Welcome to the seventy-ninth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
Listen to the seventy-ninth episode of the Access On podcast (Browser).
Or listen on your preferred podcast platform.
Description
This week on access On, Jonathan Mosen is joined by Judy Dixon, Heidi Taylor, and Michael Feir to discuss Apple's 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. We discuss the completely revamped Siri, other changes to Apple intelligence, and more.
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Live the life you want.
Music:
Access On.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. In this episode, we recap Apple's All Systems Glow Worldwide Developers Conference keynote.
There's a perception that Apple's lagging behind with AI. Has it done enough to change the narrative? The long awaited revamp to Siri is finally here, and there's even more Apple Intelligence. We'll examine all the changes announced today to Apple's operating systems from a blindness perspective.
It's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, welcoming you to Episode 79 of the podcast. And before we get on to the main event, I remind you that the National Federation of the Blind's Center of Excellence and Non-Visual Accessibility not only produces this Access On podcast, we also produce regular Access On webinars and seminars.
The next of which is on, it's 2:00 PM Eastern on June 30th, that's a Tuesday. It's a 90-minute webinar all about gaming. We're going to have a look at games you can play on your PC, on your smartphone, and the evolving world of accessible games consoles and what's available there. What's not to like when you can hone your technology skills while also having a little bit of fun at the same time?
So if the subject of gaming interests you, do register now for this Access On webinar, you can go to nfb.org/cena. That's nfb.org, slash, C-E-N-A. You'll find the events and training link there. If you choose that, you'll be able to register for the webinar. If you're interested in this subject but you can't make it, you will eventually hear highlights here on Access On, but if you've registered, you'll also get a complete recording of the webinar sent to you afterwards.
Make a difference with the National Federation of the Blind's Keep NFB Advancing: Give 25 Campaign. Each year, thousands of federation members and friends contribute to support blind people, but we still need your help to fund our programs in 2026 and beyond. When you give 25 dollars between May 15th and July 7th, you're entered into the Keep NFB Advancing drawing.
Each 25 dollars increment is a chance to win. Your support helps us continue to build a network that advances the lives of all blind people across America. You could win prizes like round trip Transportation for two to the 2027 NFB National Convention, hotel accommodations, registration, banquet ticket, or 2,000 dollars cash.
Mike Feir:
And you can double your dollars up to 25,000 dollars. Thanks to a gift from AIRA, the visual interpreting service.
Jonathan Mosen:
What a chance to win a BrailleNote Evolve from Humanware? Become a federation connector. Ask friends and family to contribute before national convention, and indicate that you prompted their giving. The Give 25 Drive supports the Kenneth Jernigan Fund, Sun Fund, tenBroek Memorial Fund, and the White Cane Fund. You can choose a fund when you donate.
To enter, visit nfb.org/give25donate. That's nfb.org/give25donate. Call 410-659-9314, extension 2430, or send a check to National Federation of the Blind, and mention #Give25 and the fund in the memo. The winner will be announced July 8th, 2026. Thank you for your generosity.
Let me introduce to you our panel, and it's the usual panel, at least it's usual for the last few years. Prolific author. I think you've just come out with one on the Apple Watch, if I'm keeping up, Judy Dixon. Is that right? Is that your latest one?
Judy Dixon:
That is correct.
Jonathan Mosen:
Very good. Well, I'm looking forward to that. Welcome, Judy. Now, another prolific author is Mike Feir from Sunny Canada. Welcome to you, Mike.
Mike Feir:
Thanks. Looking forward to this, as always.
Jonathan Mosen:
What you up to? You're doing a new edition of iOS Personal Power?
Mike Feir:
Oh, absolutely. The number four edition is underway, and I'm aiming to publish on Global Accessibility Day next year, so that is my goal.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay, that's the stretch target. And accessibility consultant, video analyst, and she with that funny accent. It's Heidi Taylor, back in New Zealand. Welcome, Heidi.
Heidi Taylor:
Hello. What's wrong with my accent?
Jonathan Mosen:
It's a funny accent you've got. It's a very funny accent, there. So I'll do the usual round table, and just find out people's overall impressions. Maybe we can give it a one to 10, one being sort of, "Wah-wah," and 10 being sort of, "Yes!" So where do you fit on the scale, Heidi? What'd you think of this year's WWDC?
Heidi Taylor:
I mean, it was pretty interesting, but I don't really know how to rate it, because the format felt so different. It was less device-specific and more, "This is happening everywhere."
Jonathan Mosen:
We'll talk about that in a moment, because it was a departure from what we're used to. Are you going to commit to a number, Judy?
Judy Dixon:
I'll say six.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay. It's not exactly resounding. And Mike, you're the optimist among us, I feel.
Mike Feir:
Yeah, it's seven or eight kind of, for me. Maybe eight. I thought it was very interesting, but yeah, very different from... Just because of everything was AI, and everything is on everywhere, kind of everything, everywhere, all at once.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'll concur with Judy, six. I think the challenge for Apple this year was that there is a perception, whether it's an accurate perception is debatable, but there's a perception that's crept into the narrative that Apple needed to catch up with AI. And I guess we will talk about whether they've done enough to change that narrative with what we heard today, but Heidi makes a really important point. The format was different. So normally what we would do in these recaps is we'd do a quick overview like this, and then we'd say, "Okay, let's have a look at what's new in iOS.
Now let's have a look at what's new in watchOS." And on and on, we would go through the different operating systems. That's not how it was this time round. They have gone to a format where they're looking at different, I guess objectives, objectives of the operating systems as a whole.
I will say before we get to that, that every keynote since 2020 when they did their first recorded one because of the pandemic, I see a lot of the tech press saying, "Oh, we wish it would go back to the live ones the way they were. They're not what they used to be." I've never seen a single media commentator in the mainstream press point out the benefits of pre-recording, and that it's audio described for blind people. No one points that out. No one knows. All right.
So Tim Cook's last WWDC keynote, and it was kind of nice to hear as a little farewell at the end, I thought he sounded a little bit emotional at the end there. Did he look emotional at the end there, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah, a little.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of nice that he had the opportunity to sound off. What is everyone's feelings about the John Ternus era getting closer? Will it make an appreciable difference to any of you, do you think? Or is it just such a big ship that it really isn't going to make any appreciable difference?
Mike Feir:
I would tend to think, in terms of at least accessibility and that sort of core stuff that will make a massive difference, I tend to think it's so entrenched now that I would be horrified and shocked if it was all reversed by the new man in charge. I'm not expecting that. I think we'll see Apple really stay the course, and I guess he'll have different... Tim Cook was really into supply stuff, supply management and stuff. And I've heard, from what you did there, Jonathan-
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Mike Feir:
... that this guy's more in the Steve Jobs mode. He's more into ideas.
Judy Dixon:
He's a hardware guy.
Jonathan Mosen:
He is.
Mike Feir:
I'm looking forward to that. That should be interesting.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. So how do you feel about it, Judy?
Judy Dixon:
I think it's likely to be positive. The fact that he's a hardware guy isn't going to be a negative thing, I wouldn't think.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, I agree. I think it could be interesting. We'll see what he says about accessibility, he hasn't really been given many opportunities to talk about accessibility before, so we'll see what happens. And I think the big difference, though, is that Tim Cook was the inventory guy. He was the financial guy before he became CEO. John Ternus, as a product guy, has had some opportunity to talk about accessibility. We haven't heard it yet, but I expect we will. It's in their DNA, it's in their culture.
So these three areas for WWDC today were responsiveness, and ease of use. And we did hear some interesting things in that area, even for those who have old iPhones. And I think that's very encouraging, given that many blind people are on a budget, and purchasing an iPhone is a real sacrifice and financial commitment. And they want their phones to last as long as possible. So we'll expand on that in a little bit.
Trust and safety, which is obviously very strong to Apple's brand, and then a big leap forward, a big leap forward for Apple Intelligence. macOS 27 will be known as Golden Gate, that was kind of fun, it's always good the way Craig Federighi does that stuff, isn't it? With revealing the name of the operating system.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
I hope that with, clearly there's a lot, it sounds like there's a lot less in the operating systems than typical years. And it sounds like they're gearing us up for much more bug fixing, and hopefully VoiceOver and macOS will get some love, because if you look at the AppleVis report card, and anecdotal evidence that we get sent through here at the National Federation of the Blind to our bug reporting form, people love the hardware but they really are a bit grumpy about some of the ongoing accessibility challenges with VoiceOver. So it would be great if it becomes like a Snow Leopard type release, where those issues are addressed in some number.
What would be the number one or two Apple bugs, Mike and Judy, especially from a VoiceOver user's point of view, that you would like fixed on any operating system?
Mike Feir:
I would like, just less sort of jumping around, in apps. Just really get the stability and focus tracking correct, so that that doesn't sort of get in people's way. Especially as voice control becomes more capable, and these assistants become more adept at understanding our natural language.
I don't want people to fall into the trap of not learning the VoiceOver interface, the touchscreen on the iPhone, things like that. It is just, there are occasions where you just need to know that stuff, if you're going to use a smartphone. And I hope people aren't almost bamboozled into not learning it, just because the voice control gets so good.
Jonathan Mosen:
Judy?
Judy Dixon:
And I'd like the voice volumes bugs fixed. It can go super loud all at once, and super quiet all at once. And sometimes you pick up your phone and it's gone so quiet, you think it's dead, and it's not even talking. And then you have to turn it up, and it doesn't work, and I find it very frustrating.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now that is one I have not seen, but it must be frustrating. Are you using AirPods a lot, or when does that happen?
Judy Dixon:
No, it just happens.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay.
Judy Dixon:
And it happens a lot. I've got a 17 Pro, but it happens-
Jonathan Mosen:
All right. Okay.
Judy Dixon:
... quite frequently.
Jonathan Mosen:
For me, the jumpiness is really important in several areas. One, I have far more apps pushing news alerts than I ought to. I admit to this, and I should probably find some therapy for this. And so, when I wake up in the morning, it does take me a while to go through my notifications. And while I'm going through my notifications, inevitably at least one or two, or maybe three more, notifications will come in while I'm going through them.
And I don't know when this started, but now what happens for me, is that every time a new notification comes in, and I could be 20, 30 notifications down, Focus will jump me back to the top or to some random place, and lose my place in the notifications. Making the process incredibly tedious.
The other really serious one I would like to see fixed is with Braille. So historically what I've done with podcasts like Access On is, I read the email from my phone, my Braille display connected to my phone. And it's been next to impossible to do that lately, because right in the middle of particularly a lengthier paragraph, Focus will just jump somewhere else in Braille.
Judy Dixon:
I've seen that too.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, it's very hard to complete.
Judy Dixon:
Yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
The other one, so I'm listing more than a few. The other one I really want to see fixed with Braille is, I do a lot of writing with my Mantis connected to my iPhone, and sometimes when I press a cursor routing key to make a correction, it goes somewhere completely unrelated to where I've pressed the cursor routing key. And that's a fundamental problem with Braille. So have you seen that one, Judy?
Judy Dixon:
I have, yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh, good. Okay. I feel like, in good company now. Have you got any bugs, Heidi, from a non-VoiceOver user's point of view, that have been around for a while that you'd like to see them address?
Heidi Taylor:
I guess I'm not any kind of power user, and most of their basic features work pretty well, when you're not trying to deal with a screen reader. So, not really.
Jonathan Mosen:
You're a happy camper. That's all right.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Cool. So let's talk about some of these changes that they announced. And Heidi, I'd be very interested in your analysis of this, because Liquid Glass has always been controversial in our community, particularly low vision users who are maybe using Zoom, the magnifier, or who have sufficient vision to do things in a visual way.
And a lot of people have said to us, "Look, Liquid Glass just has not been good for us over time. There have been some changes to it," and it sounds like it's a lot more configurable with iOS 27. And I wondered if you're able to verbalize for us what's actually changing here.
Heidi Taylor:
So one of the big things is they're adding an opacity slider, I assume in the settings somewhere, so you can choose how transparent or solid the Liquid Glass elements actually are. Which is a vast improvement.
So you can have it so it's totally clear, and you just see the icons in the text. You can have it kind of frosted, so you sort of see what's behind it, if you want. Or totally opaque, so you can't even see anything through it, which will make it much more user-friendly.
Jonathan Mosen:
So it's a slider, almost like zero to 100%, is that how it would work?
Heidi Taylor:
Yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay. All right. That's good. Any questions from anybody about Liquid Glass?
Mike Feir:
No, that's exactly what they should have done from the first place, I think, with it.
Heidi Taylor:
Yes.
Mike Feir:
Because I've heard people ask, I've seen messages on different things asking for that, for the last year. Of that kind of just absolute control of, "Okay, how clear do I want this?"
Jonathan Mosen:
The Liquid Glass thing, as a VoiceOver user, hasn't affected me a lot. Other than, I'm not a huge fan of what they did with search in a lot of these apps. There used to be a simple search button, you would double tap it, you'd get an edit field and you would type what you were looking for.
Now the search has become a lot busier, with things that I'm not convinced actually belong there. So I wish they would declutter that again, but I don't think that's part of the changes.
Heidi Taylor:
I know, I don't like that there.
Judy Dixon:
It's not.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. All right. So another good piece of news, and I made a reference to this, apps apparently launch up to 30% faster, they said. I just want to segue a bit, because there's something odd that has crept into the iOS 26., maybe 4, beta cycle.
I've seen others on Mastodon refer to this, and I'd love to know, Mike and Judy, if you were seeing this. I'm not sure if it's VoiceOver related or not, but now there is a hideous pause between when you ask Siri to launch an app, and when the launch pops up, when the app pops up.
Judy Dixon:
It's two or three seconds, at least.
Mike Feir:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
I mean, it's much longer than it used to be.
Mike Feir:
Correct.
Jonathan Mosen:
I mean, it used to be immediate.
Judy Dixon:
It is longer. It is longer than it used to be.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Judy Dixon:
But apps launching is longer than it used to be.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, so you've got a double effect then, right? Because for whatever reason, it's taking Siri a long time to respond to the command in the first place, and then whatever happens, happens. But are you getting this Mike, with this huge delay?
Mike Feir:
Not that I've noticed overly.
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh, you'd notice if you were getting it.
Mike Feir:
Yeah. No, it's been pretty responsive.
Jonathan Mosen:
So, that's right. I've seen some people saying on Mastodon, "What are you talking about? It's the way it's always been." For me, it is not the way it's always been. It's quite a lengthy gap, there. So I really hope that's fixed.
You can transfer files a lot faster now, they're saying, even for older iPhones. So you may find that your old iPhone will get a new lease on life, and it's also an unexpected and pleasant surprise that we can report, that if your phone is running iOS 26, it will run iOS 27.
So they haven't dropped any devices off, and I think that's to Apple's real credit, because you look at their competitors and devices become obsolete quite quickly. So that's great. You won't get all the features, and we'll come onto that, but you will still be able to benefit from some of the features.
There's a thing called CPU Scheduler. I'm just going to wear the American thing and say "scheduler," and be done with it. I don't know how to say things anymore. CPU Scheduler manages tasks more efficiently, so that should mean that if you've got a slower phone it's going to be a little bit more deliberative about what it prioritizes, to try and make things feel faster.
And I'm just scrolling through, "More seamless transitions between Wi-Fi and cellular networks." And they gave one example that really resonated with me, because I get this a lot. You jump on a flight, and you connect to your Wi-Fi, and then you get to the ground and they've switched the Wi-Fi off, but the Wi-Fi connection is still active.
I've got into the habit now of going into Wi-Fi and disconnecting from it just as I'm about to land, so that I can have my cellular signal back, but they're saying that the phone's going to be a lot smarter about this in terms of choosing what network it should be connected to, to give you the best connectivity that you can get.
Mike Feir:
I like the thought of the processing scheduler. I'm a little... As long as, like it's making all this decision for you, and I hope unlike the context-sensitive rotor, that it will be smarter about what we need sometimes, than the rotor.
Sometimes it doesn't understand really the context of what I'm doing, and I have to turn it to what I want, rather than it turning itself. And if that happens regarding processing, I can foresee issues if Apple hasn't sort of thought that through very, very well.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I got the feeling that this would just go on behind the scenes, that it was one of those tools where, it would happen without you knowing it was happening. Did you get anything visually about the process scheduler, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
They didn't really show anything other than just some people in those situations, so it does seem like a background sort of task.
Jonathan Mosen:
I feel like I should pat someone on the head, because every WWDC, some DSL pops up and sells us on yet another revamp of Spotlight Search.
Judy Dixon:
I had that same thought.
Jonathan Mosen:
I was going to turn it into a drinking game, like, "How far can we get through before we hear about Spotlight Search being revamped again?" And I get enthusiastic about it, and then find myself just not embedding it into my workflow.
So they're really revamping it a lot, because of Apple Intelligence, and we'll talk about that. But when you install iOS 27, whenever you choose to do that, and we will talk a bit more about the timing in a minute, but it will start indexing your content with this new index system.
And the idea is that, when you're searching for something, it should be a lot more intuitive about finding the thing that you're actually looking for, bringing it to the fore. It will go ahead and do that. I imagine that there will be a little bit of a battery hit, while it chugs away, creating this new index in the background.
And then eventually it'll get to the point where, everything you do, it'll just be indexed right away. And it's supposed to be a lot more efficient.
Mike, are you a Spotlight Search ninja, by any chance?
Mike Feir:
You know, I haven't had a ton of use for it. Every once in a while it comes in handy, but I think we're at a point where what we'll see is, now that this artificial intelligence is tapping into that and given what we've heard this afternoon.
I think a lot more people are going to use Spotlight Search, perhaps without even realizing they're doing it, because of how the AI will use that indexing to sort of power, understand your context. So that, I think, will be pretty interesting. It'll probably get more use on my iPhone.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Do you like the Spotlight Search, Heidi?
Judy Dixon:
I use Spotlight Search when I want to move an app. So I want to find out where it is and what folder it's in, because I have a whole lot of folders, and over 700 apps, and I don't know where they all are.
So I use it, and it's supposed to tell us what folder an app is in, and more often than not it doesn't do that. It just gives the app's name, fine. And if I want to move the app, I have to go to the app library and find it there to move it, because I don't know what folder it's in. And it doesn't tell me. So I'm hoping they improve that.
And I was thinking about this indexing. Haven't they been doing that all along? Maybe that's been the problem.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes. Yes, we're always warned about the battery drain, so they're telling us, I think, that this is some new form of indexing. But yes, I'm with you. I think you and I are a dying breed, Judy, because I still have my apps neatly organized into folders, and every couple of weeks, because I tend to try a lot of apps, I go through-
Judy Dixon:
Files?
Jonathan Mosen:
... sort of, normally page three or so, is where my new apps start. And I move them into the right folders. But yeah, sometimes-
Judy Dixon:
That's what I do.
Jonathan Mosen:
... yeah. Sometimes-
Judy Dixon:
That's exactly what I do.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. And people look at my home screen and they go, "Why is your... Your phone is so organized." But it does help. Heidi, do you like Spotlight Search? Do you use it at all?
Heidi Taylor:
I use it a little bit, but mainly just to quickly open apps, because I have one home screen of apps, no folders. Just the ones I use really frequently. And then, anything else, I just go to the app library or search for.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay. Interesting. Yeah. And of course, you've got the MacBook as well, and an iPad.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah. I use it similarly on an iPad, I don't get a lot of use out of my Mac, but I use it occasionally.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. Now, something that will be of great interest to many of our listeners, is that they are bringing a custom EQ to the AirPods. I'm curious about this, because I'm not sure what this does that you can't already do by going into the music settings, and adjusting the EQ there. Maybe it's that you've got a whole bunch of bands and sliders, and to think of it, I don't think that they do that. There are just presets in the settings right now.
Mike Feir:
Yeah. They-
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah, so-
Mike Feir:
... have just presets.
Heidi Taylor:
... what they showed is that there's the low bands, the mid-bands, and the high bands. And each will have its own slider that you can adjust.
Jonathan Mosen:
Did you see how many bands there are?
Heidi Taylor:
Just the three.
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh, okay. So low, medium, and high.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay. And that will apply right across the spectrum, of course, so it will even affect VoiceOver.
Incidentally, for those who do have hearing impairments and want a bit more punch, what's interesting is, Apple moved this. Because it used to be in the music settings, and then I think in '26, they moved it.
There's a feature called Late Nights, and it's now living under Sounds & Haptics, and that affects the whole system. And if you turn that on, you really notice a lot more punch and compression behind VoiceOver, so it's kind of cool to switch that on sometimes.
Mike Feir:
Oh, I'll have to track that down. I used to like that a lot, and I couldn't find it. Interesting.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, they moved it. And it's also pretty good sometimes, if you've got certain dialogue in certain shows, I switch that on and it does actually increase the clarity, so it's a good thing to check.
Now another really good, the one I think health thing that they told us about, was relating to the cycle checking app. And this is now aware of when cycles may be showing symptoms of menopause, and you can consult on that, and it will give you information about that. So that's a useful health edition.
I would imagine that, when we get to John Ternus's first keynote, which will of course be in September for the hardware, we will hear a lot more health information. Because there's all sorts of rumors out there about new sensors that might certainly be coming to the Ultra Watch model. I love my Ultra Watch model, so I'm looking forward to that.
There's a lot of effort today placed on expanded child safety, and let's make no bones about this. This is in response to regulatory pressure in various countries. In Australia, already, they have banned social media for children under a certain age, and this is a model that is of interest to a number of other countries who are investigating it.
So they've expanded child safety features considerably, and this is all contingent on you creating a child account. So when you do that, you can check the box that this is for a child, it will ask you how old the child is. There's a lot more granularity now over what parents can choose to give their kids access to.
You will remember, Heidi, that when you were a little banana, we used to have this thing in place where every time you wanted an app, it would send me a push notification to say, "Heidi wants to download this app. Is this all right?" And I would decide whether it was or wasn't. I can't remember ever denying a request from you. You were the sensible child.
So now it's expanded to things like viewing a website. So you can, if you're a parent, lock the iPhone right down, and then when a child visits a website for the first time, you as a parent can get a ping and decide whether it's okay. You can go to the website first and check it out for yourself, and then authorize that website if you're comfortable.
Also, who the child can communicate with by text, and presumably by phone as well. So when are you getting my next grandchild a iPhone that's set up to call Granddad, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
You're funding that.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, it's exciting. It's exciting. Yeah.
Heidi Taylor:
Well, it won't be for a while yet.
Jonathan Mosen:
I do get calls on my phone from my three-year-old granddaughter, your niece, who says, "Granddad, I made you this little thing at play group, and I'm going to come over to America now and bring it to you."
Heidi Taylor:
Aw, cute.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Heidi Taylor:
Has she ever followed up on that?
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, the only time was when I actually paid for them all to come over here. She exhausted me.
So we've got system warnings when there is violent content that the child might inadvertently be exposed to, as well. And you can ration how much specific activity the child's allowed to access, and also at different times of day. So in New Zealand, for example, and I think in some states here in the United States, it's come to as well.
There has been a ban on personal devices in the classroom, and Apple's pushing back and saying, "Well, hang on. There might be a case that personal devices can be used for legitimate learning activities.
So you, as a parent, can dictate when certain apps are available. If you don't want certain non-education related apps to be available during the school day, then you can switch them off. And there's no way that the child will be able to do that." So, clearly, they're responding to that political tide that is mounting up.
Heidi, they said that there was a new website that parents could go to find out more about helping your child use these things responsibly. Did they tell us what that site was visually?
Heidi Taylor:
I don't know, but I've just looked it up and it's apple.com/child-safety.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well done.
Mike Feir:
Oh, that makes sense.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay.
Mike Feir:
Yeah. I was wondering that, too. I was like, "What's the website? What's the website?"
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, "Call the number on your screen now," apple.com/child-safety, if you want to find out more, pretty comprehensive suite there. Anybody got any comments on any of that?
Mike Feir:
I think it comes, unfortunately, all this comes too late to really stop the tide. Probably what's going to happen is, schools are going to ban smartphones period from the classroom, or as close as you could get.
Judy Dixon:
Oh, they've done that.
Mike Feir:
Yeah, this will have... If they'd thought of this five years ago, this might have had more punch, but now it's like... It might catch... It'll still help. All these features are really helpful.
I'm imagining exhausted parents trying to keep up with doing every little thing that they can do to protect their kids, and feeling more obligated because now that these features are hopefully out in the open enough, that you don't feel you have to be a techno nerd to find and use them.
Jonathan Mosen:
One of the many privileges of my current role is that I get to hear from people with a wide range of comfort levels with technology. And there are parents who want to do the right thing by their kids.
Sometimes it's a non-blind parent of a blind child, sometimes it's a blind parent, and they just find the pace at which all of this is moving and the choices they have to make, and the anxiety they feel about trying to keep their kids safe, overwhelming. Because there's just so much going on.
So, I'd be interested to see how educational, how helpful this material is, that Apple's putting together. But yeah, it's a bit of a rear guard reaction. What's the climate like in Canada, Mike? In terms of calls for social media bans for teens, and that sort of...
Mike Feir:
Yeah, it's heating up. We're looking at what's happening in Australia very closely. Parents have been concerned about this. And educators. There's a lot of lawsuits from boards of education happening against tech companies about this. So there's a lot of... I think parents are at the point where they feel that government should step in.
I think that's the way things are leaning. So I kind of question, personally, whether the outright banning from social media is the right move. I guess Australia is the test case for that, but we're paying close attention now to all of this. And yeah, the politics are heating up.
Jonathan Mosen:
Who has screen time turned on, on their devices?
Mike Feir:
I have it on, but I don't use any of the limitations. I can see-
Jonathan Mosen:
Do you get the report every week?
Mike Feir:
... yeah, I can see that, and that's helpful. But I haven't engaged any of those, and I hope whoever does engage those limitations remembers their passcode, so that they're not stuck behind those limitations when they don't want to be. Right?
Jonathan Mosen:
So, Mike, curl up on the couch here and tell me. When you get that report every week, how does it make you feel?
Mike Feir:
Sometimes it surprises me. "Oh, I spent that much time on Mastodon. Oh, I spent that much time on..."
Judy Dixon:
It would tell me how much time I spend playing Wordle.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. So do you have it switched on, Judy?
Judy Dixon:
I do not.
Jonathan Mosen:
No, I don't either. I mean, that's just scary.
Judy Dixon:
I don't want to know.
Jonathan Mosen:
No. What about you, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
I think I have it on, because I get a notification every Monday of my average hours spent on my device, but I don't lock anything down.
Jonathan Mosen:
So do you look at the report?
Heidi Taylor:
Sometimes. Sometimes I'm just like, "Oh, okay. It's there. I don't care."
Mike Feir:
It's kind of like, I take out the recycling, and I try to take each item out and put it in the dumpster. And that gives me a real sense, a granular sense, of what we used since the last time I took everything out. And that can surprise me, at times.
But other people just dump it in and have done with it. But I kind of like having that conscious level sense of, "Okay, what have I done with my recycling? What have I done with my time?" It doesn't really restrict what I do, so much as it just kind of gives me an indication of what I've done.
Jonathan Mosen:
So if you're totally committed to the Apple ecosystem, so I don't use a Mac at the Jernigan Institute, for example. Presumably, does it give you a collated screen time across your entire Apple footprint?
Mike Feir:
Yeah, I've just looked at... I haven't really synced everything up. I just use it on my iPhone, kind of exclusively.
Jonathan Mosen:
So for example, Heidi, if you've got your iPad and your Mac and your iPhone, does the screen time report tell you right across the Apple ecosystem, what you did on all those devices?
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah. So you can get it to show you for a specific device, or the total across all devices.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right, okay.
Heidi Taylor:
So I can see that I've used my phone a lot more than I've used my iPad, for example.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. So that's where it would fall down for me, anyway, even if I did want the bad news. Because I spend so much time in Windows at work. Interesting.
Now Apple has made this pitch before, and they made the pitch again today, because I think they really had to. They're basically saying that their delay with AI is a plus, because there are some of these companies rushing ahead with AI, AI for its own sake, causing all sorts of damage.
But Apple's being deliberative. So that's the spin, smart marketing, and making lemonade out of lemons. They have new Apple Foundation Models that they've developed in partnership with Google, using Gemini. They were talking to Anthropic, I hear. And so we may have got Apple Intelligence powered by a Claude, rather than Gemini. Anyone have a strong preference? You happy with Gemini?
Mike Feir:
I guess I'm happier. I haven't used this stuff very much at all for anything, really, seriously. I've asked questions. I've tried the writing tools, but I can't say I'm impressed so far. It sounds like they're really being updated. So some of what they're talking about, I'm interested in now that it's through Apple's server, and I'm not so worried about privacy and my information being taken by someone else.
I trust Apple to take steps to guard that. So I might get more use out of this stuff now, that it's more in the ecosystem that I choose to operate in. So that'll be interesting to see.
I'm kind of more the person who wants to choose my own words when I write than, have some writing tool do it for me. But I look forward to being able to ask questions, get kind of starting ideas. The brainstorming is appealing to me, in a lot of ways.
Jonathan Mosen:
Judy, what's your AI of choice?
Judy Dixon:
I use ChatGPT mostly, because it's kind of what I started with, and I like the interface. It works well for me. I use Gemini occasionally. I use Copilot for writing things, sometimes, like in Word. Because it's just there. So I use them all a little bit, but I use AI stuff a lot. I mean, I use ChatGPT several times a day.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. They've got that critical mass going on. ChatGPT is almost like Google was.
Judy Dixon:
Yes, yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's the ubiquity.
Judy Dixon:
I use it when I would have used Google. That's true.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes. I have found that Gemini has developed a lot, recently. I find that, of all of them, the Gemini Deep Research tool is quite verbose and pompous, and least helpful if you're doing a deep research query. ChatGPT and Claude do very well there. What I do find is that Claude writes very, very well, and especially over time, if you teach it the way that you like to write.
So I mean, I've written, as have all of us, I guess, a lot of stuff over the years. And if I feed it a whole bunch of speeches, and I ask it to help me work on a first draft, I would never have just, tell it to write something and deal with what it's written.
But it seems to understand what I'm driving at quicker than any of the others. So I kind of was hoping that we might end up with an Anthropic based model, but this is what we have, and I'm sure it'll work fine.
It says that there's "high accuracy for system-wide dictation." They have revamped system-wide dictation, and I wondered how many times I get to use the word Sherlocked in this presentation, and this is the first one. Because clearly they have Sherlocked Wispr Flow, which I have enjoyed using very much. Anyone else using Wispr Flow?
Judy Dixon:
I've looked at it, but I haven't used it.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Wispr Flow is a third party keyboard, intelligent dictation feature, and what it does is it uses intelligence to try and decipher what you're saying, it's not just kind of taking it out of the air. And it also is quite tolerant. So if you say something like, "Hi, my name's Jonathan, and I live in New Zealand. No, I don't. I live in the United States." It will actually just correct itself like that.
It will come back, "I live in the United States." So it's very intelligent, and I really found myself using dictation almost all the time, because it was so reliable. But then Apple kind of clamped down on it, and it became a little bit more difficult to get going all the time.
For a while, there was this glorious period where you could assign it to the action button, and hit the key and just dictate to it and hit the key again, and it would insert things. And then it got more complicated. So hopefully we're going to have that level of accuracy with this new dictation.
There's on-screen awareness, based on the app that you are using, and what you're doing. And this is what they promised two years ago.
Judy Dixon:
Yes, that was my thought. "I think we've heard this before."
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. So we've been waiting a long time for this. That has tremendous accessibility ramifications, potentially. What I didn't hear though, was whether the new Siri AI they're calling it, will actually be able to take action for you. Did we see that?
Mike Feir:
It sounded like it would.
Judy Dixon:
They had an example where it did. "Go write an email, and do this."
Mike Feir:
And brilliant.
Jonathan Mosen:
So what I'm getting at is, let's say that I have an inaccessible app, and I launch that app and basically the screen may as well be blank, to a VoiceOver user. And even if I turn screen recognition on, which would be my first strategy in that situation, I still can't quite work out how to proceed past the first screen.
Can I tell this new Siri AI, "If you see a button that looks anything like login or continue, or sign in," to click the button?
Judy Dixon:
Hm.
Mike Feir:
Yeah, that wild be ideal.
Heidi Taylor:
I don't think they showed anything like that.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. And I'd like to think that we might get there, because that would be incredibly powerful, but getting the context is quite good. I've been using this. People seem not to know that this has been there for a while now. You can say to the current Siri, "Describe the screen," and it sends a screenshot away to ChatGPT, and then describes it for you.
And if you are signed in with ChatGPT, you can then go to your ChatGPT and ask questions about the screenshot. So I've got this really groovy smart scale, and when you stand on it, it has all sorts of things. Like it tells you that your left leg weighs a quarter of a pound less than your right leg, and all sorts of...
And then you can go in, and you can say, "Describe the screen," which sends the screenshot to ChatGPT, and then you can go in and ask it all sorts of questions about all the body composition matrices that it's collecting. So it sounds like you'd be able to do a lot more of that directly from within Siri AI. So that's pretty cool.
There's a dedicated Siri app now. So you can talk to Siri, I think most of us will just continue to push the side button, and talk to it that way. But there's a new gesture, I don't know how that will translate for VoiceOver users, whether there'll be some way of getting at that with VoiceOver.
But you will be able to hold the button down. And then, if you want, you can go back and review those conversations, much like you would with any of the chatbots that are available today. It did show how, once Siri gave you some information, you could create a reminder based on that information. So it's got deep linking into the other apps.
One thing that occurred to me, and neither Judy nor Mike have Macs, so I wondered if it occurred to you too. I wouldn't be able to switch to Siri as much as I might want with this new technology, because they made no mention of a Windows Siri app. And I think that's a miss.
Mike Feir:
Yeah, because unless you're completely in the Mac, the Apple ecosystem exclusively, there's always going to be one part of what you're doing that you just can't access properly. Which I guess is good for Apple trying to sell MacBooks.
Jonathan Mosen:
But they have done it with Apple Music, for example, and iTunes, and Days of yore, because I think the trouble I have is that, I do use a computer... Well, I'm not saying it's a trouble, but the fact is I do use a Windows computer for my daily work, for my professional work.
So if I start doing some work on the phone, and I know that eventually I want to pick it up and continue that conversation on my computer, I'm going to go to one of the other ones because it's on my computer and Siri is not.
Judy Dixon:
Right. I'm in the same boat.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes. Yeah. So I think that's a miss, and it's a shame they didn't come up with some sort of Windows version.
What else have we got about this new Siri? They've got more precise photo searching, so you can go really deep on that. Any excitement there?
Heidi Taylor:
No.
Mike Feir:
I guess for accessibility usage, I mean, you can take photos of things and ask much more detailed questions, and have it all on device. No need for an app like Be My Eyes, presumably, for a lot of that stuff.
I'm kind of wondering how it's going to do at telling me whether my hearing aids are both in charging, kind of taking a picture and having it look, and are there two green lights? And will I be able to hear the next morning, kind of thing.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, that is a good place for us to bring in the announcements that they made for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, because it looks like a lot of this stuff is going to be happening on device. And not only is there a dedicated Siri app, but it looks like there's also a new dedicated visual interpretation app to compete with Seeing AI, and Be My AI, and all those guys.
And if they have the added benefit of on-device recognition, that could be a significant advantage. If you can snap a picture and get almost instant response, in terms of what this photo is of, that's a real win. And also, it doesn't leave your device, it doesn't go anywhere. So we'll have to see if that's how it works, but they did mention in the announcement that you would be able to assign the action button to that.
So I'm looking forward to that. And that's something that I'm sure VoiceOver users will kick the tires on the moment they get the developer beta, which some people will be doing instead of talking about it like we are. We'll hear about that soon, I'm sure.
What do you think of the new accessibility announcements, Judy, particularly this visual interpretation thing that they're really doubling down on?
Judy Dixon:
I think the proofs in the pudding, here, because let's see how it works and how seamless it really is.
Mike Feir:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Interesting. Now one thing that many people who listen to this podcast will be delighted to hear, is that you've got what sounds like quite incredible customization of the new voices. Now there is a caveat here though, and that is that the new voices that they showed are only available on Apple Intelligence capable devices. I can't reel off the top of my head which ones they are now, but then-
Judy Dixon:
It starts with 15.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Mike Feir:
15 Pro. Yeah, it was 15 Pro to-
Judy Dixon:
The Pros-
Mike Feir:
... Onward.
Judy Dixon:
... the Pro Maxs, and 15 onwards.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right.
Mike Feir:
Yep.
Jonathan Mosen:
And then what about iPads?
Judy Dixon:
I don't know.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Mike Feir:
I thought you needed an M1? I remember something about it needing an M1 chip, but this is going back a ways.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes. Yes, I think so. Somehow I bought Bonnie an iPad Pro for Christmas, and I remember making that decision, that I was going to get her one with an M chip for that reason. Because it had Apple Intelligence.
So look at me go. So if you've got an Apple Intelligence capable device, you will be able to customize how quickly the voice talks. At one point they had it sounding incredibly hyper. I mean, it just sounded like super caffeinated, and then they were able to turn that down a bit.
Did they show any interface, Heidi? Because not only do we have all this customization of the voice, but we have a new Siri app, as we've mentioned. What do we know about that in terms of the way it looks and feels?
Heidi Taylor:
So in terms of the Siri app, it looks like it just has a lot of tiles in them that each relate to the conversations you've had with them, and you tap on the appropriate tile and it takes you back into the conversation.
In terms of the voice customization, I'm not sure if it's in the app or in the settings, but they showed that there were a selection of voices you could choose from. And then there were sliders for the pace and the expressivity of them.
Mike Feir:
Wow.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. So was that a slider?
Heidi Taylor:
Yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
Or were there different selections for the expressivity, or how did that work?
Heidi Taylor:
No, that one's like a slider-
Mike Feir:
Oh, man.
Heidi Taylor:
... so I don't know how you measure that on a zero to a hundred scale. But apparently that's how they're doing it.
Jonathan Mosen:
I imagine zero would kind of be like this, and 100 would be like we heard it before, in the demo. And it was really quite... Well, it was pretty impressive. So people will have a lot of fun playing with that.
Siri is a lot more conversational now. It keeps the thread, it will talk with you, all those important things. I kind of thought for a while there that they were concentrating a lot on... Well, I don't mean to sound curmudgeonly, but sort of frivolous things.
But then they did settle down and talk about comparing trends and spreadsheets on the Mac, and different work related tasks like that, so they're going after that market as well.
Yes. They're showing that Siri works differently depending on the device that you are invoking it from. So I don't know if they, for example, did they show what Siri's like on the Apple Watch, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
Not really. They just sort of mentioned an Apple Watch, and there was a picture of an Apple Watch, and there wasn't actually anything useful.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay. So a few things to note, the new Siri, which is called Siri AI, that's the official name, is available if you want to install Developer Beta 1, and that is out today, as we record this. So you can try this out, and I'm sure there'll be demos popping up pretty quickly. However, you cannot if you're in the EU.
They have not released it in the EU, apparently there are some regulatory issues. That's interesting to me because if there's a lot going on on-device with this, what's holding that up, I wonder? So I don't know. We will find out.
Judy Dixon:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
And it's only available in English, initially. So if you have another first language, then you might just have to hang in there.
So before we leave Siri and go on to other Visual Intelligence and Apple Intelligence things, what's the overall impression from you guys about whether Apple's done enough?
Is this the Siri you were expecting and hoping for?
Mike Feir:
Yeah, I'd say for me, it sounds like this is the kind of stuff that they were talking about two years ago. In terms of context, sensitivity, in terms of cross, using, tapping into different apps. We heard a bit about App Intents, which let developers leverage this connectivity between apps, grabbing information from different places to do certain tasks.
So yeah, that's the kind of thing that I can see myself possibly finding occasional uses for, in terms of making decisions, doing things like that. Being able to ask for something that requires a lot of different parts, and just have it go. I guess the shortcut creation, too, is another thing that it's apparently going to get a lot better at.
Just being able to talk, and describe what you want, and have it created. That suits me. So that kind of language, natural understanding, is going to make a massive difference for me, I think.
Jonathan Mosen:
Is it going to lure you away from the ChatGPT, Judy?
Judy Dixon:
No, I don't think so. I was thinking more about the Alexa with the new smart AI features, because now you can have so much more of an intelligent conversation, it's amazing the detail that you can get. And I think it will be more like that.
Jonathan Mosen:
Are you a fan of Alexa Plus?
Judy Dixon:
I actually am, yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
Wow. Okay. This is good. What do you like about it?
Judy Dixon:
I can ask questions that are relatively obscure, and interesting, and get answers. And the answers are more or less, or more often than not, correct.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's not on my Sonos's Sony yet.
Judy Dixon:
I really like it.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Well, one of the going to bring it to the Sonos, because that's pretty much how we engage with Alexa. So I feel like I'm left out. It's not in my Sonos.
Judy Dixon:
I bought a Max.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. Very nice.
Judy Dixon:
And it works.
Jonathan Mosen:
You're not a big Siri talker, are you, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
No, not really.
Jonathan Mosen:
So is this underwhelming?
Heidi Taylor:
I think, I like how they're integrating a lot of natural language stuff, that you can write in a text field, with the shortcuts and stuff. I think that's going to benefit a lot of people. But the talking stuff, it sounds cool for other people, but not for me.
Jonathan Mosen:
And Mike, you mentioned shortcuts. We'll skip ahead to those. This is really interesting. So essentially what you'll be able to do is, dare I say, vibe code shortcuts. So that's pretty interesting. I've been doing a lot of this lately, and one of the things that I've been doing for work purposes, is I've really got into Zapier.
I don't know if anybody else is using Zapier, but it integrates different, seemingly unrelated things. So for example, I can attend a meeting with Plaud, my little note-taking gadget, and Plaud will generate the transcript. Zapier will see that it's generated a new transcript, it will send the transcript to ChatGPT, which does a deep analysis of it.
And then it will create a list of tasks that were assigned to me from that meeting, and send them to Todoist. And I just have a series of tasks from the meeting without me having to do anything. They just pop up in Todoist.
And you can do the same, there's a Zoom integration as well. So if you have Zoom AI Companion switched on, you can do the same thing. I mean, that's really practical, useful stuff.
And so, I'm into this vibe coding, in that sense. So the idea that you can use Apple shortcuts with a form of vibe coding to basically describe what it is that you want. And the example they gave was sending a message to your loved one about how far away from home you are when you leave a specific location, or when you leave work, that's cool.
My only hope is that Apple has rectified some of the accessibility shortcomings that have crept into shortcuts in recent times on iOS, because it's got a little bit rough around the edges there. But it's exciting.
You vibe coding anything, Judy, you doing that stuff?
Judy Dixon:
No. What I'm doing is making 3D printable models with AI, and just giving it lots of detail about what I want it to do. I've even gotten it putting Braille on models. It's really fun.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's so cool-
Heidi Taylor:
That's cool.
Jonathan Mosen:
... isn't it? I was just totally besotted with the Artemis II coverage and everything, and would get home in the evening and just switch on YouTube, and watch it all night. And my assistant made me a 3D printed model of the Artemis vehicle, which was... It really brought it to life for me.
Judy Dixon:
Oh, yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's amazing.
Judy Dixon:
Yeah, 3D printing is really fun.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, it is. So Visual Intelligence is also coming to macOS now. This is potentially a very useful feature. To date, I have found myself not using it that much, because I guess there are dedicated blindness apps, but has anybody else played much with Visual Intelligence and had good results from it?
Mike Feir:
I did early on.
Judy Dixon:
I did it some. Yeah.
Mike Feir:
I did early on, I had a drink that my friend got for me from another country, the Philippines. And I thought, "Oh, I'll just take a picture, see what it said." And it actually gave me some useful information and answered questions I had about the drink.
So that time, it gave really good results, I thought. It tapped into ChatGPT when I asked more specific things, so really, I guess this was ChatGPT's piggybacking off of the initial results. So it did what I hoped, and I enjoyed the drink. So it was a good first impression.
Jonathan Mosen:
Heidi, does it help you at all, having Visual Intelligence? Maybe not. Obviously you don't so much need something described to you that you can see, but I guess the primary purpose of Visual Intelligence is to augment knowledge that you might have about a particular thing.
Heidi Taylor:
I mean, I can see the use case, but I'm just so old school that I don't use these features.
Jonathan Mosen:
My goodness. A young whippersnapper like you, being old school? Well, there you go.
Heidi Taylor:
I never think to use the features, I guess, is the problem.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right.
Heidi Taylor:
Like if I see an image of something and I want to learn about it, I'm more likely to just type into Google some keywords, than to bring up some, to take a screenshot and then let the intelligence do its thing.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, it's interesting, that. Sometimes it's about forming the habit.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
So there are more powerful writing tools in this, with the help of Gemini. And one thing that interests me was that Siri knows how you like to communicate with a specific contact, and modify accordingly. So if, for example, I am texting you, Mike. And you get something that says, "Hi, sweetie. I'm missing you." You will know that Siri has really messed up.
Mike Feir:
Something has gone wrong.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Don't trust her.
Mike Feir:
And that brought to mind, I follow some people with social communication difficulties and things, autism and other things that I guess make it harder to frame messages emotionally, in such a way that they're not repelling better responses from people.
So one person I was following talked about how having AI helped them communicate more effectively, because it could kind of help them put it in a better emotional framing than they would naturally. So I can kind of see this being very useful in context like that.
Jonathan Mosen:
I've been having a lot of discussion with people of late about AI, and the benefits that often get lost in the noise, particularly for people with a variety of disabilities. And somebody made exactly that point to me, that there are people who genuinely have difficulty expressing themselves, and they've got a lot to say. And AI is giving them a voice that allows them to communicate in a way that has them taken seriously, and that's a great, compelling story.
Apple Intelligence groups related browser tabs together. So if, for example, you are shopping for a laptop, let's say. And you have a whole bunch of tabs open, looking at different machines, then Apple Intelligence will be able to know that those things are similar for a similar project, and group them all close to one another.
That seems like a good idea. It will also have a feature where you can be notified of a page that you care about having some sort of change. So if you're waiting for a price to go down, or maybe you know that a page is going to go live. I mean, I imagine like, actually I'll tell you where this would've come in handy.
Waiting for the National Federation of the Blind's convention agenda to come out. And so you could have been on... I mean, it is out now, by the way, if you want to go and check the agenda, you can go to nfb.org/convention.
But I have so many people contacting me saying, "Is it out yet?" And so you could have the phone monitoring that page, so that as soon as the agenda is out, the moment it's out, you'd get a notification telling you that it's out. That's nifty.
Mike Feir:
And there's a case of habit formation, example of where I am old school, and I would just continue to go and check the pages. It's going to be a struggle for me to actually start getting into the habit of engaging a feature like that to do some of that for me. I'm so used to going and checking.
Judy Dixon:
But you also have to remember what all these things can do.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes. Yes, that's the thing. It's interesting you say that, because I had a look today while I was making notes, and I created a new document and I hit CTRL+S, and I just called it WWDC. And Word came back and it said, "That file already exists. Do you want to overwrite it?" I was going to overwrite it, but then I thought, "Just for giggles, I'm going to open the old WWDC file," which was from last year, "and have a look at what we talked about."
And you're right, you look at some of these features that seem so impactful, but it's interesting the ones that just don't resonate, that don't change the way you use the device at the time you think they will.
Judy Dixon:
Yes. And you have to force yourself to use them, because otherwise you'll just forget about them.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. It's interesting, that.
Now, one that intrigued me, and Heidi, I'm really interested to know if you can give us any more deets. See, I'm down with the cool kids. Any more deets on this? The automatic updating of your passwords with strong passwords, this is with Apple's Passwords app.
And what they seem to be saying was that it will actually, you tell it to go and do this, and it will sign in to all these websites for you and change your password by itself. Is that correct?
Heidi Taylor:
That's what they were showing, yes. So in the Passwords app, you'd get a little notification that you've got a compromised password, you'd press the Fix Password button, and it would supposedly log into the site using the details it has saved, and change the password for you. And then save the new password and the Passwords app.
Mike Feir:
I would use that. That would be awesome, if it works right. I will be irate if I do try that and get locked out of something permanently, but yeah. No pressure, Apple.
Jonathan Mosen:
I would too, but I am just so committed to 1Password. It's just-
Judy Dixon:
Yeah, that's what I use, too.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. It's just such a good app. It would take a lot to prize 1Password from my cold dead hands right now, but maybe they will bring a similar feature to what they have.
Now, hey, I get to use Sherlocked again, I reckon. Because the calendar is getting some natural language input. And if I'm remembering correctly, they've had natural language input on the Mac for quite some time, but not on iOS. And it looks like you'll be able to describe an event pretty casually, in natural language, and it will do that. And of course, Fantastical-
Judy Dixon:
Fantastical's been doing this for years.
Jonathan Mosen:
Years and years. You're a Fantastical user too?
Judy Dixon:
Yes. I love it.
Jonathan Mosen:
Isn't it a glorious app?
Judy Dixon:
It is wonderful.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. It does so much.
Mike Feir:
And Structured, as well, is another very popular thing that really is supposed to do a lot of that, and it structures your day, breaks it all down into chunks.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. Yeah. I mean, look, there's so much that Fantastical does for me, including if I want somebody to book a time on my calendar, I can give them a link, and you can have different links for different lengths of appointments, and all sorts of things. It's just a wondrous thing.
Mike Feir:
Marvelous. This could be a big hit to calendar apps. We've seen what happened with journal apps, when the Journal app was updated. We've seen what happened with the Notes app, and Reminders. And now, finally it's Calendar's turn for something that could really, really push third party calendar apps to sweat, to find reasons for people to still need them.
Jonathan Mosen:
I am very happy to give credit where it's due, Mike, and say that you were the one who really got me into the Day One journal app, and I love that app. I mean, I use it. I'm now on an 886 day streak with my Day One.
Mike Feir:
Oh.
Judy Dixon:
My.
Jonathan Mosen:
I have written in it for the last 886 days, and as, who was it who said it? Gwendolyn Fairfax said, "I always keep a diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train." Did you migrate to the Apple Journal app from Day One, Mike?
Mike Feir:
Yes, I really have.
Jonathan Mosen:
You did?
Mike Feir:
Yeah. I just found that the Journal app just handled everything. I'm a very casual journaler, I tend to use it to almost do my thinking more clearly about things. I'll write about what I'm thinking, and sort of clarify, or another habit I have is morning pages. Where you write sort of just stream of consciousness, to sort of warm up your writing muscles a bit.
It was Julia Cameron, I think, was the author who elucidated that one in one of her books. So I tend to use Journal a lot for that, and it just serves my needs. I don't need the power behind... Day One is still the Cadillac, I think, of these apps.
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh, yeah.
Mike Feir:
There's no contest. But Journal is, again with Apple, good enough for what most people are going to need, I think.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, yeah, I guess. And what I like about Day One Premium is that you can keep multiple journals, you can have collaborative journals. So you can use it more than just for a diary.
If you're working on a joint project or something, and you need to write articles, or whatever. I just think it's wonderful. So you've switched me onto it, and now you've abandoned it. I don't know what to do. I don't know.
Mike Feir:
Yeah. Well, the collaborative I think is still a Day One exclusive, as far as I know.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Mike Feir:
The multiple journals is not. You can have as many separate journals as you want on the Journal app now.
Jonathan Mosen:
And it's accessible, man. I mean, at least it is on iOS. The Windows, the web experience is not quite as good as it could be, unfortunately. But for iOS, and I presume macOS, it's in very, very good shape.
Now, Apple Intelligence also comes to the Phone app, and I really like what they told us here. Because I do a lot of travel, and sometimes I want to call the airline to make sure that I'm in my window seat, and I make it clear it's not for the view, it's for the sleep.
But inevitably, I will open my TripIt app, which is another app I use, and I've been using since the Symbion days. Anybody else use TripIt?
Judy Dixon:
Oh, yes. I used to use it in Symbion too, and still use it. Yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Do you have it now?
Judy Dixon:
Yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. And I've got a lot of Siri shortcuts, so when I get to the airport I'm going to, I say, "TripIt, baggage claim information," and it tells me which baggage carousel I need to be at.
Judy Dixon:
Oh, my. That's cool.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. I say, "TripIt, gate info," and it tells me, when I get to the airport what gate I need to go to. It's amazing. It's amazing. And so, what I do, I open up my TripIt app and I find my confirmation number, and then I call the airline and I go back into the TripIt app to get the confirmation number again, while I'm... And so now, apparently, you will be able to call the airline and Apple Intelligence will be smart enough to go through your email and see that, "Okay, you're calling Southwest," for example. "You've just got an email in the last couple of weeks from Southwest, so it will put the confirmation number up on the screen." That is really good use-
Judy Dixon:
If that works, that would be great.
Jonathan Mosen:
... well, that's true.
Judy Dixon:
I mean, like everything, you know? Don't be a party pooper.
Yeah, well.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. But that's useful. That is a useful application of AI right there. So that's really cool. Did it show anything else, Heidi, in that regard?
Heidi Taylor:
It is pretty much exactly as you described it.
Jonathan Mosen:
So what was on the screen? What did it actually say from the email?
Heidi Taylor:
So in their example, they called Passenger Airways, and on the screen above all the regular phone buttons, so like before the speaker button, there's just some additional text and it says, "Passenger Airways, confirmation," and then it's got the confirmation number and then it also has a little bit of flight details.
So it was from JFK to RAK, and it's got the dates and times. And then it says it was found in mail, so you know where it got it from.
Jonathan Mosen:
I really hope that works, because that's very useful.
The other Apple Intelligence feature I'm using quite a lot in the Phone app, that I think came last year, was it? Is where you can put a call on hold when you get music, it detects that music's coming down the line, and then it phones you back when the music stopped. I use that all the time. That's a great feature.
All right. The Home app, this is a very useful accessibility feature, indirectly I'm sure, but still it is. It can generate descriptions of what happened with compatible cameras. So even if you know that there's footage somewhere that you want to see as a blind person, I mean, if you were sighted, you could skim through it. I don't know, like hold down the fast-forward button and quickly catch it.
That's difficult. But if you can actually give a description like, "Show me when somebody came to the door with a package," and it will immediately tell you about that event, and then show it to you? That is a really fantastic accessibility enhancement.
What kind of clip did we get, Heidi, from that?
Heidi Taylor:
They had a few different examples. The long one they did was spanning across multiple cameras. Someone brought a fruit bowl, and it showed them coming up the path, and then it switched to the camera of them going through the gate into the backyard. And then it switched to one that showed the table where they placed the fruit bowl, and then it showed a raccoon stealing the fruit. Which was amazing.
Jonathan Mosen:
So let's say that you have two cats in the house, and then when you come home, that lovely big piece of chicken that was on the countertop that you were thawing out has gone. You could check this now to find out whether it was Mongo Gerry or Rumfelteezer-
Heidi Taylor:
Yep.
Jonathan Mosen:
... and, yeah. I mean, you could look. This is great.
Heidi Taylor:
If you had a camera that captured where the chicken was, yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Heidi Taylor:
And then the other examples were, just like from say the front doorbell camera, things like flower delivery. Or a mariachi band, and just different things. It just tries to describe what happened in the different clips.
Jonathan Mosen:
They must have a lively time in Cupertino, with the mariachi bands coming up to your front door.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
That is genuinely interesting. They did give a bit of caveat there towards the end, and I don't recall all the deets. What cameras do you have to have for this to work?
Heidi Taylor:
I don't remember. I don't have any pictures of them listing anything.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. Okay. We'll check on that.
Heidi Taylor:
Just, I assume home kit compatible ones, at least.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, for sure. Yeah. Well, I don't particularly relish the idea of spending more on home automation at this point, but it could be interesting.
There is a new version of Image Playground. I know that some people are really into this. This is not an app, or not a feature I really use a lot, but there is also an Image Playground API now, and that really caught my attention. Because if there's a smart vibe coder out there, what I would do with this app is, I would create a really blindness-specific use case using this Image Playground API where you give a good text description of the image, maybe an AI can help you refine the description of the image, to get what you want.
Then when it generates the image, what this app should do, is to then send it somewhere else, send it to another large language model. So that you can get a text description back of what you generated, to give a blind person confirmation that what it created is what you wanted it to create.
Mike Feir:
Yeah, that sounds sensible.
Judy Dixon:
That's a good idea.
Mike Feir:
Apple should just do that. Build that in.
Jonathan Mosen:
Somebody will do that. Can you tell us anything about the new Image Playground that's of note, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
It seems to function in quite a similar way to how it already functions, where you can either start with an image, or just start with a text description. And then you just give it keywords, though it does seem to allow you to iterate a bit more easily than the current version by describing the changes you want to make, so like changing the outfit the person's wearing.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, actually, that reminds me... Sorry, Mike, I'll come back to you. But that does remind me that when we got the accessibility announcements from Apple a few weeks ago, they did mention that there were much better descriptions right across the system.
So if that's the case, it may be that the app I'm talking about may not be necessary, because if Apple itself can describe really vividly to you the image that it's created, maybe that will be sufficient.
Mike Feir:
One of the things they were talking about is style. I saw a lot of complaints, and the reason a lot of people didn't use Image Playground who were fully cited, was that it created cartoon kind of images. It wasn't sort of a quote, unquote, "serious image creation manipulation tool," as it were. So it sounds like that has been corrected, from what I've heard, you can really change the style of imagery and pictures that it creates.
And so that, in theory, will bring more of those people into the fold who balked at the cartoonish nature of this stuff. Of course, now you get into the possibility of deep fake creation, which is a bit troubling. I hope Apple has thought through those kind of ramifications.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's a fine line with all this stuff now. The issues we're confronting are more and more ethical, rather than technical, and those are societal challenges. Do you use Image Playground at all, Judy?
Judy Dixon:
No, not at all.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Okay. Should we talk about the Photo Clean Up tools getting a big upgrade, thanks to Apple Intelligence? There is something called spatial reframing, and apparently that lets you fix a lot of factors to do with the photo that previously would have just been set in stone once the photo is taken. I would be grateful for your elaboration on all of this, Heidi.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah. So I don't know if it was last year or the year before, they introduced the whole spatial photo.
Jonathan Mosen:
All gets a bit of a blur, when you get to our age, you know?
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah. And so what's happening with this reframing is, it lets you sort of rotate around the main subject in your image, so that it appears as if you took the photo from a different perspective.
So say you were face-on to someone, but you actually wanted to capture more of their left profile, you sort of rotate around them. And then AI fills in the gaps based on what is already in the picture. It extrapolates, essentially.
Jonathan Mosen:
Interesting.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
So might that potentially be quite beneficial to a blind photographer?
Judy Dixon:
I would think so. If you knew exactly where it was going, I mean, it's hard to know what you end up with. But you could then have it describe it again, and...
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Judy Dixon:
Yeah.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay. How do you guard against, or how will Apple guard against tampering with the photo, to the extent that it no longer was an accurate representation of what took place?
Judy Dixon:
Oh, I think that ship has sailed.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right.
Mike Feir:
Yeah.
Heidi Taylor:
Like in the example they showed which was a picture of two kids, I think it would only let you rotate the image to a certain extent, because it would want to keep a certain amount of the original detail to extrapolate from.
So it would have to have at least some of the original in it. And what it's usually trying to extrapolate is more just background detail, so that would hopefully not make it too weird.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. Okay. Some features like image generation are going to have daily usage limits. So this is something that we're seeing creeping into a lot of AI technology now, and we'll just have to see how aggressive those limits are.
Sometimes these companies are starting at quite the aggressive end of the spectrum, and then they get pushback from users, and they pull back on the limits a little bit.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going on for developers relating to the core AI framework, which lets you run your own models in conjunction with other apps, and I think we'll hear a lot more about that throughout the week at WWDC.
Before I talk about the beta process, does anyone else have any comments about the keynote features we should cover some more of, or anything of that kind? Okay.
So let's just set some expectations. iOS 27, and presumably some of the others, are out in what they call developer beta preview. And it might be a bit less of a rough ride this year, because it seems to me they're spending a lot, other than the Apple Intelligence stuff, they're spending a lot of time, it sounds like, fixing things that have broken.
And I'm delighted about this. I hope that Apple doesn't get too much backlash for that, because so many of us have asked for this, and if that's really what they're doing, then hats off to them. And let's hope that accessibility is included.
However, as a rule, iOS beta 1 of anything is really rough. And although everybody wants to play, especially with the new Siri, I think the minimum advice I would give is to check the usual sources really carefully for those people who either have a "who cares" attitude, and install it, or maybe who have a device.
Maybe they're so dedicated to testing that they have a special device that they allocate to the purpose of testing. Even if you have access to it, I'd be really reticent about rushing out and putting iOS 27 Developer Beta 1 on a device that you depend on. So I kind of feel like I have to offer that public service announcement. So we'll see how it goes.
When do you jump on board with it, Judy? You going to put beta 1 on the thing?
Judy Dixon:
Well, not on my production phone, absolutely not.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right.
Judy Dixon:
I never put any betas on... I mean, I put betas of apps, but I certainly don't put a beta of an iOS on my phone that I depend on. Never.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right.
Judy Dixon:
But I do have another phone. I have a 12 Pro, which is getting a bit old, but I was glad to hear it was still going to work. And I'll put the beta on that.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Unfortunately-
Judy Dixon:
Quite quickly.
Jonathan Mosen:
... you won't have all the new Siri whiz bang.
Judy Dixon:
That's true.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. So that's the challenge.
Judy Dixon:
I might be getting near time for a new test phone, but yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
There you go. You know you want to. Buy Judy's Apple Watch book, so that...
Mike Feir:
Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
I mean, and the other thing I would say, is that we've got the convention coming up. And the one thing you really want to avoid, if you're coming to convention and you've got tools that you might want to use to help you navigate, or work with menus, or any number of things, you don't want to be running a dodgy build of the operating system when you're in an unfamiliar place at convention time. So-
Judy Dixon:
Oh, yes.
Jonathan Mosen:
... something to take into account. When do you jump on board, Mike?
Mike Feir:
I don't. I wait 'til September, when everyone else gets it. I run my life on my iPhone, and I'm writing my book, and everything else. So the last thing I want is to put that in any kind of risk.
So I need that working. Now the interesting thing I guess for me, in September when this stuff does roll out is, I now have a 16 Pro, thanks to a lot of you and my readers who funded it so generously. And I have a 15, basic 15. So I'm going to get a really good look at which of these features trickle back, and how far.
And some idea of what this hinge point looks like for the phones with Apple Intelligence, and the phones without. And what kind of difference it actually makes. And I will be certainly including what I find in the next edition. So hopefully that will give people some context there.
Jonathan Mosen:
I would be tempted to get another test device. I think it got handed over to a child at some point, the one that I was using for testing. But if I do that, Bonnie's going to say, "You can't have another test device until I get that MacBook Neo that I've been thinking about."
So it's a dangerous game we play. You're not really on the beta cycle, right, Heidi? You're quite happy to wait until the thing drops.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah. I'm just happy to wait 'til it's ready for everyone, and I don't really want to deal with any annoying bugs.
Jonathan Mosen:
You don't want to have a buggy phone, especially right now.
Heidi Taylor:
No.
Jonathan Mosen:
Because for those who don't know, Heidi's going to have a baby, it'll be this month. Well, it might not be this month, but-
Heidi Taylor:
It's supposed to be this month.
Jonathan Mosen:
... it's supposed to be this month.
Heidi Taylor:
Unless they're late.
Jonathan Mosen:
But you could theoretically go into July, right? Because first babies are often a bit late.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah, I could. Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah. Sadly, it's not a little Jonathan Jr., We don't think.
Heidi Taylor:
No, that's okay. We'll love them just the same.
Jonathan Mosen:
Oh, of course we do. It's going to be so exciting. Yeah. So do you think you'll be able to join us in September for the hardware event, or will you be too busy then?
Heidi Taylor:
I can make no promises. We'll see how things are going closer to the time.
Jonathan Mosen:
There you go. Fair enough. Well, we appreciate all the times you have joined us. It's been marvelous. And thank you all for being a part of this keynote. It's really interesting to see the different format, and I suspect that as we go back to our perusing of the tech press, we'll probably see all sorts of little nuggets about the operating systems that they chose not to focus on, so we will cover those in future editions. But it's been a lot of fun, as always, and thank you. We look forward to seeing all, or most, of you in September.