This is Technology Bytes, episode 74 for August 4th, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I want to talk about the latest beta offerings from Apple on almost all the devices, but let’s say all the devices that have a particular brain set in them that allow them to do this.
So let’s see, do I just say it at the beginning?
I guess so.
So I’m going to talk about the betas that offer a glimpse into Apple intelligence.
And so it was interesting because I was sitting at my desk at work, and you know my struggles with Safari and the latest beta, and they came back after last week being so happy that I could use Safari once again.
It just didn’t last a whole week even.
And so I thought, I wonder if there’s another update yet.
I knew it was probably too early, but I thought I would look.
And it said, nope, you’re on the latest update.
And then at the bottom of the screen it says, but there is this update available.
And it was called 18.1 because I think I was on my iPad at the time.
And so then I did a quick search and find out that, yeah, 18.1 iOS and iPadOS has been released as a beta one.
And also 15.1 has been offered for Sequoia.
And these are only offered to devices that are able to run them.
And so I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max that can run it.
I have the latest M4 iPad Pro that can run it.
And I have an M2 MacBook Air and an M1 iMac.
Actually, that might be different.
I think they’re both M2s at this point.
Anyway, they can all run it.
And so then it’s a matter of do I pull the trigger or do I not?
Well, if you don’t know me by now, having listened to this, and even if you go back and listen to whether I thought I should install the developer beta.
Oh, I may have not said that.
This is a developer beta of Apple Intelligence offering.
And it’s not everything.
But, of course, as I read and I thought, oh, the 18 developer beta isn’t unstable.
So how much worse could the 18.1 be?
And maybe it could fix my Safari problems.
No, it didn’t.
So I’ll just get that out of the way at the beginning.
So not all of Apple Intelligence is offered, but some is.
And so one of the things that I noticed right away is summaries.
And I noticed it first in my email.
And so as I was looking through my email for work and also my email for personal, I noticed that there was a little icon at the beginning of the text that indicated it was a summary.
And it was pretty good.
It was pretty interesting to watch and see.
I had a long work email, and it said, hey, this is going to happen on these dates for this many people.
And we’re going to close the stores for these orders on this date.
We have to ship by this date.
And the email was like three paragraphs long, but it really covered it well.
And so that was pretty cool to see.
It happened on my iPhone, and it happened on my Macs, except I don’t always use work email on my Macs because, I don’t know, trying to keep it separate, I use some of the Office 365 stuff.
It’s not my favorite, but it does keep it separate from my personal.
So that was pretty neat.
And then I was looking for something else on the web, trying to fix my Safari problem, of course.
And it says, would you like to do a deep dive?
I think it was the words.
And so I said yes.
And it said, well, give me a couple minutes.
And so it was crunching something.
And then all of a sudden it comes up with links and summaries.
And it was an in-depth search.
I don’t know why it always didn’t do that, but I guess this is part of the Apple intelligence.
It still didn’t answer my question because it just apparently is not something that’s going to get solved by me for the Safari and the betas.
But it was very interesting to see the difference in search in Safari with Apple intelligence involved.
So the other thing that is offered now is writing tools.
So it helps in your grammar.
It helps in writing maybe professionally, making it more friendly.
There’s not a whole lot of options at this point.
I don’t write very much.
An email here or there, but nothing of significant length.
I talk quite a bit as I do a couple of podcasts.
But those notes are just bullet points.
And then I just go off the top of my head.
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
But I did notice that the writing tools pop up in interesting places.
I thought it was fun to watch and see the suggestions.
And it was pretty neat.
I haven’t really explored it deeply yet because I just don’t write that much.
So one of the silly little things is Siri, only in how it looks when you activate it.
Because it now lights up all the way around the screen.
You may have seen that at WWDC.
I was surprised to see that even happened in Apple CarPlay.
So you don’t get just the little wavering circle at the bottom of the screen anymore.
The whole screen lights up.
I haven’t really done too much with Siri being able to understand follow-up questions.
I need to do a little more testing on that.
But watching some videos on people using it was pretty neat to see.
And then just recently I went into the photos where you can do natural language searches.
And I did some searching for my granddaughter eating pizza.
And apparently I have one picture that does that from when she was about 2.
And it pulled it right up.
So it was pretty neat to see that.
And today I was changing out a thermostat.
And going back from an Echo B to my daughter’s original one.
Because she sold her house and we want to take those things with her.
And it found the one picture that I needed for looking at the wiring to put it all back together.
So Photos is pretty cool.
It does let you use some natural language to create memories.
I have yet to test that out but I’m looking forward to doing that.
So maybe another microcast on the Apple Intelligence betas is in the near future.
As I have time and the inclination to explore some of what is being offered at the moment.
But first initial thoughts.
It’s pretty neat.
The stability of the beta is super.
I haven’t had any issues with it.
It gives you some ability to give some feedback.
Oh yeah, one of the things that I saw that it does is in a group text message which I have with my family.
They were going back and forth.
I was at work unable to be involved.
And it just summarized the six messages that had gone back and forth for me.
So that I could very quickly just keep up or catch up with the conversation and go from there.
So that was pretty neat.
And then it also has suggestions for replies.
And those are way more thorough.
Almost maybe complete thoughts or sentences rather than just an okay, no, maybe, yes.
Those kind of things.
Those are still there.
But the longer, more contemplative replies are there as well.
So that was pretty fun to see.
So I think in the next days, weeks, and we’ll see how those updates go.
I’m going to stay on the 18.1 path because there’s really two now.
You can do the 18 developer beta.
Even public beta is out for that.
The 18.1 developer beta, no public yet.
And so I’ll probably stick with the developer betas.
They haven’t been that difficult for me up to this point.
And I look forward to seeing what evolves as we get more of the betas in our hands.
Or Apple Intelligence features, I guess.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at maryfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast.
And I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
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