2 (06:32):
And it has taken the big tech companies in Silicon
Valley in the US a little bit by surprise. And
the reason for that is that they've changed the way that, um,
you know, the model works. So generally what we're seeing
with things like ChatGPT and meta AI and so on
is that the multi-billion dollar investments in, you know, like
(06:56):
server infrastructure and power infrastructure and those sorts of things
to be able to process the requests and deep seek
claim that they've done it in a way that uses
a fraction of the processing power, which has companies like
Nvidia who make a lot of the the chips that
are utilized in these sort of AI type platforms. Um,
(07:18):
a little bit by surprise has them a little bit concerned. Now,
there are some caveats, if you like, or some things
to be aware of with deep seek the responsiveness. From
what I've seen of it is quite fast, but it's
not entirely accurate and it does seem to self-censor. So, uh,
(07:39):
if you, for example, ask questions about Tiananmen Square or
anything else that might paint, uh, the Chinese government in
an unfavorable light, it either chooses not to answer or
to give you a, you know, a very, very cut
down and very limited response. The other question, there are
some concerns around the sort of the security of the platform.
(08:02):
And if you if you register with it, you know,
where where does that data go? Is it handed to
perhaps Chinese government or somewhere else. And that hasn't been
made entirely clear. So some of us, including me, are
a little bit reluctant to sort of register and provide
too many details. I think for the moment, if I'm
(08:23):
going to experiment further with it, I'll probably use, you know,
something innocuous like my Gmail account or something, and I'll
probably access it from behind a VPN, just to be sure,
because there are too many unknowns about where where the
traffic goes. But certainly the interesting thing about it, from
a tech point of view, is the fact that they
claim that they can, you know, process this information and
(08:46):
these requests with a fraction of the the the infrastructure.
I think it was for January. It was the most
downloaded app in both the Apple App Store and the
Google Play Store. So there's certainly a bit of interest
in it, but I would suggest just approaching it with
a small degree of caution. If you're concerned about privacy
and where your information is going and all of those
sorts of things.
S1 (09:06):
How's the accessibility?
S2 (09:08):
It seems okay from the small amount of experimenting that
I've done. But as I said, because I have some
reservations about it, I haven't really spent enough time with
it to comment, but in the brief look that I had,
I didn't sort of run into any really significant issues.
S1 (09:22):
So we're talking there about deep seek, which the AI
world has been talking about a lot over the last week.
I want to put in a quick cheerio for ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is what I've been using on my windows machine,
and I imagine would be the same for the other
desktop platforms. Just a little application of it that I've
(09:45):
found really useful recently is around accessing other software products.
So I was able recently to ask it how I
could invoke a URL in Linux. Then I asked it
for the command to invoke a particular URL, and then
I asked it to generate the script so that I
(10:08):
could then have a command to execute that script and
invoke the URL. And it was able to guide me
very clearly. And the thing about ChatGPT is that it
keeps a history of your conversations with it, and also
at any time you can copy its response and save
(10:29):
some of them away somewhere in a file, maybe where
you have a number of interrogations to it on a
particular topic, and you can have them all grouped together.
So it's pretty good. ChatGPT.
S2 (10:42):
Just on that too, I should also mention that one
of the big differences between Deep Seek and ChatGPT is
that deep seek at this point in time does not
provide the voice mode, the sort of conversational voice mode
that ChatGPT does. The only way to work with it
is to type to it. So that's something to note
as well. If you use it in that way, which
(11:03):
I quite often do.
S1 (11:05):
Yes, it can be convenient to do it that way
though the voice is also very good. I'd like to
talk to you about Amazon Amazon Fire TV. Perhaps you
could explain what that is and the Omni Mini product.
S2 (11:18):
There are there are a number of these sort of, um,
Amazon Fire TV type devices. So they're a media type
device that attaches to your TV and allows you to
stream content from Amazon Prime and other things, you know,
similar in some respects to things like the Apple TV
or the Google TV product. But in their next iteration,
(11:41):
which is the fire TV Omni mini, they're including a
feature which allows you to have two simultaneous audio streams.
If you had one family member who uses hearing aids
and wants the audio from the TV stream to their
hearing aids, they can do that while simultaneously having it
(12:01):
streamed to the lounge room for the rest of the family.
At the moment, with most of these things, it's an
either or scenario, or you have a situation where what
gets sent to the hearing aids, there's a significant latency
or delay, whereas there's now a new protocol which they're including,
which allows you to simultaneously have the Have the audio
streamed to two different devices.
S1 (12:23):
So how do you get involved with something like fire TV?
How do you start?
S2 (12:27):
You can simply order them from Amazon. I would normally
recommend waiting until they have a, you know, Prime Day
sale or something because you can pick them up fairly
cheap and then they just generally plug into your HDMI
port on the back of your television. They do have
a built in screen reader. I do find with all
of these TV platforms, there are some limitations with some
(12:48):
of the third party streaming apps. Some of them work
better than others, and some of them they'll work well
on one platform, but not the other. I had a
recent experience buying a TV for my caravan. It was
a Google TV had, you know, the Chromecast and things
built into it. But for some reason that particular TV
manufacturer had disabled all the accessibility features. So it is
(13:10):
a little bit hit and miss in that way. But yeah,
the Amazon experience is probably comparable to what you might
get on something like Google TV if you've already got
an accessible box of some sort, whether it's an Apple
TV or a Google TV for watching content, there's probably
no compelling reason to race out and buy the Amazon
Fire TV, except that you, of course, could control it
(13:32):
from your Alexa device so you can tell it to
stream things and that sort of thing. So that may
be of interest, but it's essentially Amazon's TV streaming device.
S1 (13:41):
Before we go, a reminder to everyone listening that you
can find details of what we've been talking about in
this and previous editions of the program by going to
VA radio, Talking Tech, VA radio, Talking Tech to write
to the program.
S2 (13:57):
Damo. Damo McMorrow McMorrow at Vision Australia.
S1 (14:05):
Damo McMorrow at Vision Australia. This has been talking tech
with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager
Damien McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolly. Take care. We'll talk more
tech next week.
S3 (14:18):
See you.
Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from
February the 4th, 2025. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have
you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated
stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network.
There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you
need to do is search for the two words talking tech.
(00:28):
And it can come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just
after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your
Siri device or smart speaker to play. Vision Australia radio
talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast. With me.
Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damien McMorrow. Hey, Damo.
S2 (00:50):
G'day, Stephen.
S1 (00:52):
A lot to talk about today. Let's start with some
Apple news. Another release of software across all its devices
last week.
S2 (01:00):
Yes that's right we had iOS 18.3 and we also
had updates to the Apple Watch OS, tvOS, and the Mac.
The latest version of Sequoia, and also the software update
to the HomePod speakers. There's not a whole lot that's
(01:21):
hugely exciting in these updates, but there are a couple
of little fixes that I did want to mention. The
first one is with the watchOS, so in the previous
version of the watch operating system, there was an issue
for VoiceOver users where you would turn the volume up
or down and it wouldn't appreciably change. And generally the
(01:44):
audio was either way too loud or way too quiet,
and there didn't seem to be kind of any middle ground,
regardless of what value it said was set, that, you know,
the volume didn't change. So that has definitely been fixed,
which is a welcome change. The other one that I
don't think it affected everybody, but it certainly annoyed me
for a couple of weeks, was an issue where if
(02:07):
you were using an Apple Watch and you also had
a set of AirPod pros, I've got a series two,
AirPod Pro. The audio. As soon as I put the
AirPod pros into my ears, it would take audio from
my watch rather than from my phone. And that seemed
to happen regardless of what setting I had. Because there's
(02:27):
a setting on the iPhone that you can say always
connect to this device or connect to it. When it
was the last thing that was used, didn't matter what
I did with that, it would always connect to my watch,
and the only way to get around it was to
restart the phone or to open the AirPods Pro case.
Wait till the little dialog came up on the screen
of the iPhone that showed the battery level, and then
(02:49):
put the AirPods into my ears. Now that has been fixed.
Touch wood. So, uh, my AirPods are working once again,
as they should. As I say, that one I think
was a little bit more unusual, but it certainly was
annoying to those of us that were impacted by it.
S1 (03:06):
I've also found with my phone that the face ID
that you need to use to unlock your phone seems
to be even more reliable than before. There's less times
that I seem to have to be reverting back to
be entering my passcode. That might vary from individual to individual,
but you might want to keep that one in mind
as well, which is good.
S2 (03:25):
I have. I haven't seen that myself, but I have
heard that from a couple of other people. So yes,
any improvement I think with face ID is a welcome one.
S1 (03:34):
Certainly is. We've got a bit of AI stuff to
talk about. Surprise, surprise this week.
S2 (03:39):
Yes we do. Once again.
S1 (03:41):
Let's talk first about notebook LM. You've been playing with that.
S2 (03:46):
I have. So notebook LM just to sort of recap
a little bit is one of Google's AI products, and
it's a product that calls itself your AI powered research assistant.
So the idea is that you can load sort of
several different sources into it, whether it be websites, whether
it be documents of various kinds. And then you can
(04:08):
do a number of things with that content. You can
ask questions, but you can also generate things like a
study guide. Frequently asked questions, and even a conversation that
sounds like two people discussing the content. One thing, though,
that I discovered recently, and it was sort of actually
I did it as a bit of an experiment because
of me messing about with my YouTube channel that I
(04:31):
set up over the break, but you can actually load
YouTube URLs in and then ask questions, or have it
generate a summary or a sort of a quick conversation
or podcast type overview of those videos, which is quite helpful,
particularly sometimes if you've got content that is, you know,
perhaps there's something in the video that you haven't been
(04:53):
able to pick up from the dialogue, you know, maybe
wanting to try and find out if it says anywhere
what model of product is being demonstrated or how they're
using it in some way. So you can add those
URLs into notebook LM, and then you can ask questions
about the video or videos if you've got a number
of them. You know, I gave it three videos on
(05:15):
a particular topic and, um, then asked it to sort
of generate a sort of a conversational style bit of
audio and two things that surprised me. One is the
level of detail that it goes into and its ability
to sort of pick out the salient points, but also
just the sort of human sounding nature of the audio
that it it generates. It literally does sound like two
(05:38):
people discussing it. And with some of the videos that
I tried of my own, while it misunderstood what my
name was, which was kind of odd, it certainly did
accurately describe the products that I had talked about in
the video. Like all I, it's not perfect, but it
it did a pretty impressive job.
S1 (05:57):
This is notebook Elm. What platforms does it run on?
S2 (06:01):
It's a Google based product. There is a notebook Elm
app for iOS or Android, or you can simply access
it from google.com and going into the suite of apps,
if you signed into it, you can find Notebook LM there,
and you can also organize your notes into different notebooks
depending on the topic and things like that for for reviewing.
(06:21):
So that's quite helpful as well.
S1 (06:23):
Mm. Very interesting notebook. LM something else has come out
of China recently, a thing called deep seek.
S2 (06:32):
And it has taken the big tech companies in Silicon
Valley in the US a little bit by surprise. And
the reason for that is that they've changed the way that, um,
you know, the model works. So generally what we're seeing
with things like ChatGPT and meta AI and so on
is that the multi-billion dollar investments in, you know, like
(06:56):
server infrastructure and power infrastructure and those sorts of things
to be able to process the requests and deep seek
claim that they've done it in a way that uses
a fraction of the processing power, which has companies like
Nvidia who make a lot of the the chips that
are utilized in these sort of AI type platforms. Um,
(07:18):
a little bit by surprise has them a little bit concerned. Now,
there are some caveats, if you like, or some things
to be aware of with deep seek the responsiveness. From
what I've seen of it is quite fast, but it's
not entirely accurate and it does seem to self-censor. So, uh,
(07:39):
if you, for example, ask questions about Tiananmen Square or
anything else that might paint, uh, the Chinese government in
an unfavorable light, it either chooses not to answer or
to give you a, you know, a very, very cut
down and very limited response. The other question, there are
some concerns around the sort of the security of the platform.
(08:02):
And if you if you register with it, you know,
where where does that data go? Is it handed to
perhaps Chinese government or somewhere else. And that hasn't been
made entirely clear. So some of us, including me, are
a little bit reluctant to sort of register and provide
too many details. I think for the moment, if I'm
(08:23):
going to experiment further with it, I'll probably use, you know,
something innocuous like my Gmail account or something, and I'll
probably access it from behind a VPN, just to be sure,
because there are too many unknowns about where where the
traffic goes. But certainly the interesting thing about it, from
a tech point of view, is the fact that they
claim that they can, you know, process this information and
(08:46):
these requests with a fraction of the the the infrastructure.
I think it was for January. It was the most
downloaded app in both the Apple App Store and the
Google Play Store. So there's certainly a bit of interest
in it, but I would suggest just approaching it with
a small degree of caution. If you're concerned about privacy
and where your information is going and all of those
sorts of things.
S1 (09:06):
How's the accessibility?
S2 (09:08):
It seems okay from the small amount of experimenting that
I've done. But as I said, because I have some
reservations about it, I haven't really spent enough time with
it to comment, but in the brief look that I had,
I didn't sort of run into any really significant issues.
S1 (09:22):
So we're talking there about deep seek, which the AI
world has been talking about a lot over the last week.
I want to put in a quick cheerio for ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is what I've been using on my windows machine,
and I imagine would be the same for the other
desktop platforms. Just a little application of it that I've
(09:45):
found really useful recently is around accessing other software products.
So I was able recently to ask it how I
could invoke a URL in Linux. Then I asked it
for the command to invoke a particular URL, and then
I asked it to generate the script so that I
(10:08):
could then have a command to execute that script and
invoke the URL. And it was able to guide me
very clearly. And the thing about ChatGPT is that it
keeps a history of your conversations with it, and also
at any time you can copy its response and save
(10:29):
some of them away somewhere in a file, maybe where
you have a number of interrogations to it on a
particular topic, and you can have them all grouped together.
So it's pretty good. ChatGPT.
S2 (10:42):
Just on that too, I should also mention that one
of the big differences between Deep Seek and ChatGPT is
that deep seek at this point in time does not
provide the voice mode, the sort of conversational voice mode
that ChatGPT does. The only way to work with it
is to type to it. So that's something to note
as well. If you use it in that way, which
(11:03):
I quite often do.
S1 (11:05):
Yes, it can be convenient to do it that way
though the voice is also very good. I'd like to
talk to you about Amazon Amazon Fire TV. Perhaps you
could explain what that is and the Omni Mini product.
S2 (11:18):
There are there are a number of these sort of, um,
Amazon Fire TV type devices. So they're a media type
device that attaches to your TV and allows you to
stream content from Amazon Prime and other things, you know,
similar in some respects to things like the Apple TV
or the Google TV product. But in their next iteration,
(11:41):
which is the fire TV Omni mini, they're including a
feature which allows you to have two simultaneous audio streams.
If you had one family member who uses hearing aids
and wants the audio from the TV stream to their
hearing aids, they can do that while simultaneously having it
(12:01):
streamed to the lounge room for the rest of the family.
At the moment, with most of these things, it's an
either or scenario, or you have a situation where what
gets sent to the hearing aids, there's a significant latency
or delay, whereas there's now a new protocol which they're including,
which allows you to simultaneously have the Have the audio
streamed to two different devices.
S1 (12:23):
So how do you get involved with something like fire TV?
How do you start?
S2 (12:27):
You can simply order them from Amazon. I would normally
recommend waiting until they have a, you know, Prime Day
sale or something because you can pick them up fairly
cheap and then they just generally plug into your HDMI
port on the back of your television. They do have
a built in screen reader. I do find with all
of these TV platforms, there are some limitations with some
(12:48):
of the third party streaming apps. Some of them work
better than others, and some of them they'll work well
on one platform, but not the other. I had a
recent experience buying a TV for my caravan. It was
a Google TV had, you know, the Chromecast and things
built into it. But for some reason that particular TV
manufacturer had disabled all the accessibility features. So it is
(13:10):
a little bit hit and miss in that way. But yeah,
the Amazon experience is probably comparable to what you might
get on something like Google TV if you've already got
an accessible box of some sort, whether it's an Apple
TV or a Google TV for watching content, there's probably
no compelling reason to race out and buy the Amazon
Fire TV, except that you, of course, could control it
(13:32):
from your Alexa device so you can tell it to
stream things and that sort of thing. So that may
be of interest, but it's essentially Amazon's TV streaming device.
S1 (13:41):
Before we go, a reminder to everyone listening that you
can find details of what we've been talking about in
this and previous editions of the program by going to
VA radio, Talking Tech, VA radio, Talking Tech to write
to the program.
S2 (13:57):
Damo. Damo McMorrow McMorrow at Vision Australia.
S1 (14:05):
Damo McMorrow at Vision Australia. This has been talking tech
with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager
Damien McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolly. Take care. We'll talk more
tech next week.
S3 (14:18):
See you.
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