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Welcome to this episode of Unmute Presents, where we bring you a community call from the American Council of the Blind. In this episode, the hosts discuss a range of topics, including how to report issues with apps or programs to the company, such as Zoom, to ensure that they are aware of any problems and can work on fixing them. They also talk about the recent collaboration between Apple and Google to standardize tracker devices and provide tips for navigating Zoom, including how to find the raise hand button under reactions. The hosts also answer questions from listeners, such as how to check for updates on Zoom and how to set it to automatically update. If you’re new to Zoom or experiencing issues with any app or program, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in now on your favorite podcast platform.

You can tune into this call live every Tuesday.

Visit acb.community to learn more about what is up coming.

Transcript:

[Music]

This is an ACB Community Call presented by American Council of the Blind.

[Music]

This unmute Presents Community Call was hosted on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2023.

[Music]

>>Appingions expressed on ACB media are those of the respective program contributors and

do not necessarily reflect the views held by the American Council of the Blind.

It’s elected officials support its staff.

[Music]

>> Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to another Unmute.

Just want to give you a couple of reminders here at the top.

First is we’re going to get through all first-hands,

and if we have time, then we’ll go through second-hands.

Make sure you give everyone the same respect.

What their question is, you would want with yours.

If you have any questions, comments, or anything else,

you can reach us at feedback@unmute.show.

Michael, how’s it going? What you got for us today?

>> It is going well.

I don’t have anything for you today, Marty.

• Nothing at all. – No, bummer.

• Yeah.

No, I am super excited.

I’ve got some feedback from Chanel last week.

So on Sunday, we published not a comprehensive,

but a quick overview of using Mac GPT on the Mac.

And hopefully that answers some questions.

And of course, if you guys have any questions,

feel free to ask them after checking that out.

And then on Friday, we posted our Friday finds,

And that was an intriguing episode that I’m frantically trying to get logged into because

I forgot that we were going over these as we were starting.

And then on Thursday, we also, what did we talk about on Thursday, Marty?

What did we or what are we going to?

What did we?

No, what did we?

See, that’s just my quick pop test to let you know that I don’t know what we’re talking

about.

So we talked about USB security, don’t plug and play with the MOSC and why you should

track of that, what you’re plugging your devices into. And then Lynn and Marty, now that I got

logged in, that’s, that’s our, we’re, we’re, we’re getting days mixed up. So Lynn and Marty on Friday

talked about subscriptions, scams, and privacy, exploring the latest in tech news on Friday find.

So that was a fun episode. And then again, Sunday we talked about Mac GPT and Marty did,

do you have anything you want to talk about related to some of the content that we published?

because I know I’ve gotten some contacts about some of that.

Yeah. Well, we definitely have been hearing from people overseas,

which is kind of surprising.

And that sort of blows me away because it’s really difficult

to schedule studio time with people who are in another content overseas.

Time zones are upside down, so we’ll figure it all out.

But we got some good surprises coming up for some,

let’s say, some awesome apps that you guys will get to hear about

in the next probably week or so.

So I’m excited about that.

And if you guys have questions, go ahead and raise your hands

and we’ll start knocking the questions out.

I have a question for you, Marty.

Have you gotten stuck in Zoom under the apps dialogue

and you can’t see other things in Zoom?

Has that happened to you?

No, not yet.

Oh, well, enjoyable.

What that is because I have not heard about this yet.

So what I just discovered, and it looks,

and I’m sure Herbie probably has a way to correct me,

but it looks like the F6 keystroke does work on the Mac as well.

But I got stuck in a window where all I could read about was

Kahoot and AI smart business cars.

I’m like, what is this?

And then I realized where my focus had moved to.

So if you do get stuck in that and all you hear is like Kahoot

and you’re using your arrow keys and random things aren’t quite working for you,

then try your hitting your F6 key, which takes you to

different places inside the interface.

So I will ask you about this.

And this has actually been a topic that’s been out for quite a while,

and there’s a lot of controversy over it.

But what it looks like is that Apple and Google are going to team up

and they’re going to try and give more settings, more options,

more ways to control how people track your tracker devices,

such as air tags and the like.

So what do you think about that?

And if anyone here has their thoughts on that, go ahead, raise your hands.

and love to hear what you guys thoughts are on this,

but Michael, what do you think?

• So from understanding correctly,

because I’ve not heard of this,

and then we’ll go over to the single hand that we got raised.

So we’ll get to you in a moment.

But my understanding is,

so Google and Apple, and I imagine probably Tile

and these other device trackers

are looking to team up together,

so that way they can work interchangeably.

Is that what you’re saying?

Yeah, and also giving people, like for example,

if you have a tracker, you have more options

to be able to figure out how it’s working,

what it’s doing, how it’s tracking you,

or if somebody else has a tracker around you

that maybe isn’t yours and they’re trying to do something

kind of shifty, let’s say,

then you would be able to see or know about it

because it would be not within the safe zone, basically.

I think it’s about time then, because, you know, the safety of these devices, you don’t

think about, and hopefully you don’t find yourself in that scenario, but it’s about

time that we’re talking together and that information is interchangeable between platforms.

Monica, whose hand is up?

Chanel.

Hey, Chanel.

Hello.

Well, it’s funny because I checked the podcast this, like, go, I don’t know, an hour or two

ago, and there, I didn’t see the one with Mac GPT.

I go to check it again. Sure enough, it’s there. So go figure.

I will listen to it later. And I just,

I didn’t know that F6 worked in Zoom on the Mac.

It doesn’t seem to work in mine.

Interesting. Yeah. It’s switching me between different panes.

I do command accent that kind of does the same thing.

Yeah. That’ll switch you between the actual windows and zoom though. Right. Okay.

I think when I’ve got stuck in that apps thing before,

Maybe I just tried to do escape or command W.

Um, I just wish zoom didn’t make it.

So we had to be in there, but I want, yeah.

So appreciate that there Chanel because, uh, yeah, F six is now it’s not working.

That’s interesting.

Cause it was on the Mac.

Cause I’m like, why is it not working?

And I thought that my FN key, cause that gets me all the time.

• Right. – And with this external keyboard,

for some reason, Mac OS sometimes honors

my respect in system settings, sometimes it changes.

• So, okay.

• But yeah, give that a listen, Chanel,

and hopefully it gives you some ideas.

One of the things that we did talk about,

well, that I did demonstrate later on in the podcast,

is the importance of prompting

and actually constructing the prompt to chat GPT.

And the example I used is,

instead of just saying, write me show notes for a show,

Let Chat GPT know something like, you are an assistant to a podcast host on the unmute

presents podcast. Here are the details we covered in today’s episode. Please provide me show notes,

a title and the promotional paragraph for this episode. And I found that when you, when you

craft your prompt that way, it, it gives you more usable information than the generic info you might

get from Chat GPT. So I demonstrate that in the audio. So intrigue next week, or of course,

if you send an email about your thoughts on that.

Thanks.

No problem. Monica, who do we have next?

Abraham is next.

Hello, Abraham.

Abraham, how’s it going?

Hi, I’m good and you yourself?

Good, thanks.

Zoom acting weird.

So besides your app issue, which I think I had before,

when people are sharing audio, it is you are sharing audio,

and I have to Alt+F4 to get out of that window,

and every time I tab to something,

open the Participants panel,

it goes back to that window, you are sharing audio.

• Does F6 work in that window?

Have you tried that by chance?

• No, I tried that.

• Okay.

• And what’s happening now?

I don’t know if I have scripts installed.

I think that Doug Lee made my Zoom scripts.

And I’m I Alt-Wise, I’m not raising my hand.

I had to go into the reactions menu.

Interesting. It would almost be worth–

so since you said scripts, I’m assuming you’re meaning JAWS.

It would almost be worth finding out

if you temporarily go back to JAWS factory defaults

and suspend those scripts if your Alt-Y works.

Because I wonder if it’s looking for the placement of Ray’s hand

on the screen, but when they moved it under reactions,

then it may not–

that’s probably why it’s happening there.

I enabled help and said,

“Accept call when I pressed Alt-Y.”

But I switched to NVDA and you are sharing computer audio.

>> Yes.

>> I’m still stuck on that.

>> Yeah.

>> I don’t think that’s good.

>> It’s funny, I was reading an article while I was

actually lurking in the background of Herbie’s cooking call this morning.

And someone shared their screen and it popped up on in the middle of my article.

I’m like, I really, there’s nothing users can do, but it is really frustrating how

Zoom just takes over everything when you’re trying to do other things.

Yeah.

There’s a suggestion too, and this isn’t just for Zoom, but it will work with Zoom.

If you ever have an app or a program, something like that, that you’re having

issues with and you’re continuing to have issues with it, you know, register a

complaint with the company, whether it’s Zoom or any other app, this way, they at

least they know. And the more complaints they get about things that aren’t

working or problems, maybe you could create a ticket with them, whatever they

allow you to do, let them know so that they’ll know that you’re having these

problems. And I’m sure if you’re having these problems, other people are having

the same or similar problems. So the more they know, the more they’re aware to

look at a fixing. So if you don’t say anything, then maybe they don’t know. So

If you’re able to take a few extra minutes to register a complaint or a suggestion

that something’s not working, go for it.

Okay.

We’ll do things.

Alan.

Hey, Alan, how’s it going?

Hello guys.

I’m wondering if the same problem going to work in Windows as well as the

same messages might come up in Zoom regarding the trackers.

Yeah.

It’s well, currently what they were talking about was the Apple air tags,

which works with any Bluetooth device.

So, I think that they’re trying to get everyone to jump on board so that all of the trackers

kind of work with the same technology so they’re not used in ways they shouldn’t be used for.

Yes, I know sometimes they’ve got a button sometimes disappears, so I have to use the F6

button to get it.

Right.

Yep, yep. Sometimes that F6 button will move that focus for you and that’s a good tool to

have in your back pocket.

Perfect, Alan.

Well, thank you and feel free to reach out with another question.

Monica, do we have any other hands right now?

Yes, Jane.

Hi, Jane.

Hello.

My question has to do with Zoom also, but I have an SE 2020 iPhone and today

I was on a Zoom call and I tried to raise my hand to ask the question and

it wouldn’t let me.

What?

So wouldn’t let you, meaning when you went to go to the button to raise

your hand, it didn’t let you?

It wouldn’t let me.

It wouldn’t do, when I said, so I flipped left and right

and it told me settings, a couple other things,

but I didn’t find the raise hand button under the wall.

• Do you remember if you heard something that said reactions?

• I don’t know.

• Because I think what happened is

the raise hand button is under reactions.

And so if you don’t-

• Okay, I’ll try that again.

Try that next one, Carl.

So you think it’s under reaction

because I know when you guys, ACB gives the instructions,

yes, the more buttons in the right-hand corner

and the mute button in the left-hand corner,

but you kind of have to click left and right to find them.

• Right.

• No, they really aren’t there

if you’re using an SE 2020 or an SE new version, whatever.

• Well, that is good to know.

And maybe we can play with that.

I know the raised hand button from the recording

has been moved out of the more tab for most users.

Although we do still run into some users like this.

So look for reactions and then it should be under there.

• Okay, ’cause I went into settings

and I got something else and I was like, okay.

So I got all the way out.

• Do you ever check to make sure

that your Zoom is updated all the way?

• What’s that?

• Do you ever check to make sure

that your Zoom is getting updated?

Do you check to make sure your Zoom doesn’t have any updates

that you’ve updated it to the most current version?

• How do you do that?

would go into the app store.

And then on the top right corner,

there’s a button that says accounts and you click on that.

And then you would scroll down,

you would see updates,

anything that has apps on your device

that need to be updated will show.

• Oh, okay, I thought you meant,

because I was wondering if I went into my Zoom app,

would it say if I’m updated?

• No, no, no, you gotta go into your app store

and then go to accounts

and then you’ll see it down there at the bottom.

if there’s an update for it, it’ll be there.

And if you don’t see it right away,

you can do a three finger swipe down to refresh it.

And sometimes that’ll pop and then you’ll see updates.

• Thank you very much.

• Marty.

• Yeah, you can go to your my account under your Zoom.

You can go to my account under Zoom

and you can check what version you have.

And you can also set it to automatically update.

• Okay, thank you.

I’m new at this, but I thought I managed to master Zoom,

But like I said, when I went into Zoom today to raise my hand, it wouldn’t let me.

So I’ll check that out.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, EG for the chip.

All right, Monica.

Thanks, you have Kim.

Hello.

Just to confirm what the previous lady was saying, it’s funny because my iPhone

made, um, it made Zoom look different without me even telling to it updated.

And so what you need to know is now on the bottom of your screen,

instead of there being five little pictures or whatever they are, there’s six.

And yeah, the one that says reactions, double tap on that and raise hand will

be the first thing you hear double tap on that.

And so, uh, a boy in that line, kind of, I also have a question about Siri.

I just recently updated to 15.4.

I waited forever.

And one bug that Siri now has,

I used to be able to hold down my home button.

I have an FV20, I think, yeah.

So I hold down my home button,

I used to be able to say on the app store, find,

and then I’d name the app.

On this new update,

Sperry won’t go to the App Store.

She’ll say, “Here’s what I found on the web for go-to divine office,” or whatever.

I tried it two or three times and then I said, “Okay, be that way.”

So I went into the App Store on my own and I wrote it in with my Braille device.

The app that I was looking for,

it popped up right away.

But Siri is, I think my smartphone is getting stupid as far as she’s concerned.

Well, a couple of things here.

The first thing is you’re not the only one that’s having issues with Siri.

Everyone in this update has had issues.

We’re hoping that they are going to start resolving these issues

in the next operating system, which should, they’ll probably talk about it in June at WWDC

and probably they’ll release it sometime end of the year,

September-ish, maybe October, just all depends.

But a workaround for that would be,

you could also go to the App Store,

go to search and then in the search box,

once you have the VoiceOver cursor in there,

you could dictate what you’re looking for

using the dictate button on the keyboard.

And I know it’s not a perfect situation,

but at least if you don’t wanna type it

and you wanna dictate it, that’s a workaround for you.

>> Yeah, I keep forgetting about Duketay too.

>> If you don’t see the little microphone on your keyboard,

you can go into your settings and turn it on and then it will show up.

>> Okay.

>> I have a suggestion if I may.

>> Go for it, Chanel.

>> Yeah. Sometimes it’s just a matter of the syntax you use with Siri.

Like you might have to say search for in the App Store instead of GoTo,

or on my Mac now if I want to open anything with Siri,

which usually I don’t,

but I have to demonstrate that for the class.

I will say open the text edit app.

If I just tell her open text edit,

she’ll be like, “I can’t do that.”

But if you say open the text edit application,

then it’s just a matter of fooling her to get what you want.

But honestly, 99 percent of the time I don’t use her.

But the one percent that I do, that’s what I’ve found.

>> One other quick tip I will tell you really quickly is that in this update as well,

one of the issues is it doesn’t always pick up what you say from the very beginning.

So what people do is they’ll activate Syrian, wait a second,

then they’ll say what they’re looking for.

And when they’re done talking, they’ll wait another second and then turn it off.

That way you’re sure that it’s going to get,

hopefully it will get all of what you’re saying.

But a lot of people are having problems because it doesn’t pick up the first part of what they’re saying

because they activate Syrian and it starts right away talking.

and then it doesn’t pick up everything you’re trying to say.

• Okay, thank you guys for your help.

• Yeah, no problem.

All right, Monica.

• Okay, next we have Sheila.

• Hey, Sheila.

• Hey guys, how are you?

• Good, how are you?

• I am doing just fine.

My question is not Zoom.

• Good.

• Way totally not Zoom.

And Outlook, which is what I use for my mail email.

How do you request a red receipt for someone

that it’s an important email that you want to know that got.

And I know I’ve done it before,

but I went the other day and couldn’t find it.

• I will tell you for sure,

because I don’t remember off the top of my head

and my favorite keystroke in Microsoft products,

unfortunately does not work in Outlook.

So for those who did not know,

Alt-Q will let you search the menus

for what you’re looking for in every product but Outlook.

So Sheila, if you stay tuned,

I will look up that keystroke or where to go to get that,

unless someone else has an idea and they can chime in

because I don’t know.

• Okay, thanks.

• No problem.

Who do we have there next, Monica?

Why look, she loves Antara.

• We have Kristy next.

• Hey, Kristy, how are you doing?

• Hello, how are y’all doing?

• Good, good.

• Good, I have a question about the Alexa Kindle voice.

Like, okay, you can change Alexa voice,

you know what I’m saying, for the whole operating thing.

but when you’re trying to get it to read a book to you

from Kindle, is there any way to change the voice

to the male voice or not yet?

• Have you tried switching your main voice to the male voice

and then does that work?

• No, well, the male voice, I have the main,

I actually have the main voice as my male voice

and that’s what I want.

• Gotcha, but it’s still reading with the female voice.

• Yeah, it’s still the Kindle stuff.

my Kindle books that I read on it, it still reads in the female voice. So I didn’t know if there was

something separate I had to do, or if that’s just a fluke and it doesn’t work, if the Kindle

reader doesn’t have the male voice. I don’t have an answer for you on that, but we can reach out

and see if anyone does on that one because, yeah, that’s a good question. I think the Kindle reader

is determined by whoever the book is written by and the person that is doing the recording.

They don’t make a male version and a female version, I don’t think.

Well, the Kindle Reader actually, EG, uses the text-to-speech for Amazon. So it’s not,

I think what you’re thinking of is the Audible Whisper version of the book,

which would be pre-recorded, but the Kindle Reader itself should be the Amazon TTS. So it should

switch over to the mail-wise if your default is now.

Yeah, my default default is mail, but no, it doesn’t do that.

Yeah. Yes, and thank you for that. And, you know, we are gonna I’m gonna ask Lucy if she knows all

send her an email if she has any ideas because she’s who I go to for a lady tips unless someone

else has an idea. Okay, thank you. Real quick before we move on, Monica, I did want to follow

up with Sheila and Sheila, I’m going to email these or text these directions over to you so you have

them. And it looks like you go into the message itself when you create it in Outlook, go up to

the file menu and then choose options and then mail. And when you’re in mail, you can pick if you

want a read receipt or if you want a delivery receipt, and then that will apply to that specific

message. And as it’s explained in the Microsoft documentation, and again, I’ll text you. So if

So if you don’t, didn’t catch them,

then you’ll have them in a moment.

As it explained in the Microsoft documentation,

they suggest only sending read receipts

for important messages or people will stop sending them,

which is why I stopped sending them back myself years ago,

but I see the importance of it for sure.

• Oh yeah, there are occasions as a state president

that you need to know somebody got your message.

• Yes ma’am.

• Thank you, Michael.

• No problem, thanks a lot Sheila.

Who do we have next Monica?

>> I don’t know who EG is. Hey, EG.

>> Thank you, Michael.

>> How’s it going?

>> Fine. I just wanted to add one other thing on

the Zoom that I’ve experienced,

I think maybe others have too,

is that when like for unmute presents,

I always go in and I click on my calendar,

and I’ve got the link there,

and that’s how I get into unmute presents.

The issue there is that if I do that a bunch and I don’t

actually go in and sign in to Zoom,

then some of my settings in Zoom will go away.

So for example, how I have myself named will change.

It’ll revert to my Google setting as opposed to my Zoom setting.

So sometimes you may find that your Zoom settings change

without seemingly doing anything,

but it’s because you haven’t gone into Sign In.

If you go in and sign into your account again,

you can reset your, whether you have a photo or whether you have

a naming or any of those conventions.

• Great tip.

And often what I have found is you get signed out

when Zoom updates.

• That is correct.

At least when they do a major, when they do.

• Yes, yes.

Not every update, but every once in a while,

when you’re like, why am I, what do you mean iPhone?

That’s probably me.

And then something that if you didn’t know this,

if you’re like, am I iPhone?

I’m on an iPhone.

If you tap that participants tab

in the middle of the bottom of the screen,

you are always the participant at the top.

So if it says iPhone at the top thing, you are iPhone.

So thank you, Eiji.

Did you have a question or did you just want to share that tip?

• I just wanted to share the tips since we were talking about Zoom a little bit,

but you guys do a great job.

Thank you very much.

• Thanks Eiji.

Appreciate it.

• Thanks, Eiji.

Judy.

• Hey, Judy.

How are you doing?

• Hey, guys.

So getting back to complaining about Siri, because I’ve definitely fallen out of love

with Siri since iOS 16.

And I don’t really know that anybody’s got an answer for this, but one of the–

I have often used Siri to send a quick text

and my conversation will appear on the screen

or it used to appear on the screen.

So I could look to see if Siri understood everything

or if I wanted to change it and there’d be a send button,

nothing appears anymore.

And I think that started actually with iOS 16.

I don’t even think it was one of the updates to 16.

So I don’t know, have you guys heard about them

doing anything about that at all?

I mean, have you experienced that at all?

Siri has just been not great in this update, I would say, in 16.

They’ve been trying to make improvements and fixes sort of throughout each time they do

a point update, you know, 0.1 to those ones.

But it’s still not great.

We’re hoping that in 17, all these issues will get resolved.

But unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do with Siri and making any setting changes

or adjustments to make it work.

Right, yeah, I know.

It’s kind of one of those things where it is what it is.

Yeah, I know.

It sounds like my dryer is here, so I am going to step away for a quick moment to deal with

that delivery real quick.

But one thing to think about, Judy, with Siri is in the Siri settings, there is an option

that you can enable or disable that says confirm action from Siri.

And so it might be worth playing with that as well.

Okay.

All right.

Thanks for that.

Appreciate that.

And Judy, one other thing before you go, I will say also, you could actually go into

your messages and go to the person.

And once you have the body of the message open for whoever it is you’re trying to text,

you can use the dictate from the keyboard and that might work a little bit better for you.

Right.

Yeah.

No, I have just always found Siri faster that it, you know, pick up the phone, send off

a quick text and then I could see right then and there if it, you know, if he understood

it.

But yeah, I mean, I know I can, I can do that from the messages app as well.

Even though it doesn’t show up on your screen.

So say like you’re going to pick up your phone, you activate Siri, send a text message.

Does it at least repeat back to what it said or is it not doing that either?

No, it does.

But sometimes I’m wondering, like for example, this morning, I always put the punctuation.

So I said, “question mark.”

He repeated back, “question mark.”

And I wanted to be sure that he actually was, that it didn’t say the words, “question mark,”

because it doesn’t always do that.

He’ll usually say, you know, question and it was saying, “question mark,” and there

were a couple of other things in a text that I just wanted to be sure that it came out

okay, and I used to be able to look at that and see what you know what Siri was actually understanding

and it just doesn’t yeah it doesn’t show up at all. Like I you know I’ve told I’ve said this a

lot of times but you know with this particular round in 16 for whatever reason Siri doesn’t pick

your voice up right when you activate it so you know activate Siri try waiting a second then start

speaking, you know, and then when you’re done, wait a second, and then we’ll stop

Siri and see if that helps at all.

Because I wonder if it’s missing the beginning of what you’re trying to say.

Yeah, well, it’s not just that, like, I mean, I understand that it said it doesn’t

show up on the screen at all, or it used to, you know, the conversation with Siri

used to show up on the screen if I was texting.

So, I mean, that was the point.

But yeah, I appreciate that.

And I will often go into messages if I’m just annoyed with Siri, I’ll just go into

the app and just do it that way.

So, thanks.

All right, well, good luck. Hopefully we’ll hope we’re better in 17. Right?

Exactly. Thanks a lot. Yep. Petra is next. Hey, Petra, how’s it going?

It’s going, it’s going well. Thank you very much. My comment is about the weather app. I just

use the native weather app that comes with the iPhone. And that is totally messed up lately

since the last update. I have about nine cities that I would keep track of my sisters, my daughters,

local wherever I am at the moment and then my home city and so forth.

And when I open the weather app, it comes up and first of all,

we’ll say Wi-Fi off or something like that.

And I’m thinking, heck, I’m not even in the status bar.

Why is it telling me that?

And then it will give me entirely the wrong city and it takes forever to get back

to the city that I want to be in. And then when it’s there,

Sometimes it will say left justified error or something,

or it goes into the precipitation

by every second of the day.

And I can’t get out of there.

Is there a better weather app

or does anyone use the native Apple app?

And can you tell me how to navigate that better?

• So a couple of things.

The first thing I will tell you is they did break

the weather app and it was having all kinds of issues

for a little while.

They did for the most part resolve it,

although it still does have some bugs.

If you’re looking the way the map,

do you have any vision at all

or are you not able to see anything at all?

• No, I don’t have no vision at all.

• Okay, well in the weather app at the very top,

that’s gonna be where it’s gonna tell you the city

and the weather currently in your city.

And if you have voiceover on,

it will also tell you what the high of the day

and the low of the day will be.

If you scroll or move your finger down,

the next thing is gonna be like every hour or every,

you know, minute or whatever,

how it kind of goes across the timeline.

The five day forecast or the seven day forecast

is gonna be under that.

And so you would have to get under that

to see what that would be.

Now I’m also gonna say it is still a little bit buggy.

So if you’re looking for some other suggestions

for weather apps, I can give you two.

Both of them work with voiceover

and both of them have free and paid versions.

A lot of people really, really like Weather Gods,

which does work with Voiceover and people love that a lot.

And number two would be Carrot Weather,

which people also like a lot

and it also works with Voiceover.

But they both have free versions

and then they also both have paid versions.

So you’ll have to decide what you want there.

But those would be the two suggestions

for alternatives that I would recommend.

• And I will second that.

Weather Gods is a great application,

especially if you just want to hear what the audio or what the weather is like.

Uh, that’s what I use weather gods for.

And then, um, with carrot weather, if you Google carrot weather, you’re going to

see it’s the snarky weather app, which is fine.

And that’s all good.

You can calm that down if you want, but what I find to be the most valuable

thing about carrot weather is carrot weather allows you to completely

customize the interface.

So let’s say you don’t really care about what the, what the precipitation

is over the next six days.

you can take that out and not even see that information

and only see the information you want.

So for someone who’s looking

for a very customizable application,

it does take a little bit for you to get it set up

and configured the way you like it,

then definitely check out Carrot Weather.

And then if I remember right,

I think you can even set different views

for different cities.

So if your kid lives in a city that gets a lot of rain

or has more storm alerts,

you can get those information too.

So I hope that helps a little bit.

• My only question about that,

And I’m not sure if you know this or not, Michael,

is the customization behind the paywall

or is that in the free version?

• Yep, it is behind the paywall.

• Okay.

• Well, you know, the weather app,

the way you were describing it used to work that way.

It’s not working that way anymore on my phone.

But the sad thing is about two years ago,

Apple bought a dark sky.

• Right.

• It was a really, really good weather app.

• Yes, it was.

• And I thought, wow, in fact,

My daughter who uses an Android had dark sky

and had to pay for it.

And then I was gonna get it for free.

And it was so good that I could be on the paratransit

and the driver could be looking for a particular address.

And dark sky would actually tell me the address

of where we were and what the weather was.

And Apple bought it and they’ve taken dark sky away

and they’ve ruined the weather app.

• Well, I’ll try one of the other options,

see if there’s work anybody for you.

• I think you’ll be super happy with carat weather

if you used to use dark sky, I would definitely check it out.

• All right, thank you very much.

• All right, have a good one.

• Next.

• Hello, Marie.

• Hi, I have one quick comment and one question.

First quick comment is I don’t know about a Mac,

an Outlook, but Outlook on a Windows PC,

the Alt-Q absolutely works perfectly

’cause I use it all the time.

It works very reliably. – There’s a security word

not on Windows, so thank you for letting me know

it does work.

I thought you might be talking about on a Mac,

because, and I don’t use a Mac,

but no, it works really good on my Windows PC.

My question is, I have a three year old laptop

that I’m thinking about passing along to somebody,

and it’s running Windows 11.

Do you know, they say that the reset feature

in Windows 11 will absolutely reset everything,

and will wipe out all of your data.

Do you know if that’s true?

So for Windows 11, if you go into settings

and you do the reset PC, it will offer you to just reset

or to erase all of the files and reset,

and that will cleanly erase the files.

Of course, when you erase files on a computer,

anyone who kind of knows what they are doing

and needs to, could get access to them,

but that is the most efficient way to just give it away

or to sell the computer.

• Okay, do you know, this originally came with Windows 10,

but if you do the reset,

it still will be running Windows 11, correct?

• Yes. – It won’t go back to 10.

• Yep, you can make it so it’s still on Windows 11.

• Okay, thank you very much.

That’s it. – No problem,

Marty, I’m gonna step away for about 20 seconds.

• Okay, who do we have next, Monica?

• We have Melissa next.

• Hey, Melissa, how’s it going?

• I sent an answer on mute with this, Eric.

• Hey, Eric, how’s it going?

• Last hand for now, unless Melissa can unmute.

She’s not here, so.

• Eric can go ahead with his question if he…

I did send it.

OK, I’ve sent it a couple of times, Marty.

OK, let’s move on.

If either we’ll go to Anne.

All right. Sounds good. Hey, Anne.

Can you hear me?

We can hear you. There I am.

Oh, there we go.

OK, go ahead. Wow.

Go ahead, Eric.

This is my first time and I’m on the iPhone

and I download it 16 and I’m having all kinds of bugs.

>> Don’t forget to do all the updates once you get 16 on your phone.

You might want to go back and make sure that you have all of your updates there.

You can get rid of as many bugs as you can get rid of.

>> Okay. I know that I do need to do another update.

I have two questions.

One is with the rotor.

Since I did the updates,

I lost part of my editing rotor functions.

It doesn’t seem like it is where usually go to reset it.

Has anybody had that issue?

>> I think what they do is there’s

some things on the rotor that

are things that they just put on there,

but you could customize a rotor.

So you could take stuff off or put other stuff on,

to kind of customize it to whatever suits you.

So if you want to mess around with the rotor

and either add, change things with it, whatever,

you would go into settings, then accessibility,

and then voiceover, and then rotor.

And then once you’re in the rotor,

then there’s a bunch of settings and changes that you can do.

• I know, but when you get in there, for example,

before you could go in there and tell it

to like give you, right now,

it won’t even allow me to set a link on the rotor

or where you would be able to do the rotor to set a format.

So it would be easier to do like an application.

>> Right.

>> I thought that that was weird and I did

send a message to Apple about it.

Well, did you go into the settings for the rotor and see if you can add back the things

that you would want to have on your rotor?

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been fighting with for the past two days.

So I mean, I’ve been trying to work around it, which is a pain, but you know, if it’s

not working for you, did you try calling Apple Disability and see if they can help you get

the rotor set up?

It should not be this difficult, but if you are having issues, actually the first thing

I would say to do is to update, do all your updates first and then see if you’re able

to do it because there could be some bugs with the updates.

So make sure you get all your updates all the way as far as you can go.

And then if you’re still having trouble with it, I would try calling Apple Disability because

it shouldn’t be this difficult.

My other one is on the Messenger app.

When you want to go into one of the chats,

how exactly do you do that now?

• Are you talking about like text messages basically?

• Like, you know how you get alert

that you have a chat message?

• Right.

• When you belong to a community.

• Are you talking about,

This doesn’t sound like the Apple Messages app.

This sounds like something else.

• It’s part of, I think it’s more or less

part of the Facebook.

• Oh, Facebook messages or whatever they call it.

• Yeah, yeah.

• It’s pretty much works the same way

as the Apple Messages app.

You would need to open that app up.

So you have to have that app installed on your phone.

It’s a standalone app on iPhone.

So do you have it installed on your phone right now?

• I thought I did.

I guess I better double check.

• Yeah, so the first thing is you would need

to have it installed if you don’t,

but once you have it installed,

then you would do a single finger double tap to open it up.

And then the first thing you’ll see is a list

of all of the people that you message with.

And if you have any groups or whatever,

you click on the one that is the group.

And when you do a single finger double click,

it’ll open up the body of that message.

and then you can actually reply in the message,

just like you would on Apple Messages.

There’ll be a box you can type in or dictate in

and it’ll put your message into the chat.

• And is there a voice command for that?

• You could try, if you know exactly what it’s called,

you can try saying or using Siri to say open Facebook

messages or messenger,

I don’t remember exactly what it’s called,

but that’ll only work if you have it installed on your phone.

And if you say something like open messenger, which will, that’s the fastest way to open

Facebook messenger is just to say messenger.

If you don’t have it on your phone, and I was going to drop this as a comment too earlier,

the most reliable way I’ve found for Siri to actually prompt you to go download the

app in the app stores to say open and then the app name.

And if it can’t find it, it’ll say, would you like to search the app store for this?

And you can just double tap on the search button and it takes you right to the page.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, no problem. If you have any issues, come back and let us know.

All right. Thank you.

All right. Ann, go for it.

Can you hear me?

We can hear you.

Okay.

Sorry about that. Thanks for being nice to me.

Okay. Okay. I’m glad he got in.

There is a new update that came out, what, a couple of days ago, I think.

And a friend always tells me about it. I’m glad she does because I wouldn’t know.

But she said, when you’re downloading it, you download it and then it asks you the same thing again and again and again.

And then she restarted her phone and it worked.

Should you have to do that in the middle of that particular or this particular update that has just come out?

Well, I would think you would never want to turn off your phone or restart at the middle of an update.

That wouldn’t be good.

Well, she had to because it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t let her go forward.

And she said it worked perfectly. So now I’m scared.

Interesting. Uh, I haven’t seen that issue personally, Michael,

you’ve seen this update that came out two days ago or whatever.

Um, so I am on the latest update.

The only time that I’ve ever been told to restart my phone is it’ll,

it’ll walk me through restarting it. And, uh,

then I just double tap on restart and that tells me that it’s fine.

Is it telling, did it tell her to actually go and restart her phone or what?

No, she said it kept telling her to update.

I mean, once she got in the middle of it, whatever that prompt is there, it kept

giving it to her, but it wouldn’t do it and wouldn’t move.

And she figured after three tries, she would, she would just restart the phone.

She restarted the phone and it worked.

So I went through fine.

Yeah.

So, so that sounds like it was just kind of a glitch.

Uh, technology can be technology sometimes.

So I definitely recommend not restarting your phone while you’re doing an update.

But in those instances, sometimes you just got to make a judgment call.

I mean, you can either do it or you can call Apple and they may have you do the

same thing and then you have the reassurance if something does go wrong.

But I definitely get her concern because you, you don’t, you’re always told,

don’t turn it off while it’s updating.

So yeah, I have not seen this though.

No, I’m going to wait till I have siding systems to do this one.

There you go. Whatever makes you comfortable for sure.

Thanks.

No problem, man. Thanks a lot. Who do we have next there, Monica?

Abraham.

Hi there.

Hi. How do I go about uninstalling a JavaScript?

How do you go about uninstalling a JAWS script? Okay, so I am, I may need to follow up with

you via email if I can’t remember off the top of my head, but what you can do is go

into the JAWS utility menu and there’s a option to show JAWS settings path and that will open

the proper JAWS settings path in File Explorer and then in there is the JAWS script files.

But you want to remove the script files and the keyboard manager file as well. And if you

need more directions, I can send that to you via email because I know I kind of butchered it.

This is Chanel.

Okay. Hey, Chanel. Thank you.

Yeah, some of the like the Zoom scripts actually show up and they’re from, if you have the ones from

Brian Harton at least, they show up in the in your you know ad remove and there have been quite a few

updates to the scripts so it may be worth you know making sure that I just double checked and

I only have Teams scripts here.

Oh, okay.

I’m thinking maybe Teams is open in the background and

it’s trying to answer the problem.

That could be your problem, yeah.

Because I think Alt-Y in Teams does answer a call, right?

No, I think it’s control-shift-J.

Oh, okay. Because you were saying it was saying answer call.

I don’t know what’s going on. It’s weird.

But it’s not to fix it on my laptop, only my desktop.

So another thing to try, Ibrahim, is in Zoom, do JAWS Key Q and C1.

Oh, I checked all my hotkeys default.

Okay.

Well, I was reading JAWS Key Q to see what version of scripts the JAWS was loading on your laptop

versus the desktop to see maybe there’s different version numbers on each of the computers.

So we can have Zoom in focus if you do JAWS Key Q, it’ll tell you that.

Okay.

Hopefully that helps a little bit or drop us an email and we can try to send you

some follow-up directions for manually removing scripts. And it might be worth playing with

Brian’s scripts because you can download those for free to see if they work.

Brian Hartchen from Hartchen Consultancy. If you just search for H-A-R-T-G-E-N

Zoom scripts, you’ll find it right away. He has a free version and a paid version of JAWS scripts

that provide additional functionality for Zoom individuals using JAWS.

And actually the free version is already built into JAWS now.

But the paid, I’m trying to remember the paid basically allows you more

customization of your alerts and there’s a couple other things I just can’t remember.

So, yep.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, Janelle.

Thanks, Abraham.

Appreciate it.

Uh, we have about 10 minutes left.

Who do we have next, Monica?

Bell Mills is next.

Hey, Bill.

Hi.

Can you hear me?

We can hear you.

Good.

I have a Zoom concern here.

It seems like today is a lot of questions about Zoom.

This one, I’m a member of a Bible group.

Every week they send an ID and a password.

do not send out a link and all every week it’s it’s a different ID and password. So

this time I could only enter the ID and and you know I went to join meeting and so on and I just

and I went into settings and couldn’t make heads or tails out of anything. You know I just don’t

know what to do and I’m scared to death to do they only send out the phone number or do they send out

I’d click here. Oh, they just all they do, they don’t, they just send you the number, they send you

them, like they say ID, and they’ll give you a number, and you have to put it in. And this is on

this week, I worked with my computer. Sometimes I go to the iPhone. Oh, oh, I tried both, both. So,

this week, and I never could get in. So I don’t understand it. I have tried to get them,

or I talked to somebody about, please send me a link.

(laughs)

And I think a lot of people would be happy with that.

• They don’t send you one that says join now?

• Join, no, no.

• There’s a lot of times when they send out

a Zoom invitation, they’ll send like a link

and then also the phone numbers.

• This is a separate thing from the community.

This is here in town.

• So they just send you the participant code?

• They just send the codes.

• Or the meeting ID.

Yeah. And so you have to, so what to do.

So, bell, are you trying to access this on the blind shell or the iPhone?

Cause I know you’re on both.

Well, the blind shell, I just can’t seem to get that going.

So I have the iPhone and I do some zooming on that, but I have to use my keyboard,

you know, Apple keyboard.

I hope nobody criticizes me for that.

But anyway, so, but this time.

I was not able to get anywhere.

So send us an email.

First of all, thank you for your email about pricing.

I definitely, that was a good read.

Appreciate you sharing that with us.

Um, and, and send us an email as well though, because, uh, apparently

I accidentally turned dictation on.

And so my wife was getting a dictated message of what I was saying.

Anyway, send us an email and I’ll test it on my end because I think, uh, the, first

of all, I want to see why you can’t use zoom on the blind shell.

Let’s troubleshoot that.

So that works for you.

And secondly, um, I think if you go to join meeting, it should just ask you for

the passcodes or for the meeting ID.

So if it’s not, let’s figure out why it’s not.

Well, see it asked for the ID, but it won’t give me, it, it won’t let me put in a password.

Even after you hit ID and then join.

And, and yeah, that’s when you hit join, it should prompt you for the passcode

then and it’s not, no.

Okay.

Yeah.

Shoot me an email.

Let’s play with that one.

Weird.

Okay.

Yeah.

Thanks.

No problem.

Thanks for coming.

• Thanks. Have a good one.

Monica.

• Yes, we have Malcolm and Herbie

and you got six minutes.

• All right.

• All right, let’s try and knock these points out.

• Let’s make it make Malcolm.

How’s it going?

• Good, good, good.

I have a question about an update

that you were just speaking about.

On my iPhone 13, it has iOS security response,

16.4.1 parentheses, little a parentheses.

Is this an update we should do?

It says the rapid security response update.

• Anytime there’s an update,

especially regarding security, I would suggest doing it.

• Yes, yeah, yeah.

And there’s not a major update,

so you’re not going from like 16.4 to 16.5.

So the point updates, the 16.4.1 generally,

obviously not all the time,

doesn’t fix accessibility problems

that may have already been broken or vice versa.

So those are typically safe to do

and it keeps your stuff secure.

OK, thank you.

No problem, Malcolm. Thank you.

All right, Janet.

Hello, Janet.

Hello. Yesterday, Apple was having a bug

when people tried to install the 16.4 point A.

But I think today people might be might be able to get

get the install, get it, get it, get it to install because you got

verify, verify the secure or whatever in it.

Kept saying it was failing and it was it was it was on it was on Apple site. Okay. Good to know

Updating yesterday try to get and should be able to install the update today

Perfect because they were they were I guess they were

Rolling it out and it was rolling out slowly

So like five percent of the people would get it and then another hour ten percent or what, you know, whatever

So, yeah, I just thought I’d mention that and y’all have a great day

Thanks a lot.

Thanks a lot.

And so if you had problems updating yesterday or recently, then try the update again and

hopefully that’ll fix it.

Marty, look at that time.

We did great.

And I got a dryer installed during the hour and signed the papers and everything.

There we go.

And we wrapped it up with four minutes.

So you want to tell people how to get in contact and close it out?

And thank you, Monica.

Sure.

Thanks everyone for being here for another Unmute.

And thanks Monica and Herbie for helping us out today.

If you have any questions, comments, or anything else,

you can reach us at feedback@unmute.show.

And we’ll see you guys next week.

Thanks a lot.

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Read transcript

---

Show Notes

On this episode, Michael Doise talks to Damashe Thomas, Michael Babcock and Marty Sobo about the following topics:

Tech Headlines

• SpaceX Starship test rapidly disassembles (explodes)
• Many rumored changes to iOS and WatchOS at WWDC

Topic

A new security issue has come up where people are watching iPhone users enter their passcodes. They then find a way to steal the person’s phone, and then change their iCloud password. Find out how to avoid this and other security related topics in this episode.

Picks

• Marty: Anker GaN 4 port wall charger
• Damashe: MacWhisper
• Michael: Reaper
• Michael: Sennheiser Profile microphone

Providing Feedback

We love hearing from you, so feel free to send an email to feedback@iacast.net. You can follow us on Facebook, and Twitter. You can also find us on Reddit, and all around the web. Also, don’t forget to check out our YouTube page, and for all things iACast, check out our iACast page. If you’d like to help support us, you can do so via our and Patreon pages.

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Show Notes: In this episode of Unmute Presents, we explore the capabilities of Mac GPT, a powerful chatbot that can assist with content creation and more. We discuss how to set it up, demonstrate its use, and showcase how it can be integrated into your workflow for increased productivity.

Unmute Presents – Mac GPT

Transcript

Michael:
[0:04] Hey there, and welcome to this Unmute Presents podcast. I want to thank Chanel for coming to our Tuesday call and asking that we do this.
If you have something you’d like to hear from us, remember we’re live in ACB community every Tuesday at 10am pacific time.

[0:21] That’s 1pm eastern visit acb.community for more information.
So on Tuesday, Chanel wanted us to talk a little more about what is Mac GPT?
How are we using it? And can we give some quick demonstrations of what we’re doing to get it to work? So I’m going to go over the app. I’m not going to go fully in depth, but I’d love to answer any questions after the show.
And if you have any questions, reach out to feedback at unmute.show or ask us live on Tuesdays.
In order to use chat GPT with Mac GPT, I know a lot of letters.
You need to either have a premium account through chat GPT or an API key.
I don’t think for your council work, and I’m sure someone will correct me on that if that is incorrect.
I am using the API key method. If you Google Mac stories SGPT, then you’ll find a great article which will give you some explanations of how to set up your API key and how you can go ahead and make sure you don’t get overcharged because this can become very addicting.
Now, once you do that, you can put your API key or log in to Mac GPT.
So get it all set up. And once you have that set up, you’ll see something like.

Voiceover:
[1:41] Application, Mac GPT, Mac GPT, window, edit text.

Michael:
[1:44] And that says Mac GPT window, edit text.
Now, if you just open the app, you don’t have to do this, but I want to show you something that I think can make a big difference to people.
If we do VO home toolbar, and we locate that toolbar and we interact with it.

Voiceover:
[2:00] Until bar five items, native selected radio button.

Michael:
[2:02] One of two, we have a couple of options that you can pick from.
If you signed in with the web, then just leave it on web. I leave mine on native experiment and see what works best for you. But I’m going to go to the end of this toolbar clear button group. And we’re going to press VL space on that.
This is a brand new conversation with ChatGPT and me.
So I’m going to stop interacting with the toolbar, go to the end of the page, and then press VL left arrow once, twice to the edit text. And I’ll go ahead and select that.
And now I’m going to prompt chat GPT, and I’m going to say, you’re a chat bot that is being demoed.
Oh, comma and say hi to Chanel. She’s the reason we’re doing this episode this week, period.

Voiceover:
[3:01] Oh, and say hi to Chanel. She is the reason we’re doing this episode this week.

Michael:
[3:04] And I’ll hit enter. And now if you press VO end, you’ll hear stop button.

Voiceover:
[3:09] Here, stop button.

Michael:
[3:10] That means it’s still working. If you don’t hear stop, then it’s all the way done. So let’s press VL left arrow because we don’t hear it.

Voiceover:
[3:17] Send a message, edit text.

Michael:
[3:19] And then press VL left arrow one more time. And this is a list.
This is where our conversation is. So we’ll interact with this. Enlist.

Voiceover:
[3:26] You’re a chat bot that is being demoed on a podcast. Say hi to the listeners and remind them to stay subscribed to unmute presence. Oh, and say hi to Chanel.
She is the reason we’re doing this episode this week.

Michael:
[3:33] And we’ll press VL right arrow to hear what the chat bot came back with.

Voiceover:
[3:37] Hello listeners. I am a chat, but being demoed on this podcast, thank you for tuning in and listening to the show. Don’t forget to stay subscribed to unmute presence for more interesting and informative episodes and a special shout out to Chanel for making this episode possible. Thank you.

Michael:
[3:46] If we press via right arrow, 63 tokens, $0.00.

Voiceover:
[3:49] 0 1 2 6.

Michael:
[3:51] That’s how much money I spent for that specific transaction.
And that’s a very important thing that is not shown to you by default.
So let me show you two more things. If we stop interacting with this list and we press via left arrow, top button image toolbar to the toolbar and interact with it in toolbar five items native selected radio button one of two we now have some additional options that are available including web rate your shape fill copy button group copy which will copy the entire conversation Now, let’s clear this.
And I’m going to go show you in preferences, a couple of things you might want to be aware of. So like you can on any other Mac app, well, any other well-designed Mac app, you can press command comma.

Voiceover:
[4:37] Now in general window GPT 3.5 turbo API model pop up button.

Michael:
[4:41] And this lets you choose the GPT model 3.5 turbos, what most users have.
But the one thing that I wanted to show you is toolbar.
If you go from the toolbar at the top of the screen to show tokens per message, check checkbox.
By default, that’s unchecked, so you won’t see how much you’re spending, but if it’s something you really want to pay attention to, then you can go check that checkbox and you’ll see those tokens with the amount of money that’s been spent. Let’s command W out of here.

Voiceover:
[5:08] Map GPT, window, toolbar.

Michael:
[5:10] And as I recommend, go poke around in the settings because you can make some preference changes and one of which you’ll see here in a moment. Oh, launch, launch bar.

Voiceover:
[5:20] Application.

Michael:
[5:21] Press and hold D for drafts.

Voiceover:
[5:23] Drafts, drafts, draft, blank, window, edit text, beginning of text.

Michael:
[5:26] And now I’m going to blank edit text. If I press up arrow, beginning of text, nothing there. If I press down arrow, end of text, nothing there.
So now I’m going to type the first change that you’ll notice that’s different than default.
If I type slash GPT followed by, and I’m going to dictate this.
Say hello to all of the listeners of the unmute presents podcast period.
You’re being demonstrated in a live, well, I guess, pre-recorded show period.
And I’ll tap the control key to stop the dictation.
And if I hit shift enter, you’ll hear a sound and then And I didn’t edit any of that out because I wanted you to hear what voiceover would do.
Now if I press my down arrow.

Voiceover:
[6:24] I’m at the bottom and there’s some new stuff on this text.

Michael:
[6:31] So let’s do command up arrow. And I’m going to read this entire screen.

Voiceover:
[6:36] Misspelled GPT say hello to all of the listeners of the unmute present podcast.
You’re being demonstrated in a live. Well, I guess prerecorded show.
Hello to all the listeners of the unmute present podcast. It’s a pleasure to be a part of this live demonstration. And I hope that I can be of assistance to you all. If you have any questions or need any help, feel free to ask.
And I’ll do my best to assist you. Thank you for having me on the show.

Michael:
[6:51] And as you can see that auto filled and your prompt was still at the top of the draft.
So if you wanted to rewrite it or readdress that thing, you can again, by default, you use plus GPT for me. I prefer slash and I went in and changed that in the preferences.
So how do I use chat GPT? Well, let me give you one last example.
And it’s something that I think might be good for you to observe.
And I opened map GPT by using command space, typing MA and holding C.
So this is a way that I use it. I’m going to go through my workflow and just dictate what I’m doing. If it doesn’t make sense, then just assume that I’m dictating.
You’re an assistant to a podcast host who needs to promote their latest episode.
Period. Create me some marketing messages I can post on LinkedIn, comma.

[7:50] Ideas for pictures I can post on Instagram with captions, comma.
And then what I’ll do is I’ll go ahead and let it finish typing that out.
And then I’m going to hit shift enter.
I’m going to paste this in and then here’s what we’re going to see is something.
When I hit enter, um, it’s going to start working and I’m going to VO left arrow.
And I think you’ll hear the sound. I’m not sure if you will, but voiceover will be freaking out and I’ll show you that here in a moment.

Voiceover:
[8:23] Okay. So I’m going to hit enter. freaking out and I’ll show you that here in a moment.

Michael:
[8:24] So this is it typing away and you can verify that by pressing V O N. Stop button.

Voiceover:
[8:29] And it says stop generating stop button.

Michael:
[8:34] It still says stop. And I’ll show you what it gives me here in a couple of moments with the material that I gave chat GPT, which actually chat GPT gave me in the first place.
So let me play for you everything that it heard and what it came back with and what we spent.

Voiceover:
[8:50] In list. youtube short idea. three tech stories with. you’re an assistant to a podcast host, who needs to promote their latest episode. create me some marketing messages. i can post on linkedin. ideas for pictures. i can post on instagram with captions. and some ideas for short form blog post to promote this episode.
Overall episode title. subscriptions, scams, and privacy. exploring the latest in tech news on Friday finds.
Episode show notes. On this week’s Friday Finds episode, we’re covering a range of topics in the tech world.
First, we discuss the recent changes to the popular app, Voice Dream Reader, and the impact of a new subscription model on users. Then, we dive into the flood of ScamChat GPT apps on the Mac App Store and provide tips for staying safe while browsing. Finally, we explore the rumor of app sideloading coming to iPhones and the potential privacy and security implications for users.
Join us as we delve into the latest in tech news with an accessibility view.
Promotional paragraph. Friday Finds is a weekly 30-minute tech story review show brought to you thanks to Unmew Presence.
This week on Unmew Presence Friday Finds, Lynn, Marty, and Damash are bringing you the latest in tech news with an accessibility view, from the recent changes to the popular app, app, voice dream reader to the flood of scam chat, GPT apps on the Mac app store and the rumor of app side loading coming to iPhones.
We cover it all. Join us as we explore the potential impact of these changes on users and provide tips for staying safe and informed in the digital marketplace.
YouTube short idea, three tech stories with an accessibility view.
Friday find episode preview, a quick 30 second teaser that highlights the three stories covered in the episode and emphasizes the accessibility view perspective. LinkedIn post ideas.

Michael:
[9:51] And so that was the data that it gave me. And now here’s some LinkedIn post ideas.

Voiceover:
[9:56] Are you up to date with the latest tech news? Check out our latest episode of Friday finds where we explore subscriptions, scams and privacy with an accessibility view. Join us for a deep dive into the latest changes in the tech world.
Our latest Friday finds episode covers everything from voice dream reader to app side loading on iPhones.
Want to stay informed and safe in the digital marketplace. Tune into our latest episode of Friday finds where we provide tips, Instagram, caption ideas.
Police car revolving light, new episode alert, police car revolving light.
This week on Friday finds we’re exploring the latest in tech news with an accessibility view tune in for insights on subscriptions, scams, and privacy, and that is some ideas that it gave me and I cut some of those out because there was a lot in there.

Michael:
[10:27] And as you can see, this is how I can use chat GPT, and then I can go in and copy some of these use the clipboard manager and launch bar to be able to get back to them.
And hopefully that helps you a little bit with being able to leverage max GPT in your workflow and be more productive when it comes to producing.
This is Michael again with unmute presents available as a replay on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on Tuesdays, 10 AM Pacific time. And that’s 1pm Eastern.

Support Unmute Presents by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unmute-presents-on-acb-communi

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On this week’s Friday Finds episode, we’re covering a range of topics in the tech world. First, we discuss the recent changes to the popular app, Voice Dream Reader, and the impact of a new subscription model on users. Then, we dive into the flood of scam chat GPT apps on the Mac App Store and provide tips for staying safe while browsing. Finally, we explore the rumor of app sideloading coming to iPhones and the potential privacy and security implications for users. Join us as we delve into the latest in tech news with an accessibility view.
transcripts:

Transcript:

Hey everybody, so I am the bearer of the bad news. To begin with here, last week we talked

about Bookshare raising its membership fee to 80 bucks for those of us who pay out of

pocket and unfortunately this week we have another sad tale of something that we’re paying

for that we didn’t used to have to, for some people that is. So I was looking at the iPhone,

The VI phone, it’s called the VI phone list.

This is an email list, it’s a Google,

I think it’s a Google list that basically talks about

everything iOS for blind and visually impaired folks.

There is an app that we, many of us in the blind community

know and love and trust.

And it is called Voice Stream Reader.

This app has been around, oh my gosh,

I can’t even, I’m not exactly sure how long,

but it is a quality app.

I mean, most people that use this app just love it.

We are just, you know, the developer is awesome.

He really, really, if there’s a problem,

you could write to him and he would help you right away.

His name was Winston Chen.

His name is Winston Chen, I should say.

Great developer.

So it was sort of a shock to a lot of us

when we find out that there will now be,

that the app was sold to a group

that I’ve never heard of,

but the applause group it’s called.

I’ve never heard of that group,

but apparently they are taking over the development

and everything about Voice Dream Reader.

• Well, I’ve never even heard of that group either.

• A floss group?

• Yeah, do you know what else they make by jam, sir?

• I don’t.

Winston said that he liked the group

because he felt that they would continue developing the app,

that they would really do right by it.

So if you’ve already have the app,

you’re grandfathered in, so you wouldn’t have to pay.

I don’t know about upgrades or anything like that.

So it’s $59.99 is gonna be the annual price.

So that’s, you know, 60 bucks a year is something that,

it sort of shocked me a little bit.

• Yeah, that’s a lot of money, 60 bucks a year?

• Yeah.

• This is one of the higher, most expensive prices

I’ve seen.

And you know, the thing is,

once someone kind of goes for something like this

and tests the water, then everyone else sort of goes,

well, if they’re doing it, we can do it.

And the thing that makes me nervous

is that if everyone starts charging, you know,

50, 60, $7 a month for apps, you know,

you’re really gonna have to decide

what apps you absolutely need

and what apps you absolutely don’t need

because you can’t just get everything, you know?

• Yeah.

• Because people can’t afford,

if you were to add all that up,

just if you’re paying for three, four, five apps,

you know, 60 bucks a year for all of those

becomes a lot of money.

Demoss, did you use this app for anything?

Is this your tools you got in your toolbox?

• I have been a voice stream reader user

since it was released and I continue to use it today.

• Yeah.

• Voice String Reader is very, very heavily used

in the education market because of the text

to speech capabilities, whether it’s using a built-in voice

or someone to specialize voices.

It also will play audio books back,

handles daisy files, EPUBs, docs, plain text, et cetera.

Another wide usage of the application

and kind of where Winston was trying to position the app

in addition to helping those with blind and low vision

is people who are dyslexic are also very heavy users

the app because of the text highlighting that happens visually and some other features that

are in there visually for those people.

So very popular app.

I’ve been using it and recommending it to people for over 10 years now.

Now my question to you, if the price went up to 60 bucks a year, would you still use

it and pay that money to you?

Is it that important or would you find something else?

So let me get some clarification here because I may have missed it.

But as far as I know, the cost is just for the Mac application, correct?

Or are they also implementing this across the iOS app?

It seems to me that it is on the iOS side as well.

That’s why it was discussed on the iPhone list, which is basically for iOS issues.

Okay, because as it stands right now, or at least as it stood before this change was announced,

you only paid a subscription for the Mac app.

So if you already own the iOS app, that was free.

So for me, I don’t have to pay for the iOS access at all.

I do pay for the Mac app.

I pay a monthly subscription for the Mac app, primarily because I wanted to support Winston,

because again, I bought this app when it was on sale for $4.99 when it first released.

And this was over 10 years ago.

I have been getting routine use.

This is one of the apps that if it’s not on my phone,

like it doesn’t work right.

So giving him $4.99 a month, I think,

is what the subscription currently is on the Mac,

was no problem for me.

I don’t really use the Mac app all that often.

I may add things to it from there,

but I still primarily use it on my iPhone.

If this change is also going to affect current iOS users,

then that’s a little bit different of a story.

For me, when I pay 60 bucks a year for it, I would.

I mean, I don’t know if I would pay 60 bucks a year

just for the Mac app,

but if they’re doing a wholesale change where,

you know, the only way to access the Apple Cross platform

is to pay 60 bucks a year,

and I feel like I’m probably gonna end up paying 60 bucks a year

’cause I don’t know of another application

that is as fully featured as this one is.

Like, you know, you can read EPUBs in the Kindle app,

but there’s no audiobooks there.

It doesn’t do OCR, so that’s another feature

that’s built into Voice Stream Reader is OCR on iOS.

So if I drop in a scanned PDF that’s instantly OCR,

then I can read it.

And the handy thing for me with Voice Stream Reader

is putting a PDF or EPUB file in

and having it play back as though it’s an audiobook,

meaning I can lock my phone, put it in my pocket,

and proceed to do dishes or whatever it is.

Yeah, it just does what it does and does it very, very well.

Winston said– and I guess this is something

that we all have to get to grips with–

that the one-time pricing model is just not sustainable now.

If you want an app to grow with the times,

change with the different developments in the iOS,

and it’s a moving target, a constant moving target.

And I guess–

[BEEPING]

Lots obviously. Are we gonna get sideloading on our

iPhones?

App sideloading. This is the big rumor. It’s supposedly coming in 17 iOS 17 and

Apparently Apple’s gonna pick which markets

sideloading can occur in and they’re saying that Europe is probably gonna be first because

Europe has a lot of

anti-monopoly

That’s why I think they’re saying that what is it? The iPhone is gonna be have the

SBC because they’re saying, you know, it’s not fair that Apple has this monopoly on the app store

and so I think a lot of this is coming from Europe. I would agree with you there. I would say that

In the beginning this probably and this is I have no inside knowledge on this

I this is just my own opinion

But I think that if they’re going to do something like this

They’re gonna start only in Europe and they’re gonna see how it goes

I think this is something really that’s gonna be a major undertaking

I’d be really curious to see how are they gonna still

continue to make it safe?

How are they going to police it?

I mean, as we just got done talking about,

they’re having some issues

with their own app store currently.

So how are they gonna add a side loading app store,

keep that safe?

So I think that they’re gonna start off in Europe

and see how it goes there if they implement this,

if they’re actually gonna do this.

And we’ll have to see how that goes.

And we’ll see if they bring side loading

to other countries, US and alike.

It’ll be interesting, definitely.

I definitely want to know and see how they’re going to keep track of this,

police it and keep everyone safe or if it’s going to become completely out of

control. I don’t know.

Yeah. It worries me a lot because you know,

there are sort of advantages to the walled garden right now.

Yeah, definitely.

You can keep it, although we can sideload on the net.

I mean, not when they’re not trimming the weeds back into the walled garden,

not so much.

Yeah. Yeah. So I guess.

I mean, just like in the story,

we’re hearing problems with other apps that they’re getting in there and they’re

getting by the process.

• That’s a consistent problem with Apple.

The GPT apps are new, but the underlying issue of scam apps

or fake apps or pretend apps getting by app review

quite a bit is not a new story in the Apple App Store

for iOS’s community at least anyway.

Nobody pays much attention to the Mac App Store in general,

but you see a lot of this in the iOS App Store.

I mean, oftentimes you go into the App Store

and you search for an app and by name

and you’re getting different results at the top

versus what you’re looking for

and sometimes it’s even made to look like,

I mean, there’s a weather app or there was.

They probably have gotten rid of it now

that made the news.

But before Apple had their weather app on the iPad,

there was a weather app that was called Weather Space,

and this is what was in the actual text

of the app submission, right?

So it looked exactly like what Apple’s app would look like

before they had one for the iPad.

It looked just like the iPhone app

just designed for an iPad screen.

And they were charging like,

you know, I don’t remember how much.

It wasn’t a ridiculous amount of money,

but they were fooling people that this was the Apple app.

They were like, people would look at that and say,

“Oh, it looks like the one on my phone.

“I’m gonna get that one,” right?

Not realizing Apple’s not gonna charge you

in app subscription for weather.

It’s not a thing they do.

Yeah, and that’s what they’re saying about the open AI chat GPT.

When you look at some of these apps,

it looks like it’s coming from this company.

It’s from open AI.

And that’s where the problem is.

It’s not.

You know, I mean, you can find–

you don’t really– if you want an open AI account,

you go on their website and you make one.

And then you can do whatever you want with it at that point.

It’s your login credentials and stuff like that.

But you just have to be aware.

And I think Damasi would agree, because Damasi

does a security podcast, right?

And I think that Mac and iPhone people,

we tend to be a little bit more complacent

because we think we’re safer, right?

It’s Apple, you know, Apple doesn’t have virus programs,

Apple doesn’t have malware.

But when you think about everything that’s included

in your Apple account, your credit cards,

your, you know, your whole life, I mean.

• It comes down to a proportion gain, all right?

If you only have 10 people using Macs

and two people get a virus, well, people are gonna assume

that Macs are pretty impervious to viruses, right?

Whereas when you scale from 10 people using the Mac

to a million people and 200,000 get a virus,

that’s a much bigger number, so you start paying attention.

There’s always been malware on the Mac

or around the Mac ecosystem.

It’s just the smaller it was, the less of an issue it was,

especially compared to, now compared to general malware

in the Windows world versus the Mac,

it does seem like there’s nothing happening

over here on the Mac.

But there are things going on,

and there are people actively trying to attack the Mac

as well as there are people trying to defend the Mac.

I don’t think you need to run out

and install any virus on your Mac if you don’t do

silly things on the internet, but other than that,

With the sideloading conversation, though,

I kind of feel like this.

So I’ve heard some people say they’re worried about it.

I’ve heard some people say they don’t care.

I’ve heard people say this and that.

I want to kind of put a little perspective in here, though.

First off, even if sideloading comes to everybody

at some point on iOS, it doesn’t mean you have to do it.

People on Android have the capability

to sideload applications, but first you

have to go and enable the functionality.

And secondarily, you have to actually want to do it.

If you don’t want to do it, it doesn’t affect you.

It doesn’t weaken your security because the feature is there.

As far as the EU– so the EU has the DMA, the Digital Markets

Act.

And this is kind of where they’re hitting it at Apple

and Google a little bit too.

They’re going after Apple harder

because Apple has made it a little easier for them to say,

well, the only way people can get on your iPhone

or your iPad is to go through your store.

We don’t like this.

We need to open this up a little bit more,

make it more flexible.

The rumor currently is that, yeah,

they’re gonna turn this on in Europe first

because that law goes into effect in 2024.

So they’re gonna have to do something

if that’s what they tell them they have to do.

I don’t think that anybody’s told Apple they have to do this.

I think they’re trying to prepare for it

and get ahead of it.

As for security, the thing is,

I don’t know that Apple’s gonna take this approach

because they’re a very large company with a PR department,

so they may not say this the way that I’m gonna say this,

but if you decide to go turn on a feature in settings

to side load an app, that relieves me

of the responsibility of what you side load.

That’s not my problem, right?

I don’t mean that to be a jerk about it,

but the facts are, if I have a store,

if I’m running Apple and I have an app store,

and you can go to the app store and download an app,

or you choose, you make a choice,

and I’m not forcing you, nobody tells you,

in order to get Apple Music, you gotta go sideload it, right?

Just about anything you want is gonna be an app store.

If you want to sideload an app,

that is your responsibility.

So say with the Mac, right?

I can choose to go through the Mac app store.

I can go to a trusted third-party developer

that has their app notarized and signed and all of that,

so it’ll just run.

Or I can go outside of those miles

and download somebody’s random code off of GitHub

and force it to run on my computer.

At that point, I have bypassed the protections

that were in place for me.

So that is completely my responsibility.

I think the way that they handle general security

for everybody there is kind of the same way

have done it on the Mac, which is there will be the iOS app store, as there always has

been. There will be a mechanism, maybe not functionally exactly the same, but basically

what we have on the Mac with app notarization and app signing. So, my Mac currently, if

I download, if I go to Rogan Meebuh’s website or if I go to Texas Mandarin, I download their

app from their website because they’re not an app store at all. I have no problems running

their software because one, it’s been signed with their developer certificate and two,

Apple has the notarization, which is, you know, developers send their third-party app

to Apple, Apple scans it for malware and malicious things and if it passes their tests, they

sign off on it and give it an Apple signature as well.

So now you have the developer account certificate and you have Apple certificate saying, “Yes,

we have trusted and verified this app.”

It runs fine on your stuff.

I think that’s the way they’ll handle it on iOS because it seems to me they already have

that mechanism in place with Gatekeeper on the Mac.

Like just use that same protocol there to get that to work for people.

And again, just as on the Mac, you have the ability to stay just in the App Store and

never download or run anything that’s not from the App Store if that’s what you choose

to do.

I feel that it’s gonna be the way to handle it on iOS

for people now.

If you go out there and download somebody’s random code

and put it on your iPhone,

it’s just your risk, right?

You did that.

• Yeah, especially now because the Apple ecosystem now

is I mean, people have savings accounts, right?

They have basically banking.

I mean, this is what the malware creators

and virus creators now, they just want money.

They used to be able to–

• Yeah, but I wouldn’t panic so much

about that part of it though,

because the thing is the sandboxing rules on iOS

still are gonna be in effect.

So just because even if I go out and say download app from a third party again

Assuming nobody does anything silly with a law that forces Apple to do something less secure

Apple’s approach is gonna be okay. You can go download app if it’s notarized and signed it

I have no problem running, but it still will have to adhere to the same sandboxing

You know rules that apply. I mean we switch from the Mac all the time, right? I can go download

transmit which is a

FTP client right doesn’t matter what that does but I download the app

I open it up and before I can use this app

I have to give it certain permissions because that is the structure Apple has put in place on the Mac to help protect me

Oh this app would like to access files in your document folder. Okay. Well, maybe I don’t want to give you a document folder access

So I say no, right? So it’s not the fact that

Sight-loading instantly means the end of the world at the end of your security

My biggest concern with it really is that we’re gonna see a lot of these larger companies start to pull their apps out of the

App store because they will have a little bit more flexibility in what they can do when it comes to tracking your data

tracking you and

You know amortizing your usage of their app to make money. So Facebook is when it comes to mind

I’m not picking on Facebook particularly but Facebook likes to gather scrape all the data they possibly can so my concern is that we’re gonna see people

Like meta pull the Facebook app out of the App Store pull Instagram out of the App Store

So that they can actually run the code that they typically run on their website or that they would run on Android

It gives them a lot more data about you as a user

Apple doesn’t let a lot of that stuff through the store for them

So they step outside of that now they they’re not up under those restrictions

I’m more concerned about people’s privacy with the apps that they choose to use because

a lot of these bigger companies may move out of the store.

As opposed to, I am about somebody getting a side-loaded application that goes in and

empties their Apple savings account or spins up and gets their Apple credit card.

Because all of that stuff is still secured the same way it was.

You’re not going to be able to go through my Apple wallet and yank all my cards out

of my Apple wallet and get that information because it’s encrypted in a way that nothing

on the system actually gets to read that data.

Same with your fingerprint or face ID information.

It’s not readable by any part of Apple’s system,

including Apple, ’cause it’s encrypted.

All you get back when you do Face ID, for example,

is here’s the face I just saw is what the camera says,

and on the encrypted space side of the phone

where you’re at that information store,

it says, “Yep, that matches what I have.”

Or, “Nope, it doesn’t match what I have.

“Don’t let ’em in.”

So I’m not concerned so much about the security

as I am about people’s general privacy.

Because these bigger apps will move out of the store,

because look, if Facebook moves out of the store,

people will go get Facebook.

If, say, a Marco Arment decides

he’s gonna take overcast out of the store,

well, who’s gonna care?

I’ll probably get it, but most people are like,

“Psh, man, you know, I’ll just shoot out the podcast app.”

But Instagram, Facebook, Twitter,

you know, if they move out of the store,

people will have to start sideloading,

and that’s when I get more concerned about their privacy.

• All right, everyone, so thanks very much

for checking out our Friday finds,

and if you have questions, comments, or anything else,

you can always reach us at feedback@unmute.show,

and I wanna thank Damasi for joining us today.

Thanks, Damasi.

• Thank you.

• And Lynn, thank you.

• For your assistance.

Sir, it’s been fun.

• And we’ll see you next time.

[music]

[Music fades]

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Show Notes

Here are the Tech headlines for April 27, 2023

• Google Authenticator not end to end encrypted
• Microsoft acquisition of Activision and Blizzard Entertainment blocked by UK Regulators
• Report shows there may be three new Desktop Macs at WWDC 2023
• USB-C Apple EarPods
• Microsoft Loop now in beta for iOS and Android
• Google I/O for 2023 approaching
• Multiple phones for one WhatsApp Account
• iACast+ Premium content now on the iACast Network

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In this episode of Unmute Presents, we’re joined by tech expert Damashe, who shares valuable insights on USB security. With the convenience of charging our devices in public places, it’s easy to fall into the trap of plugging and playing without considering the potential security risks. Damashe breaks down the dangers of using public USB ports and provides practical tips for staying safe while charging on-the-go. Tune in to this informative episode and learn how to protect your devices and personal information from potential threats.

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You can tune into this call live every Tuesday.

Visit acb.community to learn more about what is up coming.

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In this episode, we explore the powerful Mac app called Mac Whisper, which allows you to transcribe audio files into text with ease. Our host Damashe takes you through the application interface and demonstrates how to use it to transcribe a YouTube video into text using the Tiny model.

You’ll learn about the different models available in Mac Whisper, how to select the right one for your needs, and how to use the app to transcribe audio files from your computer or record app audio.

Whether you’re a content creator, a journalist, or simply someone who needs to transcribe audio files on a regular basis, Mac Whisper is an essential tool that can save you time and effort. So tune in to learn more about this amazing app and start transcribing like a pro!

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[MUSIC]

>> Hey, all. Marty here. Today,

we’re coming at you with our Friday finds.

With me, I’ve got Michael.

Say hello, Michael.

>> Hello, Michael.

>> Lynn, say hello, Lynn.

>> Hello, everybody.

>> Lynn, why don’t you kick us off with our first story?

>> Sure. Well, I’ll just quickly introduce myself.

I’m Lynn Schneider, and you may know me as

Kane Prince around the Internet.

And I am a right now sort of an intern, I guess you could say.

I’m interested in branching out

and becoming a content producer.

And I decided to ask the best teachers that I could find.

• We’ll do our best to learn to use something.

• And so I’m really excited.

I love technology.

You guys probably know me.

I do the ACB crafters on Fridays.

I’m involved in lots of different,

I’m totally blind from birth from anaphylmia.

I was born with that eyes. Yeah.

I’m really excited to be here

and to share some news stories with everyone.

My first news story of the week has to do with

the freestyle libre readers

that many people use for diabetic control,

blood sugar control monitoring.

Why don’t you tell everyone who may not know what a freestyle librarian is exactly just so they understand what it is?

So these readers actually help people

Monitor their blood sugars

without having to stick themselves with needles all the time and

Many people are doing this that they will sync up with your phone

so that you can have access to your readings and

It will tell you if you need insulin or

Actually, I think that they they even you can even get insulin

Injectables that they will actually do the injection for you

So you don’t have to poke yourself with a needle.

So the new technology, the old technology actually,

what people used to have to do if they didn’t have these,

you know, digital phone apps was they would have to take

either a little needle, poke themselves,

and then they’d have to use a little strip,

put that in another machine,

they would have to get a little drip of the blood

and then suck that into the little strip

which goes in the machine and tells you

what your glucose level or what your sugar level is,

which is glucose at that exact moment.

And it would reach you on the screen,

whatever the number is.

And some of them are accessible and some of them are not.

And the ones that are accessible will speak

the what’s on the screen, your glucose number

or sugar number at that moment out loud to you.

Now the new technology, which what Lynn is talking about is you get this little tiny

sticker which you stick on and it goes under your skin just enough so that it can check

your blood and you don’t change it.

It sits there constantly.

And then what happens is you have an app on your phone, which you open up and then when

you hit the app, it automatically draws your blood sugar for you and then gives you the

reading on your phone on the app and then it will keep track of all that information

so that the next time you go to the doctor they can see what your trends are and you

can also obviously look and see what your trends are and see if your blood sugars are

high low and different whatever the case may be.

So with all of that being said so Lynn now what is the problem that they’re running into

these machines?

Well, basically what’s happening is that the lithium ion batteries in the readers, some

users are reporting that they’re swelling and that they’re overheating and sparking.

Wow, really?

Okay.

In rare cases, they’re even catching fire.

So in response, the manufacturer has, which is the freestyle libre, the manufacturer has

is advise people to do a few things.

Basically, they want you to use the adapter that it comes with.

Because what’s happening,

they say is that people are not using

the adapters with the right power wattage.

>> So this is specifically the power adapter, is that correct?

>> Right.

>> So people are using

different power adapters that didn’t come with the machine

and that’s causing the machine to do wacky things, correct?

• Right, right, that’s right.

• And so they’re fixed to this is use the power adapter

we send you in the box and don’t use any other one.

• Right, and they do have some,

there’s like four, they say there’s like

tons of these devices out there.

You can still use them, but there is a recall.

So you should just be aware that there is a recall out there

and you just want to contact the manufacturer.

• Visit freestylebattery.com.

• Marty and I were discussing this yesterday.

We’re talking about the Bookshare price increase.

And if you’re a Bookshare member who like me pays

for their own Bookshare membership,

you know that Bookshare membership was always $50.

So let’s give them a primer on what Bookshare is exactly,

’cause I guarantee you a lot of people are gonna be,

well, wait, isn’t Bard Bookshare or isn’t Bookshare Bard?

So let’s give them a little primer on what Bookshare is.

• Right, yeah, that’s good.

And so there are lots of ways

that blind people can get books, of course.

The traditional NLS National Library Service,

NLS tends to sort of cater to

The people that like to read for relaxation, and that’s fine.

>> Casual readers.

>> Of course, you have to have a qualifying print disability.

The thing that separates Bookshare from NLS is that

Bookshare tends to have more academic content.

It tends to have more,

for people who like me are into lifelong learning,

students use it, they get their textbooks that way.

And, you know, students get Bookshare for free.

The problem is it caters mostly to students, but adults like me really like it because

I’m a lifelong learner.

I like to have access to academic things.

And unfortunately, they are increasing their annual fee from $50 to $80.

It’s actually $79.99 or some crazy thing like that.

So basically $80.

So that’s a pretty steep increase, I think, for people who pay for their own membership

like me because I’m not a student, so I don’t get a free membership.

And I guess this is just my little mini rant.

I feel that for people like me, in the email they sent to all the members, they say that

they feel like the people in richer countries should be able to afford the price increase.

And of course, I’m considered being in a high income country.

I am not a high income person.

I can guarantee you that.

certainly everybody is suffering from the effects of inflation.

>> Yeah, definitely.

>> We know that every prices of everything are increasing.

They’ve said that they’ve not increased their prices

despite the fact that their costs are going up.

My little mini rant here is to say that many people like me who buy their own,

For example, I bought my own Mantis.

I think people might look at me and say,

“Oh, well, you have the money.”

But it was a hardship for me to do that.

>> What is the Mantis exactly, just so people know?

>> It’s a Braille display.

So it allows me to read my screens in Braille and read books in Braille.

It’s just a wonderful device that I hook up to my phone or my Mac,

and it allows me to have braille output.

And the reason that I wanted that

is because I do a lot of volunteer work.

And unfortunately, volunteer work is not considered work.

So I’m not a student–

• No, it’s considered work, but for free,

you don’t get paid.

• Yeah, exactly.

By the way, this is National Volunteer Week,

so this, you know, as an aside.

• I get a 30% price increase,

which is what it comes down to is drastic.

It’s shocking to anyone.

But the other thing that I consider full transparency, I do not currently

pay for bookshare, so I will be open about that, but is the value you get

from bookshare still worth $6 a month?

And when you break it down monthly, it’s like, oh, that’s for all the books

that I get, that’s not a lot, but when you go and take the pricing, almost

double it, it’s sticker shock to people.

It is.

In fact, I was almost wondering, cause I take allergy medicine and it makes

me have really weird dreams. And it was at night when I saw this,

I’m like, I just see that up, it’s going to increase 30 bucks.

So I think that’s interesting about this too, is definitely

like I agree with Michael, it’s going to be sticker shock when

you first hear how much the increase is. But even at the new

number, like if you’re paying, you said what is it 80 now,

Lynn? Is that what you said it was?

It’s going to be 80. Yeah, right. So next time it comes up. Yeah.

Even if you’re at $80 a year, if you were to go to a bookstore and you were to buy

Five books that’s going to cost you on the average $20 a book

And that’s going to be way more

Than $80 a year if you were to go and buy books from the bookstore

You know at right full pop so on one hand. Yes, it seems to

be like a very expensive pay raise or monthly fee raise to the membership. But you could go on there

and you could download 10 books a day, 15 books a day if you want. I mean, you can’t go into any

bookstore and down or purchase and let us see you have tons and tons of money, you know, 15,

20 books a day. There’s just no way. It would be far, far, far more expensive.

Right. So, and I think that there’s this also this mythology out there that blind people don’t want to pay for anything.

And that is in my case, that is certainly not true. I do not mind paying for things. I don’t expect to be given everything for free.

Now, they do say that if you find that it’s a hardship, you can go on the website and ask for a

a discount.

So if you, I mean, they are allowing that, but I just wonder what happened to me, the

cost go up so much.

And I am not sure how many of us pay for our own bookshare because so many people get it

paid for some states, even I think California actually is one of the states where you can

get it the membership free.

So there are, I guess they’re kind of figuring that it won’t impact a lot of people.

But unfortunately, it does impact me and because…

And you know if it impacts you, it’s going to impact other people.

I am sorry to report that if you guys get your discs by mail, well, you’re going to

have to find another way to get your discs sent to you by mail because Netflix is going

to end that program. And the interesting thing is that I didn’t really, I didn’t even know

that Netflix still sent out stuff by mail. I mean, I know that that’s how they started,

but I had no idea that they were still doing it. And the funny part about it is I saw the

story on AOL.com. I was going through my Google news and I saw it there and I saw that it was,

the story was carried on in several outlets, but one of them was AOL and I’m like,

“Gosh, I didn’t even know AOL still existed.”

I know. That’s pretty weird, actually.

Yeah, that was weird. I felt like I was going through a time warp or something.

But yeah, so that’s, they say that people, the people that get their DVDs by mail, they like it

because some of them don’t have really good internets, you know, internet access. I know,

it’s interesting as being on the Zoom calls, how many people just really don’t have good internet.

You know, they’re always breaking up.

It actually does. There’s a few things here. And one is, Les, we were just talking about in the last story, you know, there’s inflation, right? So you look at a digital product opposed to a physical product, right? So a digital product, they put it up there. It’s endless. It’s never going to run out. It’s always there. People can stream it, stream it, stream it. You know, there’s no, there’s no love loss there, you know?

You know, right. Sorry about the physical product. What happens with the physical product? Someone has to, you know, pick the DVDs they want.

Then you have to have people going around and packaging up those DVDs, putting them in the mail, sending them to the people.

And then the people watch the DVDs and they got to turn around and they got to send them back.

And a lot of times I think when you send it back, Netflix was eating the cost of the postage both ways.

Right. Exactly.

So when you look at the money that they’re spending on doing just the shipping alone

and paying people to pull the DVDs and put them back when they come back in, and how

many people really are watching DVDs at this point?

I mean, if you go to a store, like an electronic store, it’s even hard to find a DVD player

anymore, you know?

I don’t own one.

I think I have one on an old laptop somewhere in the house,

and I think my mom has an older TV

that has a DVD player on it.

But what they said was that people still like it

because they say that some films,

like some esoteric sort of unusual films,

they are not allowed to be streamed

for copyright reasons.

And so they could–

You go back to when Netflix started

and their whole business model was, you know,

sending out DVDs to people,

they’d watch them send it back, get more, right?

But as a couple of years into the business,

they decided to start doing a small feature

where some TV shows or some movies

would be available for streaming, right?

And they were kind of the first ones

to really kind of start that.

And in the beginning, it went well, people liked it,

and then they were able to add more and more

to the choices of things that you could stream

because nobody else was doing it.

And as years went on, all of these companies went,

well, wait, why are we giving all our content away?

We can have our own platform.

And then it started all of these companies popping up

with their own platforms and their own streaming services.

So you lose a lot of those shows due to licensing and all this other stuff on Netflix.

So I thought it was funny the other day they were saying, I was looking at the article and it was talking about how one of the founders, there were two founders and one of them wanted to test whether he could send a DVD through the post office.

So what he did is he got a Patsy Cline.

It’s DVD and send it to his friend. I’m like some friend like

Okay, just send me a Patsy Cline DVD

But um, yeah, that was interesting and then

Of course, that’s how they sort of were able to beat blockbuster because people liked

The idea of getting these movies in their mailbox and stuff like that

It was kind of it was interesting and new and of course now it was convenient

I mean, what if you work on Wednesday and you go,

“I’m going to be at home with the kids,”

or, “We’ll have a date night at home,” or whatever it is.

You can order your DVDs, they’re there,

and you don’t even have to go anywhere or do anything.

They just show up in your mailbox and there you go.

Now I will say with them discontinuing the DVD service,

which is not something companies usually do,

but they’re giving you an actual bonus.

And the bonus is they’re not going to change the price

of anyone’s plan,

but they’re going to bump up the quality of the video

that you’re gonna be able to stream at no extra charge.

I think it’s a little bit of a higher quality video.

It’s not huge.

And this could be good or bad.

It may not make a huge difference.

I feel like the only way it’s gonna make a huge difference

is if you’re one of those who still has a giant TV

in your living room and you wanna watch movies that way.

But majority of people are watching movies

like on their phone or their iPad.

And really in those scenarios, I’m not sure that that high quality video is going to make that much of a difference really.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I mean, it’s sort of an end of an era, you know.

Right.

Now, with all that being said, there’s another story coming out of Netflix and Lynn, what’s that?

Well, apparently they are going to crack down on you guys who are sharing your password.

Right.

So what this means is, let’s say I have an account and I pay and I go, “Hey, Lynn, here’s my username and password.”

And, “Hey, Michael, here’s my username and password. You guys can log on and watch whatever you want, whenever you want. I don’t care.”

Or let’s say you’re a parent and you’ve got kids, right? And you don’t want to pay multiple accounts.

You give your kids the username and password and say, “Get on there and watch whatever you want.”

You know, you guys can just use my credentials to get in there.

Well, they’re cracking down on that because they don’t want to have five people using

one account.

That’s not the point.

They want to have everyone paying for an account or get a family plan or something like that.

So, I’m just wondering, do they have family plans?

I mean, do they have things where you could conceivably?

I believe that they do have something.

I’m not exactly sure what the price structure is or exactly how it works, but I’m pretty

sure that there is a way and I think it’s more money where you can go in and you can

choose a family plan, which would be more expensive than a one person plan or a single

user. And then you have up to, you know, five accounts that you can assign to people. So,

you know, you can assign, you know, account to you and then your three kids can have their

own and your husband can have one or whatever the case is. Right?

Right.

And I’m not sure how their pricing structure works on that.

It would be a kind of a similar thing to other companies

that do the same thing.

Like for example, both Spotify and Apple Music,

they have what’s called a family plan.

And so for example, with Spotify, right?

You can either pay a flat rate for a single user

and then you can have unlimited usage for that flat rate

to listen to as much music as you want.

If you have family and you want to have all your family, kids, whatever,

you pay a little bit more money and then you get to sign up to five

accounts total. I want to say, I think it’s five for Spotify.

So then each kid would get their own login and then they have their own

library, their own, all the things, right?

And that’s not sharing with the whole family.

Only you see your individual plan and everybody else only sees their individual

So that’s how it works for Spotify.

I believe Apple Music is pretty much a very similar way.

And I’m not sure how Netflix is doing it,

but I think they do have something similar.

And I think that’s everything for this week.

Yeah, I think so.

And I really want to thank everybody for tuning in.

And it’s good to be here.

I’ve got awesome teachers and that’s a good thing.

Good thing for me and I hope to see you guys again in another podcast pretty soon.

Sorry about that.

Yeah.

All right.

Thanks so much Lynn for being here.

We so appreciate having you.

And with that being said, if you guys have any comments, feedback, we’re going to try

and do this news thing on Fridays.

So if you have any ideas, if you have a story you want to hear, or if you have any comments

or anything like that, feel free to email us at feedback@unmute.show.

And we hope you guys have a great weekend.

Michael, say goodbye.

Goodbye.

And Lynn, thank you very much and say goodbye.

Goodbye, everyone.

Have a great week.

And I’m Marty.

Yep.

And I’m Marty, and we’ll see you guys next time.

Awesome.

[MUSIC]

(music fades)

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[MUSIC]

>> Hey all, Marty here and we are back with another Unmead episode.

Today, we’re going to be talking all about Chat GPT.

With me today, I’ve got Michael.

Say hello, Michael.

>> Hello.

>> I also have Lynn with us today and say hello, Lynn.

>> Hello, everybody.

>> Why don’t we start this out with what exactly

is chat GPT for those who don’t know.

So Michael, why don’t you kick us off?

• Yeah, so I will share it the best way

that it’s been explained to me

and then hand it over to Lynn

to fill in anything she wants to with it.

The best way that chat GPT or the technology

that is text generation is explained to me

is it is auto-correct on steroids.

Instead of just tapping that middle word

in the middle three words that are above your keyboard,

if you didn’t know if you start typing and you leave it on

above your keyboard on iOS and Android,

three words show up that you can tap to auto fill

and your phone can auto guess what the next word’s gonna be.

Well, this is that on steroids because A,

the prediction of the next word actually makes sense

based on the context of the information

that you prompt the AI with,

and B, it then will fill it in

and automatically form sentences

because it’s aware of proper English grammar,

and conscious of it a lot more than I am.

And that’s the best way that I have learned

to explain what chat GPT is.

What about you, Lynn?

• All right, so to me, chat GPT is a brain helper.

It’s a thought helper, it’s a creativity helper.

It thinks very fast.

We don’t like to typically say that AI thinks,

but for the purposes of understanding what it is,

have you ever sort of stopped and think,

gosh, if I could just tell this computer what I want,

if I could just tell this word processor what I want to say

and then have it say it for me.

• Work processor, write me a paper.

• Exactly, exactly.

• Work processor, write me a paper on,

insert subject here.

>> Yes. When we think about AI, artificial intelligence,

basically what we’re talking about is a tool that helps us.

I like to say, some people would say that it takes over our thinking.

In my opinion, from my use of it,

it helps my creativity, it boosts it.

It helps me to think in different ways.

A lot of times, I will ask it a question,

and it will come back with an answer,

and it was like, “Wow, I didn’t even think that.

I wasn’t even thinking from that angle.”

So it really does help,

I think, to broaden your horizons when you’re doing your work.

One time, I had to write a customer service letter,

and I was really angry,

and I wrote all this stuff into the chat box.

Then I asked GPT to write a professional-sounding letter,

and it came back with a letter that would be written by a person that wasn’t crazy angry.

[LAUGHTER]

It did a beautiful, beautiful job of coming back,

and here is a letter that you could actually send to a customer service.

>> There’s a lot of processes that you can use for chat GPT.

I mean, really anything, right?

I mean, you can use it for a paper

you may be writing on a certain topic.

You can maybe do it on a marketing project you’re doing

if you’re trying to market something.

I mean, there’s so many different use cases for it.

It’s endless.

So Lynn, what would be like a workflow?

You would start out with some kind of an idea,

you’re writing something.

How would you do your workflow?

You would start out and then go from there.

I think what’s really important and Michael and I are going to probably emphasize this

over and over is something called prompting.

And prompting is the philosophical question, what’s more important?

Having the right answers or asking the right questions?

And when it comes to AI, when it comes to chat GPT and others like it, the important

thing is how you ask the question and you will get better as you use the system.

And so, for example, when I was doing a presentation for bits, which was, I messed up because I

was just had just gotten a braille display and I wasn’t sure what the heck I was doing,

but I had asked it to write a public service announcement about why or how people should

behave around guide dogs. And it wrote basically an introduction, and several bullet points

explaining why you should do this, that, or the other thing, and then an ending. So it

was like, it did that in five seconds. Something that might have taken me a long, long time

to do, especially since I don’t have a guide dog and I really don’t really know a whole

lot about guide dogs, but it cuts the crap. I mean, I like to say that, but it really

gets to the point of what you’re trying to do.

And let’s take a step back for one second. Maybe Michael, you want to explain what prompting

is.

Yeah, so it’s interesting. I’ve fallen into the trap of having a conversation with the

AI when I actually just wanted to go experiment.

So firstly, if you are like, I’ve heard of this, you know, at its time,

I want to go play with this after I hear this podcast from Unmute present.

Uh, I really understand it a little more.

Just, just be aware that you might suck a little bit more of your

time than you expect to.

Um, so be conscious of that.

So a prompt is your information that you share with the AI itself.

For example, I sent a prompt and said, who is Michael Babcock?

And that prompt, my question to it is, is what it came back with a response of.

And it responded and told me as an AI language model, I’m unable to search

the web to tell you who Michael Babcock is.

I followed up with that and said, you are a AI assistant to Michael Babcock,

a founder of a company called PayOnMedia LLC.

We publish podcasts and help small business owners share their voice with the world.

And then I said, ask me some questions about, or ask me some questions that I can answer

to help you better assist me.

And then I hit enter and it asked me, it started asking me questions.

So now I’m going to keep this specific chat open and answer these questions and then

start asking the AI model itself for assistance that I might need.

For example, going back to what Lynn was talking about, can you provide me a

response to a customer service email?

The customer is upset because the product was not provided to them in a timely

manner, explain to the customer that we are sympathetic with the problems that

the customer is having with delivery.

And we are going to resolve their issue to the best of our ability.

Here’s the tracking number and provide them with this USPS tracking number and,

and giving them that information.

That’s a lot of rambly information that the customer is going to be like,

that’s not professional, but Chat GPT wrote a professional email.

And the only way that I have found to be able to really modify the way that the

email comes out, especially the tone, that’s important.

And that’s what will help you stand out from what other people are doing with

Chat GPT is that customer service email.

I said that I said, write me a customer service email.

I started that prompt with write me a customer service email in a polite, but

professional and casual tone, and then gave it the information

that I needed to convey in that email. And that’s how it came

up with the email that I was happy with. And then the last

thing, and then I’ll stop talking and hand it to Marty

Orlin is, I, I think this is a way you can get into building

some interesting things. And when you start, I’ve been adamant

about telling people to start from the end and work backwards.

When you start from the end and work backwards with automation,

and you run into a place where you need a computer program

to automatically rename a file.

So that way it can match a certain file type.

So you can move that file.

Think about how open AI can help you.

And I hear, and I know how I’m gonna transition this,

that chat GPT 4 is better with writing code

and stuff like that.

So Lynn, can you, what is chat GPT 3.5 and 4?

Right, 3.5 is the, it’s sort of an incremental development between 3 and 4.

Right now, 4 is, I guess they consider it under training or that they want to make sure

that it’s good enough before they, I guess, release it to the general public.

I have access to it because I have GPT Plus, which I pay $20 a month for, but I am addicted.

So is chat GPT 4, is that only behind a paywall and everyone else gets 3.5 or how would someone

want to utilize 4 opposed to 3.5 if that’s the newer out of the current technologies

that are out there?

This is a good question and if you don’t have a paid account, I’m not sure.

There’s a combo box on mine because I have GPT Plus and it lets me choose which model

I want to use.

3.5 is only available.

You have 3.5 and 3.5 Turbo for the free customers.

Some paid customers have access to four and some people can get access to four on the

API.

So if you’re using an app that I can talk more about in the near future, then you can

leverage that.

And if you want to try the difference in chat GPT 3.5 and four, and you don’t want to pay

anything, Bing is using a version of chat GPT four.

So if you ask the same question to both chat GPT and Bing, you can see the difference in

responses. So we should explain to people here, you know, how this works because you have regular

chat GPT in a web browser, you have other apps that you can install on your computer, you have

a big other technology companies such as Google and Microsoft that are implementing it into their

software. And I think with all the headlines, people are going what you know, it’s a little bit

kind of hard to follow. So we have it in the browser. So you could go to chat GPT, and you

could just use it strictly in the browser. And then we have, for example, if you’re a Mac user,

you can use what’s called the Mac GPT. And Michael, you want to give a little primer on that?

Do I ever? So Lynn, are you on the Mac? I forget you’re on the Mac, right?

I am. Yes.

Yes.

Yes. So I’m using Mac GPT. This does require a little bit more setup, but you had to go get

API key and there’s some good directions that we can point people to on how to

build a to get this and it’s very accessible to do but you put that API

key in and then you have an app that runs on your Mac and you open it up and

there’s a prompt right there a edit field that you can type it and you hit

enter and then if you VO left arrow once there’s a list there that you can

interact with and go and see the response that chat GPT gave you. Pass the

response is a copy button. So you can copy the response from

chat GPT, which is amazing. And what’s even more awesome about

this is if you are using chat GPT for I believe you can use GPT

for with the Mac app, you’ll have to try it by following the

sign in process. But if I’m in a tool like drafts or text edit,

and I type slash GPT space and then my prompt followed by shift

enter, GPT will fill in the rest of, like it fills in the answer of the prompt right there.

So I don’t even have to pop you and paste it does inline GPT filling. And then I go delete

the prompt at the top. By default, the keystroke is plus GPT space. And so that’s Mac GPT in a

nutshell. And it is it’s awesome. Right. And they do have APIs, right for developers. And there was

was a little shortcut called Super Siri. You would say Super Siri and it would actually

give you a chat GPT prompt. So it’s pretty awesome.

That’s pretty cool. In the same sense, there was I believe Federico Petici from App Stories

had a shortcut that he built that he put out. Michael, I think you played with that a little

bit, right?

Not a little bit. I’m actually racking up a slight bill on my API usage. I’m at 27 cents right now.

Better be careful. It might break the bank. Yeah, I use SGPT quite regularly. That’s the article

I recommend people going to to follow to learn how to set up your API key. So you invoke Siri,

you say SGPT. It says, “What would you like to ask GPT?” And it gives you a hint of some ideas.

What’s really nice is if you give it access to your clipboard and stuff, for example,

you can copy a URL on your clipboard on the Mac, send it to SGPT and ask it for a summary

of the article, which can be really helpful. And then SGPT also has the ability to access your

calendar. So if you tell it, analyze my calendar and tell me how many meetings I have, it can

process that information too. Okay. I could talk a little bit about Google Bard. Okay.

>> If you want. So, Bard has just opened,

Google has just opened up their AI to the public,

and it’s in beta.

I am on a list, David Goldfield’s list.

I don’t know if anybody knows about his list,

but it’s for the blind,

but he does a lot of stuff with AI on there.

It turned out that Google has released it.

It’s, if you guys hear something, something about Bard,

just don’t get confused.

It’s not the same thing as the,

as the library service reading material.

• I heard they’re actually gonna be changing the name

actually.

• Okay, I hope so.

Cause it’s kinda, you know.

• It’s confusing.

• Chat GPT is kind of a yucky name too.

Let’s get a better name guys, you know,

type it in and see what it says.

The problem that Google’s gonna have is that,

you know, Google sort of thrives,

lives and dies by advertising.

So right now it’s free.

Right now there’s no advertising in it.

But most of the reviews that I’ve seen,

the tech reviews say that it really has some work to be done.

What I think is unfortunate about BARD is that with chat GPT,

when it gives you an output of a prompt that you give it,

it will have a thumbs up and a thumbs down.

But if you hit thumbs up,

it’s going to ask you what you liked about it.

You hit thumbs down, it’s going to say, “What happened?

Why didn’t this go right?”

Unfortunately, on a board,

you just get a thumbs up and thumbs down.

I wish they would have a prompt that says,

“Here’s the problem with this output.”

I asked about French fries and I got something else.

>> Onion rings.

>> Onion rings, yeah. So I think that having that response,

being able to tell the model and

the NChat GPT or OpenAI that this prompts,

this didn’t work, something,

it gave me an answer that was not right.

In this way, I think people can train it more because they can really give more feedback

about the answers that it gets.

One thing that I have a lot of fun doing with AI is writing stories.

If you are somebody who is creative, you can type in, you’d say, “Write me a creepy story

about a vacuum cleaner.”

It will write you a creepy story about it later.

Some of them are really fun, but it can be just fun just doing that.

Say you have two sides of a political debate, you can ask it to be one side and ask you

questions.

So you’re kind of having a debate with it and it’s presenting the side that you want.

And then you can come back with your own arguments.

So it’s sort of, it is interactive.

It’s very interactive.

I have used it for therapy.

• Wow.

• You know, I–

• Yeah, I would have never even thought about doing that.

• Sure, yeah, I’ve used it.

Like, I am so mad at my sister because da da da da da.

Now, obviously you don’t wanna give it sensitive info, right?

You want to sort of be aware and also it gets its facts wrong. They all do. So if you know

I wouldn’t like use it to do an appendectomy on somebody like

You want to make sure I’m right now it does, you know, they even give you a warning that says that it may give

Factually inaccurate info so I

I would say if you’re going to use it to do your graduate thesis or whatever,

you might want to really check your facts.

Yeah. So Michael, do you know how it’s going to be implemented with Microsoft and how they’re

going to be using it?

No, but it’s my understanding that it’s going to be a pretty streamlined system in Microsoft.

And I explained how inline on the Mac at least works. So I could see them doing something similar

or just having a keystroke that you press that you prompt it. And then it could put

put that information into word.

The possibilities are limitless with this technology.

I wanna emphasize a couple of things that Lynn said.

One is, check your facts,

check the information before you just run with it.

I think that’s something that was reiterated to me

when I learned about Spouse Check when I was younger.

Listen to what it says, the computer’s not always right.

And I think that’s important.

And then secondly, it can definitely be a good

mental support tool. Obviously, seek professional assistance if

you need if you need it, but it can’t hurt to ask some of these

questions and get information. Well, let me rephrase that. It

can’t hurt dependent on the the way you use the information

Marty, you mentioned earlier, I couldn’t imagine an angry GPT.

I heard about the other day called a chatbot called chaos GPT.

that’s prompted with the sole intention of creating a plan to destroy humanity.

So like anything, that sounds great to me.

That’s just crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But like anything, a butter knife can be used to spread butter on toast or

stab into someone’s chest.

Yeah.

All about how you use your tools.

So another way that chat GPT is being implemented is into an app, for

example, called Be My Eyes.

And what Be My Eyes is, is that if you need assistance

and you’re someone who’s visually impaired or blind,

it opens up an app on your phone,

somebody on the other end connects with you,

they can utilize your camera on your phone

and you point it at whatever it is you’re looking for

and they can tell you on the other end what exactly it is.

So for example, if you’re in the grocery store

and you’re looking for the chicken noodle soup,

you’re on the aisle, there’s a hundred cans of soup up there

and you can’t figure out which one,

You can get your phone out, you can connect on the app.

Somebody will come on and use your camera and tell you,

“Oh, that one right there, that’s the chicken noodle soup.”

And they can tell you which is the name brand.

And so you know exactly what you’re getting.

So what Chat GPT is doing and what the app company is doing

is they’re gonna implement this technology into the app.

And so what that means is this technology is going to be able

to do the same thing on its own using the technology

without having an actual human come on the line.

Now, if you do have a failure with the technology,

you still can ask it to connect to a human,

but this is gonna be really cool to see

how as this goes along, how smart it gets,

how accurate it will be and all of those things.

So I’m kind of excited to try that technology out

and see how well it works and where we end up with it.

• Yeah, they call it the virtual volunteer.

And I think right now it’s only being rolled out to certain people.

I think they’re still testing it and stuff, but yeah, it’s slowly being rolled out.

I’m on the, you can get on the wait list.

And I’m still on the wait list.

I thought I had it, but I had the tab, but I don’t have the, I’m still waiting for

the, there’s a tab that’s this virtual volunteer.

And if you go in there, you can sign yourself up to be, you know, to have that virtual volunteer.

I’m still waiting.

So, but yeah, well, as you get it and you play with it, you can report back and let us know, you know, your

experience and how it works and stuff.

And I really, I just love that we’re having this conversation because I think right now when people talk about

AI, it’s always, you know, it’s gonna, you know, take everybody’s job and eventually

it’s gonna destroy humanity and all that. And the way I look at it, well, that may happen,

but until then, I’m gonna write a mean essay.

There you go. And you know, we’re gonna be coming back to this topic because there’s

going to be continuous new information quite a lot, you know, there’s going to be different

companies, you know, they’re going to be doing stuff, different apps, and it’s going to be

be implemented all over the place.

So we’ll make sure that we keep you guys updated

and kind of let you know what’s going on

as we hear things and figure it out moving forward

and all that good stuff.

So, and in closing, we’ll keep you all updated.

If you wanna reach out to us,

you can reach us at feedback@unmute.show

with questions, comments, or anything else of that matter.

And Michael, anything in closing?

Just stay subscribed. Don’t forget to share this episode with someone if you found it to be useful.

We really appreciate you joining us, Lynn. Thank you for coming today.

Oh, it’s been real. Yes.

Thanks, Lynn. And thanks, Paul. And we’ll see you guys next time.

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[Music]

This is an ACB Community Call presented by American Council of the Blind.

[Music]

This Unmute Present Community Call was hosted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2023.

Thanks to Script Talk for visiting us.

[Music]

The opinions expressed on the ACB Media Network are those of the content providers and should

not be viewed as an endorsement of any product or service.

Nor does it reflect the views of the American Council of the Blind, its elected officials,

or its staff.

Welcome everyone back to another Unmute.

We want to just as a quick reminder here at the top, remind everyone that we’re going

to take first hands.

If we have time, we’ll take second,

but also we want to remind everyone to be respectful.

If you wanna get all your questions answered,

be respectful to everyone,

the same as you would want yours to be respected.

Also, if you need to get ahold of us,

questions, comments, anything like that,

you can reach us at feedback@unmute.show.

And today we’re gonna be doing all things script talk,

so that’ll be fun.

And in the meantime,

Let’s get Michael to give us a couple of quick announcements.

How’s it going, Michael?

• It’s going well, Marty.

I appreciate it.

And I appreciate each of you for taking time out of your day

for joining us either in the podcast live stream

or here in Zoom.

So as you know, I like to go over some of the content

that we’ve recently published in case you have missed it.

And one of the pieces of content that you probably heard

when you were in the,

when you are subscribed to the podcast feed

is the advertisement that Marty and I threw together

pretty quickly.

I think it turned out okay,

but I do kind of have a biased opinion.

In addition, after that,

we published a interesting piece from a voice,

community members already know very well,

and that is Lucy,

and she came and graciously shared with us

a breakdown of the A-lady devices,

specifically with a screen.

So if you’ve ever been curious, why would I want a screen?

Why do I need to interact with my A-Lady device?

I can just use my voice well worth the listen

to listen to Thursday’s episode,

search for a mute presents on your favorite podcast platform.

And then Marty did a demonstration of a new tool

to about a hundred starts at about $130

and it’s a USB microphone that he bought

and he really likes because it’s quick and easy

to get a decent sounding recording.

It’s called the Sennheiser profile microphone.

and you did a review of it and a recording.

And if you’re interested, you can go listen to that.

That was published on Sunday.

So that’s a quick recap of what we’ve published recently.

And remember, you can search for unmute presents

on your favorite podcast platform.

Marty, why don’t you introduce our guests today,

which people are excited to hear from?

• Yes, I would like to introduce Jenna Reed,

director of marketing to talk to us all about script talk.

And Jenna, thanks for being here and take it away.

• Thanks so much, Marty.

Welcome guys.

If you have any questions, let’s try to wait till the end.

But if something I say is not loud enough

or it’s confusing, please don’t hesitate to jump in

and I will answer and try to clarify.

So our company, we’re fortunate,

we’re based on the West Coast of Florida.

So we’re down in Florida.

We’ve been around now for over 25 years.

A lot of people might not know that, but yeah,

we started out in Veterans Affairs.

We’re still available with our script talk station,

with veterans to help them.

And that’s where we got our start.

So we’ve since branched out to,

oh, I think we’re in over more than 20,000 patients

are now using script talk

and more than 7,000 pharmacies throughout the country

are now using script talk.

So you might ask, what is script talk?

Some of you might have one, if you do, yay.

If you do not, I’m gonna go through it

and I’ll tell you the easiest way possible

to get one if you don’t have one.

So, Scriptalk is a free service, absolutely free guys.

I promise, no charge for the labels,

no charge for the device.

There is no charge and it does not run

through your insurance company.

This is a free service that is provided by the pharmacies

to ensure your independence and safety.

So what they will do is they will do a small circular,

it’s called RFID, Radio Frequency Identification Label.

So they have a simple software program

that we provide them right in their computer system

where they are gonna program this label

with all of your information.

So you will be able to hear doctor’s name, dosage,

medication, everything that’s gonna be on this label.

So without further ado, you know you’re getting

a demonstration.

So let me turn on the device.

Device, if you don’t have one, it’s similar,

I would say to an old school CD Walkman.

It’s about the same in size.

It’s white, it’s got a smooth surface.

And on the side of it is a little spinny wheel,

and you’re gonna spin that to turn it on

and to control the volume.

I’m gonna crank it up,

so hopefully it doesn’t blow anybody’s ear drums out.

• Script taxation ready.

So that little circular label that they’re going to give you is typically on the bottom of your prescription bottle. I’m topping it.

So I’m going to set that down right on top of this machine.

And then in the front of the machine are three buttons.

You’ve got a circular read button and then beside that are your next and your previous buttons.

So say you only want one piece of information or you want your doctor’s name or the prescription number.

You can quickly jump through to access it.

But for my purposes today, I’m going to go ahead and play the whole thing for you.

Patient John J. Smith, medication, homoxysil in 250 milligram capsule instructions.

Take one capsule three times daily. Quantity 30 capsules. Prescription date January 10th,

2020.

expiration date January 10, 2024.

Refills remaining zero prescriber.

Dr. Ben Casey scriptability pharmacy to reorder this prescription dial 800 555 1212 prescription number 123456 warning important finish all this medication unless otherwise directed by prescriber.

Warning, this medicine may be taken with or without food.

Warning, may cause diarrhea during treatment.

If it persists or becomes severe,

tell your doctor or pharmacist.

Warning, persistent diarrhea due to colitis

may rarely occur weeks or months

after using an apionis.

• All right, you guys are getting the hint.

The cool thing about this device is it runs on batteries

or you can plug it in.

And how do you get this device, you might ask.

Well, basically when you tell the pharmacist

that you want this, they are gonna fill out a simple form

with your information and they are gonna send that to us

in Vision America and Florida,

and we’re gonna ship this device out to you for free.

You can keep it as long as you need it, no cost.

All we ask is when you’re done with it,

if you’ll send it back to us

so that we can pass it on to the next patient.

Now, for those of you who are a little more tech savvy,

we have apps too.

Now I’m bad, I have an Android,

I know a lot of you guys are going to have iPhones,

but I’ve gotten the Android.

So I’m going to open it up.

It’s yelling at me.

Now, if you have an iPhone, it’s going to automatically

have your NFC near-field communication enabled,

so you don’t have to worry about this.

For my phone, I have to go in and enable it.

And so it’s going to walk me through doing that.

I’m going to turn that on.

So the cool thing about–

Please bring in prescription tag.

Because it’s a slightly different voice,

but it works identical to that station.

So you have two options with the app.

You have a full scan feature, which is cool.

It’s gonna go through all that info,

just like that station did,

or you have a quick scan feature,

which is just gonna hit that high level info.

So if you have an iPhone,

you’re gonna take that medication

and that label on the bottom

and you’re gonna hold it up

to the top screen of your phone

and it’s gonna pick it up.

Now I have an Android, so mine’s a little different.

I’m gonna hold it on the back of the phone

the camera. Amoxicillin 250 milligrams capsule. So that’s your quick scan. It’s just going to

give it to you really quick. Now the full scan feature, let’s do that real quick. Tag is not

valid. Do you want your report? I’m not supposed to do that Doreen. Obviously the tag is valid,

it just read it. Prescription information, patient name, John J Smith, medication, amoxicillin 250

milligrams capsule instructions take one capsule three times daily so as you can see it does the

exact same thing it’s just a lady’s voice instead of the man’s the cool thing about the app as well

is it has a my meds button so under that my meds anything that you full scanned on this app

is now on a list for you so say you’re going into your doctor’s office you have an appointment

coming up. And I know personally, I can’t print out some of my medications. I don’t even try.

I just everything’s the same. But if you’re going to a new doctor or a specialist, and they want to

know what you’re taking, you know, you can pull up this MyMeds and just hand your phone over and

they can see everything that you’re on. So that’s a cool thing about that feature. And also have a

pharmacy. So say you’re on the road, and you need to find us for talking to you at a local pharmacy,

it’s got a lookup function so you can find the pharmacies near you. And then as a side note,

our website and visionamerica.com also if you scroll down to the very bottom of the front that

homepage also has a pharmacy lookup. So you can go in and you can enable it to automatically know

what your zip is and it’s going to pull up within I think like five, ten, twenty mile radius of you

all of the pharmacies that offer script talk.

And then this app also has a help feature

that will walk you through how it works.

So that is the gist of it.

So basically there are two ways to get signed up.

You can go to your pharmacist and you can request it.

I can say that some of the big ones that we’re in,

we’re in all Walmarts.

If they’re not aware of it, they should be,

or you can call us directly.

And we will work behind the scenes to get you set up.

So think CVS has spoken Rx, Walmart has script talk,

depending on what area of the country you’re in,

their chances are very good

that you’re gonna have a pharmacy near you

that does offer it or can offer it.

Now, if you’re using a smaller mom and pop

independent pharmacy, we obviously can’t guarantee that.

But what we can do is if you give us a call

and give us their information, we can call and educate them

and explain to them that they have patients

that are interesting in getting this

so that we are more than happy to set them up.

It is a very cost-effective program.

We’re not looking to make a ton of money on it,

so it’s cost-effective for your pharmacist to offer this.

And at the end of the day, to me, safety is priceless.

So I think that is pretty much all of my information.

We do have it available in translation.

So if you or a friend or family member

or your neighbor speaks Spanish,

if the pharmacist has a translation key,

that’s a separate service,

we can also provide the script talk station unit in Spanish.

We actually do a total of 25 different languages.

So that’s pretty cool.

If you do have some musical vision

and you just want large prints, we can also do that.

We work with a lot of the mail orders

and the bigger pharmacies to provide,

it’s a large print label, Booklet Style,

that’s physically attached to that bottle.

And it’s like a wave or flag that comes off

and it’s got up to 22 point font.

And it’s gonna have all that key information as well.

So we do that.

And then probably not as applicable,

but I’d like to mention it is our dual language labels.

So that would have English as well as

one in 25 different languages.

Again, that’s a Booklet style label that’s attached.

And then we also have Braille, which is nice.

We do the grade two contracted Braille.

So it’s just kind of like a cheat sheet

to let you know what medication you have in front of you.

And then I know a lot of folks that like that Braille,

also like having that RFID or script doc tag on the bottom

so that they can access all of that information

whenever they need it.

Finally, we offer controlled substance safety labels.

These are for your stronger medications.

There’s a lot of risks inherent with taking those.

So that one is kind of cool.

Again, it’s a booklet style label that attaches.

It’s gonna have all those warnings and key information.

But the cool thing about that label,

it also has a QR code so that when you scan it,

it’s got a pretty cool audible video associated with it.

That’s gonna kind of remind you, take it during the day.

Don’t take it with alcohol.

Just those key reminders of how to take

those stronger medications safely.

• Awesome, thanks, Jenna.

• Yeah.

• Yeah, we really appreciate that.

• Go ahead, Michael.

• We really appreciate that.

And I think Marty has some questions.

I have some questions.

And if you listening on Zoom or Clubhouse have questions,

raise your hand and we’ll get to those.

What were you gonna ask, Marty?

• So I guess my first question would be

when it comes to scanning the bottles,

I know that you can put it right on the machine as well as have the app.

Do they always put the labels in the same place?

So you’re not fun,

the laying around with the bottle trying to figure out where the label is to get

the machine or the app to read it.

They do typically, um, because it is circular,

they’re going to gravitate to put that on the bottom of that prescription bottle.

Now, if you have a package, that’s not a traditional bottle,

they will put it on there as well. A lot of times,

there’s like a little hang tag that they’ll stick on.

So it’s gonna stick out.

So you’re gonna feel that sticking out

and it’s gonna have that label on it.

So it should be pretty easy to locate it when you’ve got it.

• I guess my second question would be

if you have a medication that may not come in a bottle,

for example, like either eye drops

or maybe a medication that’s like a patch

or something like that,

would do they put the sticker on the outside of the package,

not directly on the actual eye drop bottle

or whatever’s inside the box if it’s like a patch

or something like that, right?

• Typically it will be on the outside of the package.

You can talk to your pharmacist and see if they’d be willing,

like if it’s an eye dropper or something like that,

if they’d be willing to put it right on that little bottle.

Now it depends on the size of the bottle

as to how easy it is for them to get it on there.

But you can always talk to your pharmacist

and make a request if you’d like.

Cool. Awesome. Michael, what do you got?

Yeah, I do see we have a couple of hands, so I will jump over to Sheila and get

those here in a moment, but I have one question that I bet one, maybe a couple

of listeners are wondering about.

You mentioned that you work on the iPhone and you work on the Android.

Do you guys have any plans or are you in the process of working on the

blind shell classic two at this time?

We are, we’re actually in touch.

We are not on them yet.

I think the real Sam is one we’re working with.

I want to say, what is the other one?

I think there’s another one out there too.

And of course I’m drawing a blank who we are in talks with those developers.

So we’re looking to get integrated in their systems so that when you, you know,

we’ll be a part of their, um, their operating system so that you can

find us on there as well.

Beautiful.

Thank you very much.

Sheila, who’s our firsthand today?

Yes.

Go ahead, Beth.

Yeah.

Okay.

Um, I was when, uh, can you hear me?

Yeah.

>> Yeah, we can hear you.

>> Yeah, yeah.

I was wondering, like with the device, you were saying that you wanted us to send it back

when we’re done, but how are we going to remember which medication is what

if we don’t have the device?

>> No, as long as you’re on the medications and you have the labels,

you do not have to send the device back.

You know, for some reason, you’re not taking those medications, or perhaps you’ve changed pharmacies

one of the rare pharmacies that does not offer script talk and you’re not actively using it,

then we request that you send it back. But as long as you’re actively taking those medications

with the script talk labels on them, we will touch base with you every six months and we’ll

touch base with you like right after you get your labels just to make sure everything’s going

smoothly, but we’re not going to like hound you or anything like that to send it back to us.

Because my, I have Lewis family drug that’s the, because I’m in Northwest Iowa that’s in,

I think it’s in South Dakota, so I don’t know, I hope they use Scrip Talk, but

yeah, that I would have to give them your number, I guess.

Yeah, so you can ask them. I would also encourage you, if you want to give us a call, and I will

give it out now, I’m sure it’ll come up. Our phone number, you can find us, obviously our website,

is E-N-V-I-S-I-O-N, america.com.

• Okay.

• There’s a pharmacy lookup in there by your zip code.

And also you can call us at 1-800-890-1180.

And we have a wonderful patient advocate care team

that works the phones.

We’re here Eastern time from 8.30 to five weekdays.

And they’re great.

• Okay.

And if you guys want to get that as an email,

you can email us feedback@unmute.show

and we can shoot you off an email

with all the pertinent information that you would need.

• Yeah.

So if you call us, we can talk to your pharmacy.

If for some reason they do not offer it,

we can educate them.

Or we can now look for a pharmacy in your area, Beth,

that might offer it.

I know you’re tied into them and you love them,

but if for some reason they do,

you do our best. – Yeah.

• Thanks a lot, Beth.

Who do we have next?

• Thank you. – Hi, Diane.

• There we go, I think you can hear me now.

• Yeah. – Hey, Diane.

• Yeah, I think that certainly from my experience,

the issue with this program and maybe others like it

seems to be, I gotta get my phone,

quiet down, hold on.

It seems like advocating to get pharmacies to sign up for it is the issue.

I’ve been trying to work on my mail order pharmacy for years and I know that someone

named Caroline, I think her name was Caroline, has told me that she had been in touch with

them and that they were interested, but that it was going to take several months for them

to work out the contract.

So apparently, if they’re still doing it, if they really are interested, it’s been a

long time.

I haven’t heard anything.

And I’m kind of wondering about your use of the word “rare” to describe the number of

pharmacies that don’t have this.

I would think there would be quite a few if you’re looking at small, independent pharmacies,

large chains.

you know, I understand but I, you know, is it really that difficult to get to convince these

smaller pharmacies that they should do this? I guess it must be.

We do our best to educate them and bring them on board. Some of the smaller pharmacies,

we can get them signed up quickly. Some of the larger ones like mail orders do take a little bit

of time and longer. But what I can say, if there’s a particular pharmacy that you’re interested in,

The more patients that want this service, the more we can push them to offer it.

To us, it’s an easy sell. We believe in independence and safety. To us, we will push

and we will advocate. You guys can advocate. We’ll give you brochures. We do everything we can.

But at the end of the day, these pharmacies, we do what we can, but we can’t make them.

Yeah, and well, the website is loaded with information, especially that the pharmacies

can look at. You know, and I’ve, by the way, mine is pharmacy advantage, if anyone’s interested in

advocating. So I guess that’s my concern is that it seems to be a hard sell for, you know, some of

the pharmacies. Diane, um, gosh, you’re probably not comfortable giving your phone number. I was

gonna say, if you want to call us, we can update you on what’s going on after the fact.

>> Diane, if you want to email us at feedback@unmuedotshow,

I can get your information to

Jenna and she could contact you.

>> Yeah. I’ll reach out to you.

Because is that a hospital system?

>> Yeah, they operate through a hospital system.

>> I’ve been working with them on the marketing side,

so I can say they are coming along.

>> Okay.

>> As far as I know, it’s soon.

So I mean, when you were talking about a big system like that, yes, unfortunately, sometimes

some of the contracts take a little while to work through.

But we are getting there and we are equipping them with brochures and all that kind of good

stuff.

So they’re coming, I promise.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

Who do we have next, Sheila?

And thank you, Diane.

Darcy.

What have we got in Clubhouse?

We have Janet here in Clubhouse.

Go ahead and unmute Janet.

Hey, Janet.

Hello, everybody.

Good morning or afternoon, Twel.

Hey, M&M.

I just wanted to say a great job, Jenna.

I’ve had my script talk for, I don’t know,

a couple of years from my pharmacy.

And the question I have is, if you use the app on your phone,

do you need to sign in or anything?

Or how’s it going to know that it’s from you?

Basically, the best way I can describe it

is it’s a basic platform.

So it doesn’t have to have your name or your information.

All of your information is in that actual tag.

And this is just a reader.

This is just going to understand what’s on that tag.

So it’s gonna have all your–

• Oh, okay, okay.

• So once you have it downloaded on your phone,

it will ask you to register with us

just so we know you’re using the app

and we have your basic info,

but you should not need to sign in every time.

So unless there’s an update or something like that,

you should just be able to keep rolling with it.

• Okay, I was just curious as well.

So thank you very much.

• My pleasure.

• Y’all have a great day, good job.

• You too, thank you. – Thank you.

• All right, EG, you can unmute.

• Thank you.

• Hey, EG, how you doing?

• Hey, Michael.

I had a quick question.

I tried to look up.

Alexa, stop, sorry.

For example, who is your reminder?

What’s your name?

I tried to go to the website, and I must have done something wrong because I got a bunch

of envisions but not yours.

Is there, what was the website again?

It’s E-N-V-I-S-I-O-N-A-M-E-R-I-C-A.

Okay, that’s the part.

Okay.

Yeah, there’s a lot of Envision Healthcare and Envision is a lot of different things.

Yes. Yeah. Now, if you’re putting us into the search engine, I would say E-N hyphen,

Vision America. We’ve got a hyphen in our official name, which throws us off a little

bit.

All right. Having a hyphenated last name, I understand that well. The second part is

I talked to my pharmacy about, and I use a large regional grocery store chain pharmacy

here in Texas, and I have talked to them about doing large print, and they said they don’t

do that. But so I wanted to go to your website and see if I could see if they were in at the

corporate headquarters in San Antonio if they if they were based. It’s a TB food chain. And I

don’t know if that’s one that you would recognize or not. So yes, it is one that I recognize in one

of our big, bigger partners. So yeah, okay. Because then it hasn’t gotten down to the store

level yet. So thank you. Yeah, I have actually a question to extend on eg’s question. So if they

are in the system and they’re a large format pharmacy like you say and they’re working with

you, if they’re not accommodating him at the local level, is that something that he can do to

go through you to help him get the labels or whatever he may need?

Well, we can do is if they don’t have the large print labels, I do not believe HEB offers them.

However, what I would encourage is if you are with one of these pharmacy chains and you want

want an option that they are not currently offering, call us.

Give us your information.

Because we are in constant discussions with these guys.

And we can tell them, look, we have all these patients that

are interested in getting it.

So the more of you guys that we can say need this,

the easier it is for us to justify it for them.

Because some of these pharmacists

are going to understand it right away.

But at the end of the day, it’s a business.

So we want to do everything in our power

to push them in the positive direction.

So the more information that we have,

the more of you that want it at that pharmacy,

the easier it is for us to educate them,

that there is a demand for it out there.

• One last question if I could,

and that is there’s a big push right now

with my Part D provider to do by mail.

But some of the things like they have to stay refrigerated,

I dropped, I don’t wanna do by mail.

So if I’m actually using two pharmacies at once,

is that an issue or not?

• As long as both pharmacies are set up with script talk,

you can get it from both.

It’s not a problem at all.

Basically the only thing yeah, we do is we equipment,

put them with the software to do it.

And then the programming device,

whether it’s a specialty printer

or it’s basically that demo unit that I

demoed for you earlier, that script talk station device,

they can also use that,

the smaller ones to program your labels.

So that’s all they need.

• Thank you very much.

It’s a great project.

• My pleasure and give us a call if you need any help.

As I said, call us and give us your information

and we’ll let HEB know.

And I’m not seeing any other hands at this time.

Are you Sheila?

• No.

• Okay. Well, if you have a question,

feel free to raise your hand.

I have a question that came up to me, Jenna.

Well, I was thinking about it

and I appreciate you coming and sharing this.

If I was to have the script talk application

on my phone and I use an iPhone and Android and a blind shell,

so any of those devices,

and I went and I was visiting a friend

and they use script talk as well.

Is that information available to me using the app

or is it tied to a device specific?

• Basically it’s just the reader.

So your phone, yeah, your phone or your device is,

like if your friend is visiting you

and they don’t want to bring their device with you

and you have one,

they can use your device to read their medications.

• Very good, okay, perfect.

Thank you very much.

• But it doesn’t store the information.

Now the only thing that it’s gonna store it

is your app is gonna store that basic information.

So if they use your app to do it.

• So Jenna, just to maybe clear up a little bit

of confusion, can you speak to what the difference is?

And when you scan, it just gives you the basic information

and then it’s gone after that?

• Correct. – Or if it’s gonna save

the information on your device as a history

of all of your medications, what would be the?

• Correct, so when you open up that app at the top

or it will, when you swipe through the functions.

• Please present prescription tags.

• She’s yelling at me, she wants food.

So there are two options at the top.

Your first option is gonna be your full scan option.

That’s the option that’s gonna read everything

under the sun that’s on that label.

• And is that where it saves that information

on the device?

• That’s where it’s gonna save that information

under my meds.

And then you can swipe through and you can click on it.

So anytime you want to go back and look or hear that information,

say you have a friend visiting you, hopefully they have this on their phone

for privacy concerns.

I probably wouldn’t encourage them to use your app to scan their medications

unless they don’t care. So, or they can use the quick scan prescription.

The quick scan function is that quick function,

it’s not going to remember.

Okay. I was just bringing that up only for the sake of,

If you’re using the app and someone else is using the app,

you wanna make sure that you’re not getting

your medications mixed up with somebody else’s medications.

So that’s really what I wanted to kind of get clear

to make sure that if you’re gonna help someone

with your own device,

make sure you’re not saving their medications

into your own device,

and then you don’t know which is theirs and which is yours.

• And just remember that the script talk station reader

is not equipped to remember anything.

So you’re not gonna get that list

or any of that info on there.

• Oh, okay, great.

And I think we have another question.

• You do, Beth.

• Welcome back, Beth.

• Oh, thank you.

Yeah, I was wondering,

it doesn’t read over the counter meds or no?

• Not over the counter.

Now, if you wanted to ask your pharmacist

if they would be willing to program a label

for your medications, you are more than welcome to.

But our system is more geared

for your prescription medications.

right. Because sometimes I do like buy things like Tylenol and you know, sometimes I like know the

bottle, but just say if I forget like if it’s Tylenol or leave or whatever. I can’t make any

promises, but you could have a conversation with your pharmacist and see if they’d be willing to

help you. You know, it can never hurt. The worst they’re going to say is no, but I have suspicion

that they might be willing to help. Oh yeah, yeah. Because they’re nice over there. I think they

They will. And the Braille, you just send the tags, the pharmacy puts it on. Is that

like with the Braille, you don’t need any really, you don’t need the app or the device,

right? No, no, the Braille, it’s a clear overlay that goes over top of that traditional label.

so that your doctor, if anybody needs to see that medication, they can still read it.

But it’s, yeah, it goes right over top. Now, if you choose to get that electronically,

both RFID in conjunction or in addition to, so that you can use it with script talk too,

then that you would need the device for. But for the braille itself, you don’t need it.

So the pharmacy, like, who brailles it? Like, I’m confused.

They do. We equip them with a printer. And now this is not one of our most popular offerings,

because I know a lot of folks don’t read Braille. If you do, that’s awesome. But we have some mail

orders, I believe that offer it. But we equip them with a special printer that’s going to print that

Braille and then they stick it on that label for you. Oh, okay. So yeah, right in the software that

that we offer them, it’ll translate it into Braille for them.

Does that make sense so that they can print it right to their Brailler?

Oh, kind of like the Braille printer on a computer.

Only this would be smaller, right?

You got it. You got it.

It’s actually a decent size.

It’s called Braille RX.

It’s a decent sized printer, but it’s going to print

basically specific for that label.

So, yeah, we just came out with a new one.

Oh, OK.

Okay. Sounds good. Yeah.

Thank you, Beth. Appreciate that question.

I do have a question for you though, Jenna, real quick.

With the script talk software and everything,

when you’re adding information to the labels,

like when the, I’m sorry, I got distracted.

When the pharmacist is adding information to the labels, that works out great.

But is it possible for the consumer to add information to labels or modify

those details. No, unfortunately it is not. It is specific for pharmacies. You have to have that

programmer and that software and that equipment in order to do it. So once it’s programmed,

now if you have a special request that you want the pharmacist to include on that label, you can

talk with them. You know, if there’s something on there that you want added, you know, they might be

able to work it into the system that they can add it on for you. But once that is put on your bottle

And once you leave that pharmacy with it, there’s nothing. Yeah. Unfortunately,

there’s nothing that you can do. It’s not editable. That’s the word edible. Changeable.

I think I like that word better. Changeable by the patient.

Yeah, sounds good. Thanks a lot. I appreciate that.

My pleasure.

Who do we have next?

Dane.

Hey, Jane.

Changeable is easier to say.

I know.

I know. Editable does not sound right. Edible.

No, no, it does not.

something but edit edit yeah no we’re not okay go ahead hello I like that too uh so I have a

couple questions with do you guys label um insulin vials and if so I know you guys do

insulin pens and um I used to be a insulin pen user and now I’m on this patch system but

Do you label vials and if I am dealing with another pharmacy that doesn’t use you, how do I convince them to use your labels?

Jane, what I would recommend, I don’t want to answer your question incorrectly. I don’t know that we do work with pharmacies to do the vials, but I don’t want you to quote me. I don’t know.

And I don’t want to give you wrong information.

So what I would encourage you to do Jane is give us a call or email Marty or Michael and with your information and have them forward it to me.

And we will reach out to you after to talk to you about this and to work with you on your pharmacy, because we can educate them on our end and see what we can do for you.

And again, I just, I don’t think that they do,

but I can’t say that for sure.

That’s an instinct response.

That’s not a, I don’t know for a fact response.

Does that make sense?

• Why would something like insulin be unsure

just out of curiosity?

‘Cause the way they make them,

it’s hard to put labels on something like that.

• It might be, it’s just, you know,

the pens I know for a fact,

but I just haven’t had a lot of requests.

I do a lot of the shows and the events

and the things like that.

that hasn’t come across my desk that I don’t want to say one way or the other.

And there’s probably a way that they can do it.

I just don’t want to give them accurate information and say yes,

when I’m not 100% sure.

I don’t know how do they come in boxes.

I’m not diabetic and I don’t have, you know,

well, okay. So yes, these, uh, vials, they come in boxes when it looks like a

regular, um, well, kind of a small medicine bottle.

And I guess the reason there is no reason that can’t put the label on the box.

Okay.

I mean, it sounds like it would be, as I said, I think it would be, you know,

they might be able to do it.

I don’t see that they wouldn’t.

I’m just,

the only thing I would say is I would maybe go on what you said earlier about

something like eyedrops, where they put it on the outside of the box instead of

the actual, you know, eye drop bottle or actual insulin pen, just there may not be enough

room I’m guessing.

Yeah.

That would be my guess.

That’s the way I want this to put it on the, because it’s never going to come out of the

box unless you have to use it, but that’s a different story.

So forgive my ignorance guys.

I haven’t dealt with that a whole lot.

But we’ll put you guys in contact if you want there Jane, just to find an actual resolution

because that could be something that may not be available, but could be available.

And so we appreciate you asking for sure.

We want to get your pharmacy set up with it.

And once they’re set up, then we’ll see about getting it on there for you.

And you said you had a couple of questions.

Were those all of them?

Jane.

I’m assuming so.

Oh, she saw us.

Yes.

Okay.

Perfect.

Thanks, Jane.

Thanks, Jenna.

Marty, do you have any other questions or does anyone else have any other questions at this

time for Jenna before we let her go?

We greatly appreciate you jumping in to share information.

I live in Oregon and a legislative imperative back in 2019

that I was first part of was mandating

for prepared individuals accessible labeling systems.

And that’s the first point that I had heard

about script talk and how script talk works.

So I was excited when Marty mentioned

that he had talked to you.

• Yeah, yeah, no, at the federal level, there are guidelines,

But I think it helps tremendously with awareness

and knowledge when the states get active in it as well.

I know Nevada has done something,

Oregon’s done something,

Maryland just pushed something through

that’s waiting the governor signature.

So a lot more of the states are getting active.

Once it’s on the state level and the pharmacy board

can work more specifically with the pharmacists,

that helps bring this into play a little bit more

and helps convince the pharmacists

the importance of it as well.

So one thing I would love to add is if you guys are online on social media at all,

you know, I have fun running our social media accounts.

I look for stories, both entertaining and educational.

So if you’re on any of the social media, I would love for you to look us up under Facebook,

Twitter, we’re also on LinkedIn.

So if you’re not already following us, I’d invite you to do that as well.

And then again, our number real quick, if I may, is 1-800-890-1180.

And do reach out to Marty or Michael.

If you have questions that I didn’t address or I couldn’t give a specific

answer, you know, connect with me after the show, they’ll give you my information

or I can reach out to you directly.

And we will definitely get you taken care of.

Okay.

Hi, Beth.

I see your hand going off.

Go ahead, Beth.

• Shanda’s becoming a real professional at this.

• Yeah.

So we just went for an Envision American Facebook.

Do we talk to you directly?

• I’m sorry.

• Have you messaged you directly, I mean?

• If you want a message,

I’m the one that usually gets all those messages.

So if you want to say hi to me, you can.

But we have a page that you can follow on there.

Let me pull it up real quick.

And right now, I can do my handle.

My handle at spacebook.com/envisionamerica.

• Oh, okay.

• And then if you follow us, you know,

like I think Pennsylvania just launched a pro,

yeah, if I can talk right, Pennsylvania just launched

a program to teach students disability inclusion,

which I thought was pretty cool, of something brand new.

You know, Wegmans, we just rolled out

a pilot program at Wegmans.

So if you’re in the New York area, guys,

Five stores are piloting script talk right now.

That’s a new one.

I was recently and did a podcast with a VA or BVA,

I should say.

So that’s on there.

A health system just picked up our dual language

translated prescription labels.

So that’s like a hospital system.

Similar to what I think Diane was asking about earlier.

Not the same one, no, but this is a different one.

But yeah, give you an idea of some of the stuff

that I look, I’m always,

So if you have a story or something you’d like to share,

don’t hesitate to poke me

because I’m always looking for good stuff.

Not just promoting who we are and what we do.

I like to, you know, look for good educational,

fun stuff to share with you guys.

• ‘Cause you sell other products, I’m sure, right?

Or just-

• Actually, our specialty is accessible labels right now.

• Oh, cool, yeah.

• Now that’s our specialty.

You might’ve heard of the ID main in the past.

We still-

• Oh, what?

The ID mate is a barcode scanner, a UPC scanner.

We do not sell it anymore.

We just recently with COVID, we were looking at rebuilding it and the parts were harder

to get.

It was getting really expensive, but that was our bread and butter.

What we founded our company on was a barcode scanner that could help you tell the difference

between like peas and carrots in your cover or, you know, and if we didn’t have it in

in our database that go out to Amazon or jet.com.

I think Walmart might acquire a jet, like Walmart.com.

And it could tell you how to cook stuff too.

• So, okay.

• We used to sell that, but right now,

our primary focus is accessible prescription labels.

So right now, the same area of growth

is a dual language translation.

So a lot of folks, if you don’t speak English

as your first language, you can get a little scary.

and other sending problems with these medication labels

that you can’t read and understand,

which so many of you guys would be aware of.

So.

• Jenna, this is Michael here.

Is Envision going to be at the ACB convention in Schomburg

to allow people to check out the devices in person?

• You know it, we will be there.

Charlotte will be there for us this year, I believe.

And then Dave’s son, David Reistrick,

who’s one of our founders, his son Ben,

who now serves as an attorney,

We’ll probably be popping around to help out as well.

So please give them a hard time.

If you go stop by the booth,

there’ll be his first big show for us,

but I didn’t tell you that.

• Awesome.

Marty, are you still there?

And thank you again, Jenna, from me.

And unless anyone has any other questions,

I think we’ll go ahead and wrap it up.

• Yeah, I just want to say thank Jenna one more time.

We really, really appreciate it.

If you guys need any information about how to contact Jenna,

you send us an email, feedback@unmute.show

and we’ll make sure we get you all the pertinent information.

Other than that, everybody have a great week

and we will see you next time.

Thanks Sheila and Darcy for helping us out today

and we’ll talk to you guys soon.

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