 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to every single one of you, including Hi Tech Oki, Jim Hart, Logan Larson, and James Irizari. On this episode of DTNS, Amazon brings its voice assistant into the large language model era, announces tons of new hardware, and OpenAI releases a new version of the image generator, Dal E3. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, September 20th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Saradale. I'm Sarah Lane. Whoops, from Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Scott forgot who he was. We hope that you've recovered from the slip. That was a big surprise. Big surprise to me. Whoa, that's me. I don't know what y'all were doing 20 years ago today, but I was getting hitched. So, happy anniversary to my best friend. Tom, that's awesome. Well done. Sorry, I didn't mean to rub it in. I'm just trying to push my wife out of the universe. Let's start with the quick hits. Microsoft's head of gaming, Phil Spencer, responded to roughly 100 internal documents being accidentally uploaded to a U.S. Court website related to the now withdrawn U.S. FTC versus Microsoft lawsuit in a post on social media about the exposed documents. Spencer said, quote, it is hard to see our team's work shared in this way because so much has changed and there's so much to be excited about right now and in the future. We'll share the real plans when we are ready. Oh, the real plans. Oh, gosh, yeah. In an unrelated leaked memo, it's a weak leaked memos. Microsoft's head of consumer marketing, Yusuf Mady told employees that Thursday's Microsoft announcement scheduled for 1 p.m. Eastern will include AI efforts as well as new surface hardware. This feels more like an intentional leak. Microsoft has reportedly been developing an AI related chip for its products, so it could be AI in the hardware. I expect it probably will be. Also, Mady said that the Windows Web and services units are now being brought together into a single unit, which makes it sound like Windows is going to become even more cloud reliant integrating web services and AI. What's up for iOS includes native support for the iPad now seen and reported by W.A. Beta Info. The iPhone version could previously be used on the iPad. Many iPhone apps can be, but the new iPad version is customized for a larger screen. Users can link their iPad app with an iPhone version and that would port over existing messages. The test flight version of the iPad app is maxed out on users with no information about when it will come to the general public. So for now, expect this soon, Mish? Maybe. China's Ministry of State Security accused WeChat on Wednesday. That the U.S. has continuously attacked Huawei's servers since 2009. It also includes U.S. tech companies, accuses U.S. tech companies of installing backdoors on software to steal data from China and Russia. The post specifically called out spyware called second date as being developed by the U.S. National Security Agency. As we mentioned in GDI yesterday, Mac, the U.S. As we mentioned in GDI yesterday, Max is launching a live sports add-on October 5th under the Bleacher Report brand. Existing Max subscribers will get it at no additional charge until February of February 29th. Then after that, they have to pay $10 a month to include it. If they so desire, you don't have to. You would just choose to. In addition to studio shows like Inside the NBA, one of my favorites, the Bleacher Report add-on will have live games from the NBA, NHL, MLB, men's college basketball, cycling races, and also soccer. All live games on cable or broadcast will be included as well. All right, let's get into that Dolly news. Hello, Dolly. Let's do it. Hello, Dolly. How are you open AI announced version three of its image generator, Dolly, D-A-L-L-E, just in case you were confused. It understands context better and integrates with chat GPT, so says open AI. So for example, you could tell chat GPT to write a prompt for Dolly three. Open AI uses external web teamers. That is a group that intentionally tries to break a system to test its safety for the better of everybody on the other side of it to develop better safety measures for Dolly three to help prevent creation of explicit or violent images. Dolly is also instructed not to create art in the style of living artists. Artists can send images to open AI that they wish to exclude from the training models as well. If they're kind of worried about it somehow getting in there chat GPT plus and enterprise subscribers will also get the new Dolly in October, followed by researchers and API users later in the autumn. Open AI didn't offer a time frame for a free version, but one would assume they would hope that some free users would play around with it and make it a little bit smarter. All right, Scott, let's start with you as somebody who you know is very into image generation from the human sense. What do you what do you think about the latest version of Dolly Dolly three as a as a human art generator? Yeah, I actually think this is really good news and I hope it's probably not the they're probably not the only group AI group working on this to ensure future versions of their image generation. They're certainly getting sued the most though. They are getting sued a lot. That's a big motivator turns out if you really want to get somebody to do something often often a suit will do it. But the fact that they are I think is really good news for the future of all of this stuff and I hope others follow suit. You know, we don't really know how it's going to present itself until we see it in action. But I like the idea that the model will at least do its best or hopefully do its best to avoid some of the trappings that are around this thing like taking other artists work or having been trained on it producing artwork that looks just like theirs and then others using it or selling it or whatever. These are all big problems and in and around this stuff and it's part of the reason you don't hear much or as much controversy when it comes to chat GPT because people are doing a lot of tech stuff and I'm sure that some people are saying well Scott they can also write in the style of so-and-so and write in the style and I have heard people complaining about that and then suing chat. I think George R Martin just joined a suit against open AI for that make sense because that that you know it's kind of the same problem. But I feel like the image stuff gets more stage time because it's visual and everybody can see it. It's different than writing where you got to go read a bunch of paragraphs to see if something was taken or not. So smoking like an artist right exactly but knowing that all of that is happening on the writing side and the art side I think is really healthy for quote unquote for lack of a better term the industry or movement of the AI and large language model image and text generation. We don't want these things to be taking people's work and doing it without any kind of credit or all you know these other some of these issues will remain and we're still going to be arguing about this for years I think but these are steps in the right direction regardless of the motivation was it was if it was lawsuits fine but they're the big player or one of the biggest players in this mix and when the big player makes you know in roads like this toward trying to apply ethics some kind of ethics to this stuff even though it's moving so rapidly I think is a really good thing. I'm probably missing something here but creators can submit this is from the Verge article creators can submit an image that they own the rights to and request its removal in a form on its website. Okay I get that remove my don't train on my data without my permission I support that I think you should have the right to decide whether your stuff gets trained on or not great great job open AI a future version of Dolly can then block results that look similar to the artist image and style well don't they have to train something to recognize whether the art is being created in that style at which point aren't they training a model to do just that and the reason I bring that up is I I think the fear of this is a little overblown because again. Yeah you could you can get the generator to do something in the style of Scott Johnson but that's no different than getting someone else to write in the style of Scott Johnson to me the problem is what you do with it and maybe what I'm missing is scale you can do this at scale which you couldn't if you have to do it by hand and that that is a big difference but I'm not sure that that this is as big of a problem as people are fearing it's going to be because you're having to give if I'm reading this right open AI the the same tool that they might use to train the model in order to stop it from accidentally creating something that looks like your art right how would the model know to avoid your thing if it didn't know your thing implicitly know your thing so it could avoid making your thing you're I think you totally right I think that's probably true but you know that's where these that's where the nuance comes in with this whole conversation it's like well this we have to look at it this like almost like a person and I don't mean like in the AI sense which is like a person I don't mean that what I mean is for this thing to actively avoid this and apply these quote-unquote ethical standards they have to know what they're being ethical for and so in this case as Tomics described it you have to train it on the thing they're avoiding so it seems goofy and backwards and would it be better if it just never knew your style and maybe but I don't think that's realistic I think it's going to need to know what salve to use the name Salvador Dolly's work looks like for it to avoid outputting Salvador Dolly and making his people mad you know so yeah I think you have to train it on everything it's complicated yeah no it absolutely is what is also complicated sometimes Salvador back in August I don't know what I'm doing but some people seem to think that what I do is is okay and I've been doing it for a long time so I conducted a seminar called how to make a great podcast good news we recorded it you can get that session in the new DTS Patreon store I explain the foundation of podcast producing how I do things share some ideas and experiences on how I think a podcast can be made great and you can get that seminar if you're interested either as a downloadable file that you can keep and watch whenever you want or streaming if you'd rather have it just available in the cloud and you don't have to worry about the file you can pick which one you want just go to patreon.com slash shop Amazon held its devices and services event Wednesday spending the majority of its time touting the services part upgrades to its voice assistant thanks to the inclusion of large language model support finally let's see what old Al Exa has in store Amazon says it should sound more natural it should respond faster be better at using context so you can just speak in natural language you don't have to keep repeating the wake word you can have ongoing conversations for example Amazon says you should just be able to say I'm cold and it will then adjust the thermostat because it knows what you mean when you say that for smart homes you should be able to just make a list of what you want your devices to do and Amazon will be able to create a new smart home routine for you. Amazon's example to the verge on this was Alexa every morning at 8am turn up the light play wake up music for my kid in his bedroom and start the coffee maker other smart home smarts include smart lighting which can take into account brightness time of day and motion to intelligently decide whether to turn lights on or off and automatically discovery should be easier to apparently after you add a new smart light you can just say turn on the new light and it'll know prebuilt features in third party devices will be supported as well so if you have the example they gave was GE's colored light bulbs you can say make it look spooky in here and then it'll turn orange and black I assume or if you have a Roomba you can say the floor is dirty and then the Roomba will be like oh you all go clean that up these features are called dynamic controller and action controller respectively and require participation from the device makers to make it work so it's not just a generalized thing a few other things here Amazon showed off map view which yeah if you have an iPhone or an iPad that has the LiDAR sensor the most recent ones do you can create a map of your home and then display all your devices on a map so you can control them from there you can just look at the family room light tap it and turn it on and off AI upgrades will work on all echo models going back to the launch of version 2014 the very first one new upgraded voices system coming to the BMW cars as well and the large language model powered smarts come into the fire TV search function so that you can search in natural language and narrow down your results that way as it gets more capable Amazon says it might start to monetize some of this since they can't get you to buy anything through these speakers Amazon told the verge the idea of a superhuman assistant that can supercharge your smart home and more work complex tasks on your behalf could provide enough utility that we will end up charging something for it down the road now the company is going to introduce the upgrade for free to begin with through a preview program so if you're in the US in the coming months look for that everybody gets a chance at the non-smart home upgrades through that preview program but if you want the smart home stuff I mentioned that's invite only alright let's pause there before we get to the hardware what are our hopes and dreams for these upgrades to the voice assistant oh man well okay so we've got a new piece of kids hardware the echo pop kids coming with branded content like Marvel or Disney for $50 which includes Amazon kids plus a new fire HD kids plus pro for older kids and fire HD 10 kids which starts at $190 for upgraded battery life and processors yeah let's get let's get into the hardware Amazon also announced the echo show 8 with spatial audio and room adaptation or improved sound similar to how sonos speakers work home screen content will change when it detects your nearby pre-order starting now for $150 shipping next month and Amazon introduced upgraded echo frames with longer battery life upgraded audio and multi-point pairing there are also new frame styles so you can keep it fashionable Amazon echo frames sell for $270 a new fire 4k stick with Wi-Fi 6 for $50 also was announced the fire TV max streaming stick has Wi-Fi 6 E Dolby vision HDR HDR 10 plus and Dolby Atmos audio for $60 a $120 version of fire TV soundbar works with fire TV devices without set up for $120 so you're paying for a little setup all fire TVs and echo shows also get ambient art which you can alter with voice commands again using some generative AI in the process three new blink security devices including a camera range extender for $50 come in next year a battery extension pack for outdoor for that one's 30 bucks and a new floodlight camera for 160 bucks pre-orders on that now and a new ring stick up cam pro has a radar powered 3d motion sensor a new 8 inch echo hub is a thread border router and matter controller that you can mount on the wall or smart home control and other smart display functions for $180 I am very excited about the new Eero mesh Wi-Fi because I use Eero and even if Amazon owns them I still love them the max 7 has Wi-Fi 7 support Wi-Fi 7 isn't even a fully certified standard so it's forward compatible 10 gigabit ethernet ports and can support more than 200 connected devices pricey starts at 600 bucks and you can get it in packs of one two or three and an accessibility feature for the fire max 11 tablet will let you control smart home devices video audio and more with your eyes with a feature called eye gaze a new $6 per month service called emergency assist can call emergency contacts if something goes wrong and use voice commands to connect with assistance directly okay we have talked about software we have talked about a hardware what do we think quick thoughts Scott Johnson well to me the big that all of this new hardware this avalanche of hardware that we just talked about depends on how good these this improved language model based AI stuff is with the A word if she's that much better and I can have the kinds of conversations with her that I'm currently taking for granted on things like chat GPT which I've become very accustomed to I don't want that to go away I am I'm all in on the future of some of that if she can exhibit some of those same sorts of responsive answers even when my question may not be perfect or there can be some intuiting of what I mean some of that Tom laid out earlier I think all this hardware then suddenly seems more interesting to me without it none of this seems interesting to me because the current state of the a word and the echo ecosystem is not all that great it feels behind it feel like it's it's lagging for that matter so does Siri so does okay G word they all kind of have lagged for me in terms of catching up with what's happening on the on the cutting edge of all of this which chat GPT and others are at so for me all of this hardware sounds awesome in the shadow of the a word is now like legitimately good at giving you what you want when you want it and how you want it then I'm interested in all of this and these don't seem like high prices 120 bucks for this or that not as big a deal but if it was all like status quo I don't know man I would I don't think any of this would be exciting there have been rumblings you know from inside and outside Amazon and Google talking about the assistance you know of like you know everything is kind of it there were such bigger hopes for all of these assistance and they're not really what they've promised to be especially when you look at all of the AI you know chat GPT type stuff I kind of disagree I feel like my you know I'm more or less in the Amazon ecosystem I do use sono speakers so there are certain echo speaker functionality that either comes to me or just never does but for the most part I can do what I want to do I tell you know my lights to do what I want them to do I tell my TV to turn on and off I you know order things for my groceries I do not think this is a bad life but I understand that if you know you're a company like Amazon you want way more from a person like me if I am a person who is not not shy about you know speaking out loud what I would like the assistant to do they would like to make way more money off of me and you know I'm here for it I will I will play around with us to me it's a contextual thing like if I ask my echo to play back a certain band that I like if that band is not super easy to distinguish like if I say R-E-M she's going to know and she'll play me an R-E-M playlist but if I say play me live that word's too weird it's a band and I loved him in the 90s but it's weird it's hard to SEO that name there are other bands called the band and band and things like that I would love it if she could know more than that I did this with my own podcast I can say hey A word play the morning stream and it knows to play the latest morning I love the work on our A word but if I say hey same name play me core my other podcast about video games she really struggles because core is a she doesn't understand she tries to play me some music by some yeah this is really convoluted now I'm not saying this is just a music application but it's one example of if she can become have a stronger vernacular a stronger communication and more intuitiveness and all those things that we want to apply to AI then I find the music I want and the podcast I want and more and more content a home home device stuff that I want suddenly becomes a lot more viable to me because I'm not just getting the very baseline basic stuff which I agree is cool but I just think it could be cooler I think the future of Amazon smart assistance is better after this announcement for me than it was before and you alluded to this earlier Sarah that people have been criticizing these voice assistants and that Amazon was hoping we would use them to all shop more on Amazon and that is definitely not what we're doing because I'm the same as you I use it to turn lights on and off you know get a notification that there might be a storm coming or something that doesn't make Amazon ongoing money which is what it wanted to do it's why it was putting out all those weird integrations with shopping and constantly is like hey would you like to buy this or that look at the Echo show the Echo show was designed for me to walk by and go ooh yes add to my shopping list and then buy it that doesn't never happen but no for the most part I'm like oh look the weather 75 so what it looks to me like is they are trying to improve the voice assistant trying to catch up they were ahead of the game in 2014 and it's perfectly normal that they're going to be a little behind this this late in the game nine years later but they're making strides if they fulfill on all the promises they made in this announcement then they should be able to say okay you know we've got a much more capable voice assistant and get more people to buy them that's important because a lot of people were thinking Amazon might back out of this industry and it doesn't look like they are the other thing was that I was kind of worried about that to be honest you know because it's like even at the you know the very you know low level of just being like hey you know who turn TV on I am used to doing that to the point where I do that in places where someone's like who are you talking to and I'm like oh you don't okay yeah so the good and the bad news is it looks like they hit on a monetization strategy that doesn't involve retail not that they're going to give up on trying to sell you stuff they will but they told the Verge a super intelligent smart home helper and I'm like oh I know what you're going to do you'll keep making this available for free on your echo you're not going to pay to use voice service on your echo but there's going to be fancier options probably related to the smart home oh do you want to be able to program your smart home better easier through matter and thread pay for the the smart home assistant version of this and they can get some ongoing subscription revenue out of that possibly there there'll be some non-smart home stuff where they're like your voice assistant could be even better if you're a prime subscriber or if you add on this thing but it seems like that's the direction they're going and it also seems like when you look at all this hardware we're not seeing the drone that flies around your house or the astro robot or anything like that here this is all very real life stuff smart assistant smart home stuff I think they also see this is like oh this is our advantage in the smart home and I think it really is and they're going to try to capitalize on that yeah also the euro stuff I've got an euro situation where I am now works well it could be bumped up a little bit and that is partly on the telco side but but yeah I I'm a big fan of the euro Wi-Fi stuff that I think would I mean most likely be compared to Google Wi-Fi right kind of same idea stuff like that there's a few mesh competitors out there but and I haven't tried them all because I am satisfied with the euro and I've never I've rarely run into problems with it even mixing older versions with the with the more recent version the six version it's it's pretty stable and works pretty well the concern you at all that sevens not fully standard now that's they this goes back there's a long tradition of this I don't know if you remember like back in 2004 everybody was putting out pre n 802 11 pre n routers because the standard was pretty much there just hadn't been ratified yet so they're like well let's just put out the routers with the support and then we can do a firmware update to tweak it a little when when it gets ratified but no this I don't think that's a concern that's an advantage that means like oh once Wi-Fi seven is ratified you're already in the game you've got it there sure 600 a little high but hey it's that's that's the only that's the big downside now well if you happen to be traveling with a smartphone don't have an Eero hub anywhere near you and you have tapped to pay capabilities Chris Christensen has a handy tip for you this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute one thing that happened in the pandemic that you may not have noticed if you don't live near a major city is that a lot of cities are moving their mass transit system from using whatever complicated system they had before to using tapped to pay and so using your Apple watch your iPhone or your Android phone without getting any special pass you can just tap on in the New York subway in the London subway and I suspect in other ones that are going on right now so if you're heading to one of those cities or many other cities in the world master your tapped to pay skills also easier is it used to be that if you wanted to get a week long pass you would have to buy something special and now for instance in the New York subway as soon as you do a certain number of taps on and off for the rest of the week from Monday to Sunday every other ride is free so get ready to tap to pay on your next trip this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler everyone who's not in the U.S. is laughing at us right now but yes yes we're finally getting it to they've had I was using my watch to tap to the long time ago and just just being in Korea they have tapped to pay for Samsung but not for anybody else Oh really anybody else interesting okay I mean I let's check out the mail Oh sorry yeah I was just going to say there was some time where the only store that I wanted to go to was like Samsung pay or nothing yeah so yeah they love their Samsung over there well yeah it's you know it's got a local advantage all right let's check out the mail bag all right let's do it Rob followed up on our RFID at Amazon just walk out tech conversation that we had Richard Lee Henry on yesterday's show Rob said the tag itself isn't powered and is dormant he was referring to I think was me just sort of being like does that become an issue if you have the tag somehow and a piece of you know the garment that you that you take out of the store and and use going forward Rob says when you pass through the reader the reader itself emits a lower power field that's enough to trigger the tag to respond with a small packet of data like an item number or U.P.C. the readers then able to pick detect that response and then the sale continues so if you're sitting at home that tag is still there but it's dormant if you have something that could read it like a flipper zero or that you might have near you you could trigger it and get the code but without readers literally everywhere they can't really be used to track you or collect data yeah and I got an answer to to my question about where they are they tend to be on the tag that is attached to the clothing somebody said look for kind of a thicker sticker with what looks like wires which is actually the antenna for the RFID so you take the tags off your clothes which most people take the price I get off right then you're fine yep well Scott Johnson no matter how many RFID tags you might have on your clothing we're we're happy to have you here oh thank you very much yeah yeah I have 12 on me right now 12 separate tags by the way cool pants by the way but let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of the work yeah I've been tracking them they're good yeah because that's how it works I am usually talk on the show about the video game shows and stuff that sort of tech tangential but I am going to mention film sack dot com and the reason we're going to do that is because that is a podcast we have been doing since 2009 and we still love it somehow and that means I think listeners really like it so anyway if you like movies old new and everything in between and you want to hear for hosts discuss these things each and every Saturday check it out today at film sack dot com patrons stick around for the extended show good day internet I mentioned Astro the rolling robot from Amazon we acquired one earlier and Roger has been trying it so I gave you my impressions of it earlier this summer we're going to check in with rogers testing of the Astro robot stick around you can catch this show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern twenty hundred U.T.C. find out more at daily tech new show dot com slash live we'd love to have you join us live if you can but we're always on demand as well we'll be back tomorrow talking and all the details within with Chris Ashley joining us talk to you then