Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 192 of the IA cast. All right, I'm here with a rather good group of folks. Was going to say large, but I don't think we're too big for what we're doing today. My name is Michael Doeies and I'm here with great folks. We have Taylor Arnt.

Hello, everyone.

We have Jeff Bishop.

Hello, everyone.

We have Michael Babcock.

Hello.

And Marty SoBo.

Hey.

All right, so we are here. Something new we're doing is, if you join us when we record these episodes live on Iacast radio, we're doing a preshow now so you could come in 30 minutes before chat with us using the Iacast hashtag on your favorite platform. And that way we can just hang out and talk about everything coming up. And so that's been pretty awesome today. There have been messages, so that's great. We're on Mastodon and all the other places. So I want to thank everybody for being here and listening and everything else. It's going to be a great podcast today. We've got some great content, but as we typically do when we have Michael and Marty here, do you guys want to give an overview of what you guys have been doing on Unmute for the past week?

I will start so I want to let everyone know that we are introducing a new travel and tech show which will be coming in the next few weeks. So stay tuned to that. We're going to be bringing some really cool stuff and there'll be audience participation. It's going to be a lot of fun, so stay tuned for that and I'll let Michael handle the rest.

He just wanted to throw in information about the new stuff coming out. So Friday finds has kind of changed. Lynn went out and started doing that on her own yesterday. She talked about Google's AI revolution, the HP printer predicament, and also instacart a preview episode. Episode one of that travel show dropped on Thursday. Wednesday we talked about Shellphone show setting, quick dials up. There was the replay of the ACB community call on Tuesday. And then Technically Working was recorded last week as well. And Pinecast didn't show me all of the content. So I'm trying to talk and find that at the same time. Do you remember we talked about Michael on which one? Oh, we technically working. We did it first talking about Macgpt and how we had mentioned Macgpt, and then it got mentioned on MacBreak Weekly. No, that was yes.

Yes. Thank you, Michael. Fantastic. Yeah. If you haven't checked out Unmute, they have some great shows. And I really enjoyed the travel show. That was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that.

I still need to watch that.

Yeah, it's rather a fun show, so check that out. Okay, so we have some good topics to talk about today. And I guess the first one. Let's get this one out of the way because it's always coming up somehow, some way, and that is the downfall of Twitter or X. And you know what, and I'm kind of curious y'all's thoughts on this because I hear a lot of people say, I'm just going to keep calling it Twitter. And one of my favorite trainers from LinkedIn Learning and previously Linda.com, his name is Martin Ren Hendrickson says, and he does a lot on TikTok, he's a great educator. He does WordPress and all these other training classes. He said, know it's great if you still use it, but don't call it Twitter because it is not Twitter anymore. And I do feel like it is not Twitter anymore. It is something different. It is not the same platform really anymore. I mean, the Word tweet is in there in cases and it still points to Twitter, but it is really a lot different. In my mean, there's a Twitter Mac app and you could go to Twitter.com, but it's totally different. And to make it even more different, now you're not going to be able to block users on the platform anymore unless it's in your DMs. Have you guys seen this?

No, I haven't seen it.

I have, yeah.

I think the new name of Twitter is very fitting. X is the word, it in braille and it is an evil clown character.

Yeah, well, it can also be Tin.

Therefore, it's very fitting due to the fact that they eliminated the entire accessibility team, they eliminated all third party clients. It's just yet another very fitting, fitting name for, frankly, a service that is really nothing like it used to be. It's very sad, right?

It's very chaotic. I don't understand how people even can handle all the chaos. You don't know what's going to be from 1 hour to the next at this point.

Yeah, it is. And then there's those people who really don't care. They will use it until the lights go out.

That is true. Got the hardcores who's going to hang on till the lights go out.

Like you say, Taylor, which is all my accounting people. So they don't care about Twitter changing its name to X. Like I said, as long as they can post, as long as they can interact.

Well, it's what people know, right? It's what people know. And people like to stay where they're comfortable, what they know. But I think for certain groups of people, blocking is required. Like, there are so many stalker people and people that are doing terrible things on these platforms. I can block people. I believe on mastodon, you can, you can mute people. I've started muting anybody that posts, or I've started blocking reposts about political stuff that come across my mastodon timeline, because I don't want to see that.

Here's a question I'll put out there. Do you think that they're going to bring back blocking, but it's going to be behind a paywall?

No, that's a good point.

No, I don't think so. I think the whole intent here is to make sure that in their opinion, things stay open.

Right.

I think the bigger issue than X is you have lots of people who are not embracing other social media platforms. I don't have a problem. If you want to stay on X and even promote whatever you want to promote there, that's perfectly fine with me. I mean, you have every right to do that. But there is a significant audience of people, of blind people, and especially if, for example, at companies, for example, Freedom Scientific is on Macedon, NVDA is on it. But people like Orbit Research, there was a great segment on Mozin at Large today that talked or Living Blindfly, whatever you want to call it, that talked about this very specific subject. And I don't bring it up just because of Jonathan's name. I actually have been talking about this for quite a while, and that is, hey, if your audience is on a specific platform, then you really ought to be serving your your audience wherever your audience members are. And I'm hoping that we see a wider adoption of Mastodon being picked up because that's where majority of the people that we communicate with are.

Right.

The blind users are on Mastodon.

Yes.

There's still someone X, there's still some on Twitter. That's cool. And if you want to keep that presence there, then as Jeff was saying, that's fine. But if you want to talk to the people who are going to, a, consume the content that you want, but B, share that content with other people who are following the people that you're targeting, which then widens your target market and your reach with your messaging, you need to be where the people are communicating. And I have gotten tenfold engagement on Mastodon, and it's not only about engagement, but it is if you're trying to help inform and educate individuals, it's about the building conversation.

Yeah.

Thank you, Jeff.

Yeah, exactly. And I think the other thing is that there's this concern about, well, the tools I know, for example, I don't bring this up to bash anybody because people have to do this on the timeline of their choice. Right. I am just hoping that someone builds a timeline. So I've been working with ACB on this, and the concern from ACB is, well, the tools that we use for communication across social media platforms do not support these other platforms. And that's true. So this is a wider problem. Right? It's a wider problem of people need to be recognizing that there are these other services that are available to allow people to engage. I don't blame ACB at all on this. I mean, if you've invested heavily in your tool set, and that tool set is not adaptable to meeting the needs of hosting to federated environments, well, what do you do? Sure, you can go invest in something like Buffer, but then you got to retrain yourself. Okay, great. Now I got to get rid of this other tool and figure out this other tool. And that's going to take time. Yeah, well, it is accessible. That's the other thing is that you have companies that are serving people with disabilities and they're using platforms that are sort of against people with disabilities. I don't know. It's a tricky, tricky one. I just wish people would be more upfront and engaging about not just saying no, but being willing to have an open conversation about, okay, maybe we could use some help on building a roadmap.

To get you know I will say this about Mastodon. Mastodon is the only platform that I know of that has an app. Like, I mean, I guess Spring could do this with Twitter, but I don't believe it's usable.

Spring is is it? Yeah, it's one of these apps where he keeps making changes to keep it working with X. Oh, wow. And so it's know, tag your It game. Right. It's awesome to watch, actually.

Yeah.

Like, what do they call it? Cat and mouse.

Yes, exactly.

One of the things that you could do in Mona that I found is you could create your own theme so you can make the app.

Yeah, it's awesome.

However you want with the colors that you want. And so I've created a theme, like, with a very dark blue background in the white text. So it's like a dark mode, but with the I love the color blue. So I get to have my app look how I want, configured the way I want. And then, you know, the other neat thing is it syncs through Icloud. So I just go select my theme on any of my devices and it's there. And I could even send that theme to other people.

I love that.

I will say the thing about Mona is they definitely think outside of the box in terms of what people may want, and they make the app so customizable. It's almost unbelievable how much you can actually customize it to an individual the way you would like to have it look, feel, work for each individual person. Not many apps spend that kind of time to be able to put that much into customizing a look and a feel and how it works for an individual.

Right.

That's the other thing people yeah, sorry, Michael.

Oh, go ahead.

That was the other thing that people were complaining about, is know these Federated environments are very complicated. They can be, but they don't have to. Right, exactly. That's the thing that I think people need to understand is that yes, look, X can be very complicated, depending upon what you're mean. Facebook honestly can be extremely I don't even get me started on it. I'm there because my family is there. Me too. But other than that, oh, my gosh. It's very complicated.

Some of these platforms can be limiting. Like, Threads is the new hotness right now, but it's an iPhone app. It is not a tablet app, and it's not a desktop app. Yes, I could use Stage Manager with my iPad and it looks great, blah blah, blah, but I can't have a full screen experience and make it look good and post professionally on Threads. I cannot type that fast on that keyboard, and visually it looks okay. But accessibility wise, Threads is kind of a mess. A mess.

Well, the thing is that I'm really on the fence about is you have to be on a specific network even though you don't like it, because if you leave, you're going to lose contact with certain people that you have no other way to really interact with them, such as family or certain family members. I mean, at that point, something is so big that as much as you don't want to use it, you can't leave. That's kind of a weird feeling, don't you think? You sort of feel like forced into having to stay somewhere because you kind.

Of have to be everywhere.

Right? Exactly.

Really do, yeah. Families all over.

And that's why I wish that more platforms would actually look at Federating so people could join in that little silo. Great TV show, by the way. They could join in that little silo but then communicate with other places. So if X or Facebook added activity pub like Threads wants to do, then everybody could just talk to each other and we could just be where we want to be now. I mean, there's problems with everything, but that would kind of make the huge social media town square that we would want.

That's an awesome idea. It's just welcome to fruition, right?

So all in all, I think we can all agree that this whole where we started with this blocking, people need the ability to block users. They need to have the ability to say, I don't want to hear from this person because they are what they are, and I don't want to hear that right on my timeline. Because imagine if somebody's paying and I think this is it. So you can't block ads too, and somebody's paying money to show negative content and you block it. Or can you imagine if kids see videos from an account you don't want them to see and you can't block it. Right. So I feel like that's actually something interesting is somebody shared that apparently Apple and Google have rules that social media platforms have to have mechanisms in place to block users or they can't stay in the App Store. Now, you will be able to still block DMs according to Elon, but you will not be able to block regular users. So I don't know if that falls within the purview of the App Store rules or Google Play rules.

Probably not.

And that's just kind of weird in my opinion. You can block one thing but not.

Think that. I think the way that he's trying to go with this app is that direct messages are going to be more like personal texts.

No.

Yeah, because remember, X is trying to be the everything app. So it's trying to be WeChat in the US. And I even wonder if he's going to remove actually that's a whole discussion we'll have another day is if he's trying to remove a lot of the social media aspect and make it into more of a WhatsApp or telegram.

That would be very interesting transformation. We do not need a WeChat in the US.

Okay, so let's start the next part of our conversation with another negative topic that is that we are hearing reports that OpenAI might become bankrupt in the next while. And I'm very skeptical about this. And the reason why I say that is because I feel like, yes, they're losing money. Yes, they may have to consider that, but they've made so much groundbreaking work. We'll still have Chat GPT, we'll still have all these things that somebody will buy it up, somebody will make sure it stays around and who knows, maybe they'll get more investment money or it might just go to Microsoft or somebody. But I think know, people in the media, they report on something and say, oh, this is going to happen. And everybody's, oh no. And I feel like what happens with that is that when we see articles like this, it really just gets people's blood going. Because I rely on chat GPT, I can't have this. Go. So do you guys agree? What are your thoughts on that topic?

I rely on it so much. Like when Michael told me that, I was like, are you for know, I was very like, if Chad GPT goes away, I'm going to be so upset. Because the thing is that it really helps out with a lot of different things. Of course, I do think like Michael was saying, that there are going to be companies who want to buy it up. Because the thing is that this is a groundbreaking investment. Not investment, but a groundbreaking technology and people have already gotten introduced to it. So now it's kind of going to be something that people are going to expect.

It's interesting to me because they're saying that or we're hearing there's a chance they may go bankrupt, but there's all these companies that are paying to use their technology to implement it into their apps now that's maybe not every single company is paying for it, but as a majority of they're paying for it. So I don't see how that's going to make the company go bankrupt. Something seems off to me. Everybody wants to utilize this new technology. It's the hottest thing right now. So what's making them going to go right?

So I'm distracted by my pick, which is deeply related or deeply powered by Chat GPT and I think Michael's going to love this pick. So I'm super excited for that part of the show, I could see easily how OpenAI may go bankrupt from the resources that Chat GPT is using, but I don't know how much of those resources are being offset by investments from other companies. And is Chat GPT using more money than what they can get for the resources from other investors? So it'll be interesting to see where things go in the next six months because we've gotten used to using it. And like Taylor, I am highly reliant on it. I'm less reliant on it now than I was in the past, but I think it's really interesting. I use a digital bank for my payomedia company called Mercury and Mercury has a lot of perks for their customers, including discounts on Stripe, Atlas and Amazon. AWS, credit and other things. Well, one of the things that I discovered the other day was they also give you $1,000 to use within a year of credit for the API of Chat GPT. So if they're really going bankrupt, why are they still offering promos like this? To build awareness and engagement. So I just think it'll be interesting to see where things go in the next six months to a year.

Do you think that they're putting this out there or someone's putting this out there to keep them just in the news, constantly in the headlines? Because unless we're missing something, I don't see how they can be going bankrupt.

Well, I mean, if you listen to Double Tap, they go through some statistics and they talk about what each query to Chat GPT costs and things like that. One thing to keep in mind is if people are using GPT and not using Chat GPT, then they are paying for API usage somehow, some way. And I guess the question is, if they required everybody to have like a $10 Chat GPT and the $20 plus, would you pay $10 to keep using what is now the free version of Chat GPT?

I would say yes. I mean, people have already been paying $20 a month and I think that's pretty significant for a monthly use of an app or a service. I mean, that's not cheap. So people are still paying for it, which means people are really liking it and finding it important in their workflow to be able to pay that extra money every month to have the service available to them.

Yeah. And this kind of leads into our next segment and that is, I guess, Be My Eyes uses OpenAI as GPT Four. Right? And that would mean that if they went bankrupt and they couldn't afford it, Be My Eyes would be affected and they're just in the beta process of Be my AI. Right? So I'm just hesitant to anytime I hear this has been leaked about an Apple product or this company is going to go bankrupt, this is going to happen when it comes to tech stories. Okay, let's bring it back to last. There was. I think it was last week we talked about the extreme pro hard drives and problems with those. And I heard from Andre Louis that there are steps you can go through to make sure you don't have a bad drive and things. It wasn't the end of the world as the Verge article and the video I shared made it sound like it is right. So I guess when it comes to hearing articles like this I think we need to manage our expectations of the media companies, of the tech reviewers and tech websites that are putting this content out because is it really as bad as what we're hearing or is it really what we're.

No way to know really. There's no transparency mean this wasn't really.

On the agenda but Linus Tech Tips has been under scrutiny for getting information wrong.

You're going to have to explain a little bit of that. I'm not sure everyone's going to understand that topic.

Well for people that may not know the Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel does supposedly factual videos about computer hardware, reviews of different products and has gone from being very factual to more entertainment as other channels are saying. And so you could watch their channel to get a review of computer cases, power supplies, coolers, all kinds of things for building your own computers. And they've always been very negative towards you know, everybody has their but that's as a YouTube channel, people have the right to put out what information they want, but at the same time, you need to be factual and not give misinformation. People are going to make mistakes, that happens but when you make a mistake you need to say somebody fact checked us and it's actually this we apologize and they aren't doing that. And so it kind of goes to what we're talking about with this bankruptcy story and saying is this really the case or is it speculation? Or do we need to really be reading all these tech articles and taking them for what?

They are going back to the Linus Tech tips for 1 second if people are interested in that. They did post a video that's I think probably about 30 minutes that they're talking about all of what happened. So if that's something you're interested in go check out their channel and there's a current video up there that's explaining all of what we're talking about here.

Interesting. I will have to watch that because I will too. That's very interesting that they did post an update about that. There are things that are happening in our world that I think we need to make sure that we get all the information on before we just because clickbait is a real thing. And clickbait is where somebody puts a title to a video or an article to get you to click on it, even if that's not what they're talking about. Or directly what they're talking about. It happens a lot and even some articles try to say this is going to happen even if it's not. So it's important to look at. But I guess we really need to move into our last topic here. And this is kind of why we're here. This is the more exciting part, the more upbeat, the more positive part. So many people have been now allowed into the Be My AI beta. Unfortunately, Taylor and I have not, and.

I'm very sad about it.

But there's also a new feature in the Bing app which lets you take a picture and then get information about that picture from Bing's chat AI bot, which is basically OpenAI.

Yep.

Now we've put it through its paces. Taylor has done several things with.

So.

I'm curious, do you any of you guys here? I think Jeff, you do? Marty and Michael, do you guys have access to the Be My AI feature?

I do.

I do not.

I do.

You do? Okay. So we have kind of two that have access to it and three who or Marty, have you checked out the Bing image feature?

Yeah, I did a little bit. I've messed around with it just a little bit. I haven't spent a huge amount of time, but a little bit.

So we have three that have tried one thing and two that have tried probably both.

Well, I tried them.

Um, so Michael, have you tried the Bing image thing?

No, I have not tried it out directly, but I've heard podcasts. I'm familiar with how it works. I'm interested to hear Jeff's opinion on the results of both, if he's willing to share.

Yeah. Well, do you want to go and talk about that?

Well, I think it's really I don't know, your mileage is going to right. Like, it's all dependent upon the photo that you take and what the AI technology is going to be able to gleam from it. I will say this. I think that the Bing capability is great. I think that the ease of use, though, of Be My AI is probably going to make this a much easier process for users. Right now, Bing is a bit complicated in its user interface, and I don't mean that necessarily as a negative. Right. Bing versus BMI, AI are intended for well, I mean, Bing is intended for everyone. But Be My AI is a very specialized user experience created specifically for blind and visually impaired people. Right. So I think that people are probably going to flock to that and they're going to find that the descriptions that it provides are I think they're going to be pretty comparable, to be honest with you, because they're using the same technology. Right. They're using GBT. Four. So I don't know that it's necessarily a he said, she said kind of a thing of which one's better. It's going to come down to what is the right user experience for users to allow them to be very efficient at it and to be able to do it in a way that's just easy. I think I described it to someone as we need to build delightful experiences. And I think that's the path that needs to be pushed for is a truly delightful user experience for everyone. But I don't think that be my AI necessarily. They all have their little idiosyncrasies, right? My friend Paul was playing with it and he couldn't get out of once he was done, he wanted to go back and start over and he found it a little challenging to figure out how to do know. And I said, well, you can just kill the app from the app. Switcher goes, yeah, well, you shouldn't have.

And it's.

So and actually, I consider being beta as labeled. It's not labeled. Like, I don't think that Microsoft would ever claim that to be, quote, beta. Maybe they would, I don't know. But I sort of think of it as all of this AI stuff, whether you're using the Chat GPT client on iOS, which by the way, I think is one of those delightful experiences, or you're using Vima AI, or you're using Bing, or you're using Perplexity, which by the way, I can't get my mind around. I don't know why it is other people find that app to be just amazing and wonderful and just really easy to use. And I'm like I think it's too cluttered.

Personally, I think it's great that there's options out there because some people want a tool that's going to give them tons of customization, be able to do whatever they want, however they want, and other people don't want any of that. They just want to be able to go on and get in and out quick, do what they need to do without having a lot of what do we want to say, Sparklies? Right. They just want to get in, get it done, get out. At the end of the day, you get to the same place, but having options of how you get there and how you do it and how things work is a great thing.

Yeah, so I think all of these apps or tools or whatever you want to call them, whether they're tagged as beta or not, I think they're all beta because I think everyone's still trying to figure out what is the right user experience and what is this going to look like in six months? I don't know. I have no idea. Honestly, I don't know where we're heading here and I don't know that a lot of people know where we're heading. From the standpoint of where this ultimately, say, in a year or two, where we're going to be in this landscape, it's very fascinating to me. I think it's a wonderful opportunity to reset and look at a brand new technology and see how it's going to fit into our existing infrastructure and how it's going to impact our daily lives from. A work and play and productivity. It's boy, it's being talked about everywhere. And I work at the University of Arizona now, and it's all the buzz. We have weekly meetings on this topic now where we spend hour, hour and a half every week just talking AI and how do we both incorporate it into process and how do we ensure that we're doing it in a way that is also protecting the university as well? So it's just very interesting.

It's very interesting because I've never had a chance to try be my AI. I did try Bing, and I have a video coming out on my channel whenever I have a chance to edit. You know, I have put Bing through its paces. And really, my takeaways, like Jeff was saying, is, yes, I still think it's in know, I think that the app is a little bit cluttered and a little bit busy. It could use some accessibility improvements. Some tabs are unordered, unordered, unlabeled, and just a whole bunch of other problems that all add up to make a very hard to use experience. And I think with that being said, though, the things that Bing generates, the descriptions or I guess the chats are very helpful. I mean, I had it describe the room, right? Because I had that video and I said, describe room. It literally said what's in the room? And then eventually said that there was a red trash can outside the window. I could see all the way out there because I took the image from Mel of the room. And then from there, I did some tests in terms of detecting colors. How good does it do? Detecting colors does pretty well. And then I tried food, and this is where it really went south. It thought a bag of that bag, a can of mixed vegetables, was a can of Pringles, which of course, it's not Pringles. I know what Pringles feel like. And so Michael and I laughed for a little while, and then from there, I had to test some medicine bottles, just some supplement stuff. And of course, it got those way wrong. It thought it was a maxicillin when it was like a sleeping pill. So just a little bit wrong. But AI is in its infancy, and I think overall, I probably give Bing maybe about a five out of ten just because of how inaccessible the app is.

Well, as far as it's usable. But it does have issues with certain things not being labeled or labeled incorrectly. Those things can be fixed. One thing, and I want to get a sense from you guys, do you guys think that because I feel like this is why the Be my AI feature is still in beta. Do you think that there's more guardrails on the Be my AI feature compared to the Bing implementation, or do you guys think that they are the same things? Is there anything do you think that you've gotten Bing to do or say, that would be more of a be my AI will not do this because it's geared towards the blind and visually impaired.

Well, currently, and I don't know if this is going to stay in there. And again, I don't have the beta, so I'm going on what I've heard. But if you cannot get it to do exactly what you need with the AI, there is a way to then hit a button where an actual person will come on and look through the camera for you and tell you exactly what it is that you're trying to identify. I don't think that Bing has that, of course.

Well, no, of course not. No. I think that AI is never going to be perfect. Right. There's always going to be situations where it's going to fail at some level, it's going to not be precise enough, and it's going to give inaccurate information. So this is where it's going to be really important that people be told. And maybe it needs to be something that's even more obvious, like maybe it's done via audio as well as text, and you're forced to listen to it because, you know, most people, me included, if there's an I agree button, I'll just click it. And I don't care what it says because that's just how I am. I think that's how most people are. Nobody reads that stuff. So I think that there needs to be some protection built into this, at least on the be my AI front, to ensure that people understand that, hey, don't be relying on this to cross a street, necessarily use your mobility skills or don't rely on this to make sure that you're taking your right medication. Yeah, please don't. Right. Don't do that kind of stuff because, gosh, you could end up in a pretty serious situation. There's going to have to be some fail safe methods put in place to ensure that people are at least warned. And I don't think they've been saying, we want to be really conservative about this and make sure that we test it and make sure that it's ready. Okay, I get that. But there comes a point where you're just going to have to release it and put those caveats in place because you're never going to have a perfect solution to this.

You're always going to find way more bugs and way more issues when you release it to the public. Opposed to a controlled environment only with certain people in your circle or whatever. There's no possible way the people in your circle, developers and people within your staff, or maybe within your staff, and then a few extra people outside of that is never going to be equal to releasing it to the public for thousands upon thousands of people to beat the app up like crazy and come up with every possible scenario that you would never think of in a controlled environment. There's definitely good and bad to that, as we all know. But I think that's better than keeping it in a controlled environment. Like Michael was saying, at some point you got to just get it out there, let people just use it and make improvements along the way.

Right? And I guess my big question is, do you guys feel like or have you all done tests where you've tried medicine with either one and kind of see like, okay, it's getting this food or this medication, right or wrong? And do you think that the Be my AI version would say I'm not going to answer that because I don't want to be responsible. I'm kind of curious if it will do that differently because Bing is going to try to get it right and it's just most likely not. So I'm curious if we've seen a difference there on the Be my AI version compared to the Bing.

Well, now that's interesting that you bring this up because we have had situations where we find a pill that has fallen on the floor and my wife has used a pill finder app. And you know what? They're pretty accurate, actually, because there's symbols on the pills themselves. At least most medication has this. And so you could actually look this up and actually find out. Now, you may not find out, for example, the dosage, though, but you at least know that, oh, this is Tylenol, or this is whatever, although Tylenol is pretty recognizable. I don't know, though. It comes in different shapes, I guess. I don't know. I personally would not use a technology like that to check for something that important. If something like that were to happen, I would not rely on that. I would want to make sure that I'm comparing it with another pill in the bottle, have someone visually check it, unless you know that, for example, there's no other pills that could have entered. Like, I only take one vitamin a day now, right? So for like when I was at the seeing, I know that, well, if there's a pill on the floor, then it's got to be that because I don't have any other pills here. But I don't know. I think people need to be very careful and very cautious about what they're using this technology for. And there's got to be some human.

Just filtering if you're going to use technology at all. Right. You might just be better at trying with an OCR app, just genuine OCR app, because it's going to get it pretty close. And so if you know you have six drugs and it gets some of the letters wrong, it's not trying to guess and make it into something that it's not, right. Go ahead.

This is where you need to be educated. If you're someone who does need to take medications, talk to your pharmacy and get on their program with the software and the hardware they provide at no cost to you to be able to identify your medications. And like Jeff was saying, other apps out there may be able to identify something, but it's not going to be able to tell you your dosage and any other information like that where if you talk to your pharmacy, and let them know, hey, I have a visual impairment or I'm blind, and I need to use the technology that's going to help me identify all my medications. They have that which is going to be at no cost to you and give you all of the actual information of which medication it is, the dosage and all of that. So this is where you make a smart decision and you make sure that you get yourself educated so that you're not taking a chance and doing something harmful to yourself.

Well, and I think it's one of these situations where you really need to figure out what's the right tool for the right job. Let's bring it to food. Right? If you have certain foods that you're trying to scan, you might want to get a barcode scanner or an OCR program to do that because, again, AI is going to try to get as close to what it can see, and then it's going to hallucinate and tell you maybe not even the right information. So, again, I personally would say let's find the right tool for the right job here and realize that AI is a good tool to describe certain things, but it is still young in its development, and it's not going to replace everything else that we've been using over the years. Would you guys agree?

I would totally agree, because like I said, when I put out this video, it's going to prove that you should not use this technology for certain things because it will not work in some cases could be harmful.

Yeah.

And there's no technology that's going to be right there in your environment with you letting you know everything that's going on around you. I mean, you've got to listen and be aware of your surroundings, what's going on in whatever situation that you're in.

Right. Well, do you guys have any final thoughts? Well, I guess, Michael, if you had to recommend one to people to try, would you tell people, if you're not in the beta yet, wait, or would you tell people to try the Bing image feature?

I mean, I didn't even download Bing because I have access to Bing, my AI. If you're eager to try this technology out, Jeff or Michael, does Chat GPT not do native image recognition in the iOS app?

It does not from what I could tell.

No, I don't think so.

I find the Bing app, from what I heard, to be super cluttered and annoying. If you want to know what it would be like for be my AI, try out Bing. But envision the Chat GPT app because it looks a lot more like that it's more like a conversation when you're sending images.

I will say Bing is not really hugely annoying. They've actually improved it. So it's not as bad as it was tricky. It's just tricky, you know what I mean? It's not a polished user experience. So you're going to need to do a bit more investigation to get where you need to go, that's all. It's not undoable by any means. Again, I come back to it's not.

Quote, delightful, but here's where people can be helpful to the situation. Use the app and give feedback and let them know what's good, what's bad, and allow them to be able to make adjustments and improvements along the way. The only way that's going to happen is if you actually take a chance on the app and really use it, put it through its paces and whatever you're trying to do with it, and give feedback and let them know what's good and bad and what you think they should do to make it better.

Or.

You know yeah, that's very true. Marty. If you are using the Bing app, then get on X and Tweet at or I guess it's not Tweet anymore, it's post. I think post at MSFT enable and give them the feedback. They can get that directly to the appropriate people. I encourage that with all of the technology companies. Get them feedback because that's the only way that you have to influence the future of how things should work and operate. So please take that time, take that five minutes and let them know what you think.

Well, I think this has been a good conversation about these two. I would urge people to try it. Don't rely on either one. Right. And just be mindful of what you're doing and we would love to hear your thoughts. Which one do you like better? You can email us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear your thoughts on each of these programs. And again. We're on mastodon. You could check our Iacast hashtag so also on X and all the other places. And so I think we have quite a big panel today and we have a heart out at the top of the hour, so let's go ahead and wrap this thing up and as we typically do, Marty, do you have a pick for this week and where can people find you online?

I do. My pick for this week is an app called Mercury, and it's a brand new weather app that's been out recently and I read a couple of reviews on it and decided to give it a try. I saw that it actually is a really great app if you're looking for a straightforward weather app that gives you all the information you need without being so much information. And again, you don't customize it or anything like that. It just works. One of the features that I really thought was cool about it was a it was built with Voiceover in mind. So all the elements work with Voiceover. It works across all the platforms. So Mac, iPhone, iPad, Watch, and every other weather app that I've seen. If you want the local where you live to always be present, you need to save a profile, and it also shows up in your local. So you're always looking at two of the same thing. Basically, this app did something really unique where it's showing you your local, but if you leave your local, it knows to sort of hide it and just make it as a secondary view, and then it just brings up whatever local area you're in. When you come back to your local area, it shuts that off again. So you're only looking at your area in the local space only, and it's not a secondary also, so it has that kind of smarts, which I thought was really cool. So if you're looking for something cool, a know weather app, check it out. It's called mercury. It works with Voiceover and it's across all the platforms. You can find me on Macedon. I'm Marty at Unmute Community.

Okay. And Michael. What about you? Do you have a pick and where can people find you?

I do. So my pick today is Find. I'm not sure if you played with that yet, Michael, but it's Phind.com, I believe. Yep. And it is an AI based programming assistant. It does have a Vs code extension for people who are interested.

Are we playing with this?

Of.

So you know how they give you examples of prompts? So one of the prompts that they gave me was, what's new in Llama? Two create a TikTok like application for generative AI. And of course, they have to ask because it is a programming app, why are there so many Potholes in San Francisco? And can I get paid for the damage it caused to my car? And so it's a kind of a cool app designed for programming in mind. Been playing with it for some WordPress stuff to get some WordPress plugin code that I want to work on. And what I like about it is it doesn't just give you the code, it explains to you why it's doing it. And if you need it to go more in depth with the code, it'll provide you those details as well. So, again, find Phind.com and you can find me on Mastodon Payome payown at Unmute Community.

Yeah, we could do probably a whole programmatic episode on this.

Yes, we can, Michael.

Oh, I should thank Mossi for sharing it with me because he's who sent it to.

All right, so Jeff, do you have a pick and where can people find you online?

I do. And by the way, if people want to find that Mercury app, you can search for it. Don't just search for Mercury because you'll never find it. You'll get all kinds of other banking and all kinds of other car things and all kinds of things. So search for Mercury weather if you're just wanting to do a search for it in the app store. And that should pull it up right away. Yes, I have a pick today, and that is we are getting our concept two rowing machine going. So I'm going to pick the ERG data app. And so far it's been a very accessible experience with one exception that being upgrading the firmware. I'm not sure whether or not this is a accessibility issue or if it's just a connectivity issue. And I've yet to determine this, but boy, it's really neat. You just walk up to the rowing machine and you place your iPhone on the PM Five device that's connected to the rowing machine and it connects to it using NFC. And then you can tell it to remember the device and away you go. So none of this Bluetooth pairing really, really neat. So that's my pick. You can find me on Mastodon, at Jeffbishop, at Mastodon online. And if you must follow me on Twitter. I don't visit there that often. You can find me at Bishop there. So thanks.

All right. And Taylor. What about you? Do you have a pick and where can people find you online?

I was really scrambling for a pick. I was really thinking about it all show because I of course, don't really come on here all that often. So I was like, oh, I got to find a pick. Unfortunately, I really couldn't find one. So what I did is I decided to pick the Bing app. Yes, it's not glorious, not luxurious, but you know what, it's really helped save my butt this week because I had to do a lot of different tasks and things for accessibility testing and that was a whole story. But I have used the Bing app substantially and it has been very helpful in some ways. So I am picking the Bing app. Where you can find me is you can find me on Mastodon at Tayarngt, at Techopolis. That is T-E-C-H-O-P-O-L-I-S social. And I'm also on YouTube and I also make content for I accessibility.

Fantastic. So I have been trying to come up with a good pick and I think I haven't started it yet, but I know I'm going to love it. So I'm going to be starting it soon. And that is the new, ahsoka, TV show on Disney Plus. I'm a huge Star Wars fan and I've followed Mo. The reason why I haven't started is I'm not caught up on the Mandalorian, Star Wars rebels and all this other stuff that you kind of need to know about before you get into this. And I think it started this week, so I'm really excited to check that out. So star wars. Ahsoka. And that is my pick on Disney Plus. This know we need to get in our good TV show watching know even pace out your TV show watching since we may not have some for a, you know, TV shows because they're going to be delayed, so keep that in mind. There's going to be some great shows. I'm excited about so many coming out later this year, so it'll be great. As for people can find me online, I'm Mike Doeies on X. I'mike DOE's at Techopolis Social. Taylor spelled it out earlier so I won't do that again and you can email me at [email protected]. You can send feedback to the show at [email protected]. Also keep in mind Iacast Radio is know we're always updating new content. You could put it on for noise, just listen anytime and I'm really excited that people are taking advantage of this. You can always mention our hashtag iacast on Mastodon and Twitter and different places and I'll be kind of monitoring those. But it's been an amazing show. I want to thank all of our listeners. You guys have been great and always feel free to leave us feedback about our content and let us know any show ideas you have. I come up with these weekly and if you guys have ideas or any of you guys that are on the show with me, you all want to talk about a certain topic, we can do that too. So it's been a great episode and we will be back next week for episode 193. We're inching closer to 200, which is exciting. So I want to thank Jeff, Marty, Michael and Taylor for being here. It's been an amazing show and we will be back next week, so thank you all and have a great day.

Thank you for tuning in to the IA cast. We hope you enjoyed the show and found the conversation to be insightful and informative. If you have any feedback or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Please send us an email at [email protected]. You can also follow us on Twitter at iacast network to stay informed about new episodes and other updates. Don't forget to check out more great podcasts on the Iacast Network iacast Net. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again sooner.