Category: Technology

AI Assistants and Important Meetings

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That’s a worry I’ve heard before. Whether you’re a job seeker meeting a recruiter, an account manager calling a customer, or a novice getting coffee with an industry veteran, handing off communications to an assistant might give you pause. You might worry that you’ll blow the opportunity, come off impersonal or worse, arrogant.

via How to use an AI assistant for important meetings – x.ai

I’ve been using Amy as my personal assistant to schedule meetings and add things to my calendar for a little over a year now. Amy is an “artificial intelligence powered assistant” that you act with as you would a person. The advantage is that Amy does all of the time-consuming email back-and-forths that come along with scheduling meetings.

There are a number of companies coming out with similar AI powered assistants, but x.ai has been my preference (I do test out others to keep up with things).

I schedule lots of meetings with clients, potential clients, boards, and colleagues (and podcasts), so anything that frees up my time while coming across with the same genuineness and kindness that I normally try to convey via email is a winner.

Over the past year, I’ve learned a good deal about how to deal with Amy as well as how to introduce or include Amy into an email thread with people who have no clue what AI is or why this personal assistant is not a real human being. I’m sure that will continue, but as a culture we are on an upward slope of awareness about AI (whether that’s because of interactions with Alexa and Siri or news stories) and the concept of having a personal assistant that is powered by AI won’t be such a novelty in a few short years.

I’ve not had anyone comment about my pretentiousness of having a personal assistant or tell me that they were annoyed or inconvenienced by the experience of working with Amy. So maybe we’re getting over our preconceptions about the role of personal assistants in a post-Siri world.

For now, I’m continually using Amy to power meetings and enjoy the experience of doing so!

Updating Your Pacemaker

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This won’t be the last time we see headlines like “465,000 Pacemakers Need a Firmware Update” as more of our medical lives become intertwined with technology. However, technology is the human exploration of advancing our own tools, so there’s good with the bad.

But for those of you who don’t like to upgrade your mobile phones, you might want to start learning to love software and firmware patches and updates. Security threats are a real risk whether it’s your Facebook account, your bank account… or your heart.

The devices must be given a firmware update to protect them against a set of critical vulnerabilities, first reported by MedSec, which could drain pacemaker battery life, allow attackers to change programmed settings, or even change the beats and rhythm of the device.

On Tuesday, the FDA issued a security advisory, warning that the pacemakers must be recalled — and as they are embedded within the chests of their users, this requires a home visit or trip to the hospital to have the software patch applied.

via FDA issues recall of 465,000 St. Jude pacemakers to patch security holes | ZDNet

Iris Hospital Alert App

Once installed, Iris automatically detects you in a hospital. After remaining there for 10 minutes, Iris reaches out to confirm if you’re okay or not via a push notification. If everything’s okay, perfect, just hit the the button to confirm and Iris will go into the background again. If you’re not ok and Iris doesn’t get a confirmation from you, the emergency contacts you chose upon sign up will be informed via text message. Iris will also present your personal health card on the lock screen of your iPhone so ER staff can access your important health and personal data including your name, health status, spoken language, daily medication, and more. ER staff is also be provided your emergency contact”s information and will be able to reach out themselves if they haven’t heard from your contacts already.

via Say hello to Iris, your modern day emergency alert – Iris App – Medium

I love apps like this that utilize the most seemingly mundane features of our constant carry smartphones to achieve good.

Can I Replace My Computer with an iPad?

 

Yes. Probably. I have many needs for a desktop computer in much the same way I drive a pickup truck. Do most people need a desktop computer or even a laptop … or a pickup truck? No.

The new iPads are amazing and iOS 11 is a game changer when it comes to getting things done with a “big iPhone”.

For seven years, I worked as an Expert, Store Trainer, and Worldwide Instructional Designer for Apple. So as you can imagine, I’ve had an innumerable amount of questions and conversations with customers and team members all over the world about tech. And one of the ones I heard most was, “Can an iPad really replace my laptop?” Most people you ask that question of, provide definitive, knee-jerk responses, like “absolutely” or “no way.” But the actual answer, like with most tech, is usually: “It depends.”

via Can iPad replace my laptop? – Enjoy Technology Inc.

The $999 iPhone

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I don’t think the price of the new iPhone 8 / Pro / X / Edition / whatever-its-called is going to put a damper on the demand:

Chief among the changes for the new iPhones: refreshed versions, including a premium model priced at around $999, according to people briefed on the product, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Apple made room for a bigger screen on that model by reducing the size of the bezel — or the forehead and the chin — on the face of the device. Other new features include facial recognition for unlocking the device, along with the ability to charge it with magnetic induction, the people said.

via Dear iPhone: Here’s Why We’re Still Together After 10 Years – The New York Times

Voice Isn’t the Next Big Platform

This piece is originally from Dec 19, 2016, but interesting to revisit as we enter the home stretch of 2017 (and what a year it has been):

In 2017, we will start to see that change. After years of false starts, voice interface will finally creep into the mainstream as more people purchase voice-enabled speakers and other gadgets, and as the tech that powers voice starts to improve. By the following year, Gartner predicts that 30 percent of our interactions with technology will happen through conversations with smart machines.

via Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It | WIRED

I have no doubt that we’ll all be using voice-driven computing on an ever increasing basis in the coming years. In our home, we have an Amazon Alexa, 4 Amazon Dots, and most rooms have Hue Smart Bulbs in the light fixtures (oh, and we have the Amazon Dash Wand in case we want to carry Alexa around with us…). I haven’t physically turned on a light in any of our rooms in months. That’s weird. It happened with the stealth of a technology that slowly but surely creeps into your life and rewires your brain the same way the first iPhone changed how I interact with the people I love. We even renamed all of our Alexa devices as “Computer” so that I can finally pretend I’m living on the Starship Enterprise. Once I have a holodeck, I’m never leaving the house.

And perhaps that’s the real trick to seeing this stealth revolution happen in front of our eyes and via our vocal cords… it’s not just voice-driving computing that is going to be the platform of the near future. In other words, voice won’t be the next big platform. There will be a combination of voice AND augmented reality AND artificial intelligence that will power how we communicate with ourselves, our homes, our environments, and the people we love (and perhaps don’t love). In twenty years, will my young son be typing onto a keyboard in the same way I’m doing to compose this post? In ten years, will my 10-year-old daughter be typing onto a keyboard to do her job or express herself?

I highly doubt both. Those computing processes will be driven by a relationship to a device representing an intelligence. Given that, as a species, we adapted to have relational interact with physical cues and vocal exchanges over the last 70 million years, I can’t imagine that a few decades of “typing” radically altered the way we prefer to communicate and exchange information. It’s the reason I’m not an advocate of teaching kids how to type (and I’m a ~90 wpm touch typist).

Voice combined with AI and AR (or whatever we end up calling it… “mixed reality” perhaps?) is the next big platform because these three will fuse into something the same way the web (as an experience) fused with personal computing to fuel the last big platform revolution.

I’m not sure Amazon will be the ultimate winner in the “next platform” wars that it is waging with Google (Google Assistant), Apple (Siri), Facebook (Messenger), and any number of messaging apps and startups that we haven’t heard of yet. However, our future platforms of choice will be very “human” in the same way we lovingly interact with the slab of metal and glass that we all carry around and do the majority of our computing on these days. It’s hard to imagine a world where computers are shrunk to the size of fibers in our clothing and become transparent characters that we interact with to perform whatever we’ll be performing, but the future does not involve a keyboard, a mouse, and a screen of light emitting diodes for most people (I hear you, gamers) and we’ll all see reality in even more differing ways than is currently possible as augmented reality quickly becomes mainstream in the same way that true mobile devices did after the iPhone.

Maybe I just watched too much Star Trek Next Generation.

Nerd Post on Firewalls

We work on a lot of websites built on WordPress at Harrelson Agency.

Some of those are complicated builds that cost tens of thousands of dollars and require constant maintenance. Some of those are relatively static sites for a non-profit or small business built on a shoestring budget of just a few hundred dollars. What all of the sites we build have in common is a firewall (we use Wordfence a great deal but also have other means and normally work at the endpoint).

What I’ve found in all my years of marketing and business consulting is that web security is so overlooked by companies, churches, and non-profits large and small. WordPress powers a ton of websites out there, and as a result is frequently a vector of attack and hacking attempts. Make sure your web devs / “tech people” or neighborhood kid that you hire to build or work on your site knows at least a little about infosec and opsec or you’ll be paying for your budget-built website eventually.

Here’s a nerdy, but interesting, post from Wordfence on what makes them different from cloud-based firewalls…

When choosing a firewall for your WordPress website to protect it against attacks, you have a handful of choices. Wordfence is one of the only effective “endpoint” firewalls available. The alternative is a “cloud” firewall from vendors like Sucuri (now owned by GoDaddy) and Cloudflare.

via Why Choose An Endpoint Firewall Like Wordfence

Pokemon Go snatches all of your Google data

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By signing up to play Pokemon Go through Google, many iOS users have unknowingly exposed all of their emails, chats, calendars, documents and more to the game’s developer and third-parties.

Source: Pokemon Go catches all your Google data (here’s how to stop it) | Cult of Mac

I’ve been thinking a good deal about this game over the last few days. I should have posted before, but I wanted to wrap my head around the whole thing (as much as I can).

I’ll have a post up tomorrow with my thoughts.

Until then… this report is insanely terrible and horrifying given our current police state / insurance state / corporatist overlords. Our privacy is our power. Don’t give it away so easily, people.

Update

Fixed with new update on iOS.