This is Technology Bytes, episode 98 for January 19th, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy.
And here we go.
Today, I’m going back to Apple intelligence again.
I know I’ve spent some time there, but it’s just, it’s really brand new and I use it sparingly, but there are times when I, I remember, oh, this is there.
This is available.
I can do this.
And this week was one of those times.
And I was using the writing tools that are in Apple intelligence.
Now I realized that Apple’s not the first to do this.
In fact, all the artificial intelligence engines, tools, whatever you want to call them, have had these type of tools in them all along, but I just don’t use them.
It’s kind of interesting.
I’m a technology nut and I love technology, but I am a little cautious when it comes to things like artificial intelligence, chat, GPT, those kinds of things.
I I’ve seen it used.
I’ve talked to people that use it a lot.
They’re often surprised that I don’t use it at all.
And, and it’s interesting because now that Apple has released things, then now I’m free to use them.
I don’t know why I hesitate to use other people’s offerings, but I do.
And some of it might be privacy, but maybe that’s a not actually what is all cracked up to be from some of the news this week.
But that is who I am.
That’s the world that I live in.
And that’s the technology I use once Apple has released it.
So this week at work was a little bit of a difficult week.
We were struggling with some of our employees, trying to figure out what’s the best approach.
And so our bosses, I have a counterpart at work.
We actually have the same title.
We do a little bit different job, but we work very closely together and our bosses, who’s the owner of the company, the CEO, and then the COO, who’s our boss, who actually works remote had both kind of given us direction to get rid of some of our employees and we spent time thinking about it, my, my counterpart and I, and we just weren’t having peace.
I prayed about it through the weekend and I could not come to peace with what we were being asked to do.
And so my counterpart at work said, I’ll write something up that we can send to our bosses and see what they say.
So I said, that sounds like a good idea and asked if he would send it to me before we send it to the bosses so that I could take a run at it as well, seeing what it looked like.
And basically what I knew I was going to do was select the text and run it through Apple’s writing tools.
It’s kind of funny because I believe he wrote it in Microsoft word.
Maybe he just put it in Outlook in an email, but either way, um, copilot exists in that environment because that’s what happens with Microsoft office now.
And I didn’t even try that.
I wasn’t interested in using their offering.
I don’t know what it would have done.
Um, probably should do things like that as a comparison, but that’s not where my mind went.
I decided to see how Apple’s writing tools would massage what my counterpart had written and see if it was something that we thought was worthwhile using.
So I’m kind of burying the lead because you know, if I’m talking about writing tools from Apple and if it didn’t work, I might not be talking about it for very long and so it did, it worked well.
It did exactly what we wanted it to do.
And it split, uh, basically what was one paragraph email into four different paragraphs, it, I ask it to take the writing that I gave it and make it more professional and it wrote so well.
I, um, it didn’t really not sound like my counterpart.
It was still his words, but it just grouped them and arranged them and threw in a couple things in such a way that it made the point we were trying to make very clear and very professional, just like I asked it to.
So another example of real world, real world use of Apple intelligence and it coming through in shining colors.
So just thought I would share that with you this week.
That’s all I have for today.
If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybitesatmerigfamily.com.
Thank you for listening to the Technology Bites microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
