Welcome to episode 333 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on May 5th, 2023. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss a topic or recent news and hub it relates to you Today we start out by giving our opinions on Teams and Outlook, opening links in Microsoft Edge and talk a little bit about some other browsers before diving into Azure AD News.
In this last week there have been a few announcements around Azure AD with the preview release of Windows lapses for in-tune and Azure AD as well as Azure AD certificate based authentication or CBA on mobile Now being generally available. I'm curious what you think about this. I've seen the headlines, I think I understand what's going on with this, but I don't know that there's any demos out.
It was more of a announcement in the message center and I've seen a few people ranting and raving about this is Microsoft Teams plans to make users open links and Edge and apparently this is both Microsoft Teams and Outlook that when there's a link in one of those two programs, that's gonna force you to open it and Edge and everybody is up in
arms that Microsoft is now forcing edge on people. However, based on how I'm reading this, it sounds like it's doing it like Edge within Outlook and Teams cuz it talks about opening, like say you get a link in a message, I email you a link or I send you a link in teams and you click on it to open it instead of popping up like a brand new browser window. It sounds like from this announcement that it's popping it up within Teams or an. Outlook. It's not. It's popping it up. It's not in edge.
It's in edge and it's showing cuz it talks about showing things side by side. So it's popping it up in edge and then showing teams and the link side by side. You know the new office browser bar that's on like the right side and edge. So it pops open with the email, say I clicked a link from an email, it has that email and Outlook web view and then the link rendered on the left. Yeah. Browser. Bar. Yes. So the page is in the main area and then the team's conversation or the outlook
is in that little toolbar thingy on the right? Yes. Okay. Then they're probably justified that that's stupid. Yeah, it's not a good way to to do it. Yeah and I, again, I didn't look, I kind of skimmed through the articles and I was, yeah, I couldn't tell from the articles and what I had seen if it was popping it in the client or popping it in the browser itself. I would agree this should not pop it in the browser. You should have an option.
Okay, we can be done with that one now, but it's, I'm surprised they're trying this cuz I feel like they always get in trouble with their browsers and trying to force their browsers on everybody and then the EU goes in, slaps 'em on the wrist and they have to go undo it all and then they go try to redo it again like a few years later. , I like a lot of Microsoft stuff but I've heard what is it, the definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again.
Ye. Yes. And not learning from your, it's something like that and not learning from it. I. Just don't know sometimes about these things. You know like last week we chatted about the marketing messages for conferences showing up in teams and SharePoint and all these various applications and this is very much in the same vein kind of thing.
Like don't give me marketing for your own stuff or like it's great, it's fine if you wanna be helpful, be helpful, but as soon as I turn it off, don't come and try and be helpful again and again and again and again behind me kind of thing. Like stop forcing it down my throat. It's like Edge is for the most part, it's like a decent browser but becomes a really degraded experience when all of a sudden hey here's the new office bar, you know?
You know on the right side of edge when maybe you're not an office user, like not everybody is, maybe you don't need that. Maybe you don't want the big Bing button there. By default maybe in the enterprise version of Edge, like you don't want to have Bing shopping bot following you around and offering you coupon suggestions. Like , it's kind of a hodgepodge thing, right? Like and it's very like micro softian that it's one of those everything in the kitchen sink kinds of products.
I think it's really unfortunate that they do that at the expense of user experience. Like you know, if you wanna be a viable replacement for Chrome, you gotta be less creepy than Chrome. Not more creepy and it's all going the other way, which isn't the best way. Yeah, I was hoping Edge was gonna be nice. Although I will be honest Scott, I have been using Arc. Have you played around with the ARC browser at all? I have played around with Arc a little bit, so you sent me an invite to it.
So Arc today is a Mac os Mac only. Mac only. Yeah. Web browser and it's gonna come to other platforms at some point. I don't know if you saw this, so. Yes and there was a tweet today about it hinting that it was gonna come to Windows like in the relatively near future. I will put a link to a a, a Reddit thread on arc. So Arc as a browser is interesting. If anybody wants an invite hit hit up Ben on on all the socials and he'll help you out.
Or I guess I have a couple invites now as well that I'm probably not gonna use for anything. Yeah, you have some now too, but either of us. It's an interesting browser. It's an interesting take on the concept of a browser and having spaces within a browser and bringing, I think like PWAs kind of in line into a browser. It's kind of interesting like the way you interact with your mail versus YouTube versus a set of web pages that are in like a tab group, which is a space,
things like that. One of the cool things the ARC team is doing is, or they're gonna try and do, I have no idea if they'll be successful on this . So for Arc on Windows, they're basically going to build their own custom like bundled version of Swift and bring that over to Windows. So it's kind of this um, this this very ambitious thing that they want to, to go ahead and do.
So they want to build a swift tool chain for Windows and sometime in 2023, the timing isn't exact but basically what they want to do is they want to build their own custom compiler and debugger for Swift on Windows. They also want to build a native vs code integration and build a bridge layer to do swift fi, swift bindings over to the built-in WIN app s stk.
And then they, once they have all that in place, right, like they, they can port their code over, they can compile, debug, all those kinds of things. They will actually be ready to port Arc over to Windows. So basically what they're looking to do is design, build and ship a tool chain to develop cross-platform Mac and Windows apps that are programmed in Swift using Visual Studio Code. The ARC team, which is the underlying organization that runs, it's called the Browser Company.
It's not a big company , it seems like a very, a very large endeavor to go ahead and push through, but uh, we shall yeah, see how it goes and where it lands. I mean I wish I'm y you know, best of luck. It's always cool to see new technology come through like that. I imagine there's a whole host of wonkiness that comes along the way with that. For sure and I've been using it for two weeks now. I've been really liking it.
I won't lie, I said it to my default browser, I'm like okay, I'm gonna dive into this for two weeks and try it. I've actually been a big fan of it and I have no intention at this point in time of switching back. We'll have to see. It's been a good experience for me to this point in time. I have a guest on the podcast with me today, black eyed Jack, Jack, he tried to catch a swing with his face. It did not work out so well. . For those of you that can see.
I see the lock on your door is working really well too. It. Worked well. I didn't lie it so I'm, it's just me and him home for a couple days while the rest of the family's out and I didn't wanna lock him outta my office since there's no one else here. Security through obscurity. I got it. Yes. Let us know about the ARC browser. So I was going to mention this, I'm, I want to go back to the edge thing and then we'll dive into our Azure ad topic.
So how come Microsoft gets into all this trouble for it and Apple got away with like forcing Safari on you on all their devices for so much longer and even the iPhone, I mean you can switch it now right on the iPhone iPad it sort of lets you switch your default browser and you still see all this stuff about opening Safari and
then it opens in the default browser. But to be fair, apple forced Safari on mobile devices for a really long time and never really got this type of blowback I guess from the community that Microsoft does when they try to force edge. I don't think either one is right. I don't think Apple should do it, I don't think Microsoft should do it. I want to be able to pick what I want, but that aspect of it has always befuddled me. They're.
Very different things, very different ecosystems and different units of scale when you measure them. So I guess for Apple, when you say they used to force people into Safari, they still do. So WebKit is the underlying rendering engine on iOS. If you're a third party browser maker, like say you're Microsoft building Edge for mobile and Google building Chrome. Chrome for for iOS you still have to use Apple's WebKit rendering engine in the background.
So you're basically a shell on top of Safari On's top and that's the state of affairs today. So until Apple builds in side loading or something else, like you really can't bring your own rendering engine like Google couldn't bring Chrome over with Blink or something like that. I, I think some of it is you and I live in the United States where it's very much like an Apple bubble. Like iOS is a popular thing here.
Like everybody I know who has a phone has an Apple device like and but I mean I've got 'em all over my, like I got an Android phone sitting next to me but I only have it sitting on the desk for like testing and playing around. I don't use it day to day. Like my daily driver is an iPhone and I've got iPads and all those kinds of things. As soon as you get outside of the United States, that's not the case at all. Like, like. It's all Android.
Yeah, from a pure like hey let's take a look at the global market and kind of economies of scale and things that are going on out there. Android is magnitudes larger than iOS, it's it absolutely it's the right thing to do to say like hey, like why is it this way? But saying why is it this way? Cuz like Apple's got a monopoly isn't really, I don't know that it's the best lens to look at it through. That. It's that cuz there's such a small market share compared to the people using
teams and Outlook and Edge getting forced on 'em. And I guess to your point, a lot of this stuff ends up coming down from the eu, not anything in the US and if Androids are Apples not that big over in the eu, they probably aren't caring that much about it. I just real quick kind of Googled around for a quick one here. So mobile operating systems share worldwide in Q1 2023 was Android at 71.65% of the global market and iOS at 27.71.
I guess that makes sense sort of, although I still think it should be if one gets in trouble, the other one should too. But any who, we don't need to spend our entire time talking about browsers. browsers are fun, they're not a bad thing to talk about and. They're very quickly turning into the center of everything we do.
Like I look at the amount of time I spend in the browser and even the amount of time I could spend in the browser, if I didn't care about desktop outlook or office apps, I could probably legitimately spend like 95% of my day just in a browser and do all of my work right in the browser and websites and all of that. Which is why I need like 16 gigs of RAM dedicated just for my browser. .
It's an interesting thing so I, I don't know if you've noticed this in just kind of the change in the way you collaborate with people. I was doing something Uhhuh earlier this week. We were talking about Power BI and they, okay, they wanted some help putting together some Power BI reports like they've never done Power bi. I know where this is going.
I was like, okay cool. Like happy to show you and you know, let's set up some time, put some time on my calendar, like we'll go through it and do it all. And we were kind of talking about prerequisites like what are the things that you should have in place ahead of time to make sure that this is a useful session for us. So you know that Excel notebook that has the tabular data, make sure you have that available, put it in a shared location on SharePoint or your OneDrive.
Make sure you bring your Gusto queries, your SQL queries, like all those things like bring those to the conversation. Yep. And oh by the way bring Power BI as well Windows. And when you say that to somebody and they're living in a web first world, like it was a little bit of a, the first question I got wasn't like, do I need the desktop app? It's like can I, it was, can I start from the web? I'm like no, let's not do that. Like let's go get the desktop app here.
There's a 64 bit version of it, have fun, please. Like go grab that thing. Yeah and it's a different way to think about it. Like in the world of PWAs, all these kind of mobile first things like I guess I always, I come from a place where I'm apt first for everything. Like I don't want, I do everything I can not to use a website first and I'm slowly recognizing that there's this whole other universe of folks out there back to Android versus iOS, right?
People approach things in different ways that right? Yeah. Like that it's a not a desktop first world, it's a mobile and specifically like online, like web-based world first. That's a big pivot point for me in my head, right? And and it's something I really have to like try and wrap my head around and and be able to grasp. So. I would be fascinated if we can find somebody that has some insight into Power bi, why it has actually reverted unless you know why it's reverted to a Windows app first.
Because I remember when Power BI first came out, I was able to do a lot more in the browser then than I am today in terms of like setting up data connections and creating those initial dashboards and the power query and all of that. I re like I distinctly remember doing all of that in the browser and one day I went in to do it and I was like wait a minute, it's all gone in the browser. I actually have to start the desktop app now for 99% of what you do in Power bi, you absolutely need Windows.
Do you need to go download the desktop app and Windows 10, windows 11, do everything there, publish it up to Power BI and then you can make minor tweaks in the browser. But I feel like that's one app that has actually gone backwards from the functionality available, at least from the creation authoring standpoint and what was available on the web to having to be more desktop first. I don't know if maybe it is, it's a, the massive amount of data or the processing.
I'm curious if you know or if anybody knows that is listening. I don't know. I would bet a couple of things. So there's actually a pretty decent comparison on the differences between Power BI desktop and Power bi, the service kind of like the website that you would go to if you were going to be web first. So one of the things that really stands out to me there is being able to not only transform your data but also shape and model it.
And I think that's gonna be better suited to desktop apps, especially the way Power BI does it today, right? Like where you might have a backend view for your data sources and then you actually have your modeling view and you have this kind of relationship structure that can be changed on the fly and sometimes it can be one-to-one, one to many, many to many.
You can have bidirectional things like honestly like that's not something I want to mess around with at a Microsoft interface for doing like data modeling on the web. Like I've already tried VIO on the web and that's horrible. Like for things like that I don't even want to do it with a live connection. Having to tie things together. I think another big part of it is probably just performance and uh, kind of Perth and scale.
So when you're doing things like you're say creating a new DAX measure or you're creating calculated columns, you are really kind of asking the local client to do a whole lot on the fly. Like usually when I'm working with Power BI reports, I'm working with data sets with at least a million rows if not tens of millions sometimes.
So it's not an inconsequential amount of data to have to churn through and kind of figure out, like I, I wouldn't wanna have the overhead of waiting for my web browser to render something like it's bad enough having to wait for the uh, power BI desktop app to catch up with you. And then the the, the final one that stands out to me is data sources. And there's always been this disparity between Microsoft tooling and the, and the ability to bring in data sources.
So things like well take like Excel on the Mac versus Excel on Windows and what you can do with being able to do a link data source and like pull in acoustic connection or connect to another notebook and and bring in data, things like that. Like it's a varied experience there and it's really limited by the client and what it can connect to.
So I'm willing to bet that you can just write a whole ton of different connectors on desktop and iterate on top of them much quicker on the desktop side than you can on the service side. And then on the service side, like you don't need the authoring connector experience, you really just need to support like the gateway or connectivity piece. Like you're almost down to like ports and protocols at that time over the actual like engine to do all the stuff. So.
Right. And then I guess from the data refresh standpoint, if you're doing scheduled refreshes or manual refreshes, you're not as worried about it refreshing quite as quick cuz you're not trying to actively work with the data live to formulate it. It's just go refresh all the data re-render and if you're doing a daily refresh at 5:00 AM or 11:00 PM who cares if it takes 15 or 20 minutes
to do a day to refresh? Exactly. I guess that I can see that. And yeah, I wonder if it, if that was part of the web stuff is it just was too slow, it was taking too many resources on the back end and they said let's just author it all the desktop top. . I don't know if you've noticed but uh, you know, for all the web apps that Microsoft pushes on us, they're not always the most performant things. Like given the choice of working in like, sorry, Google Sheets versus Excel .
I would wanna work in Google Sheets every day. Does it do everything Excel does? No. Does it work fast and consistently? Yes. Can I say the same about Excel on the web? I cannot, same thing for like Gmail and Outlook teams versus Slack. Like all all these things, right? Like they, they're tools for the masses that have known rough edges and you just kind of live with 'em and plot along.
Yeah, well and I think some of the difference there, I'm going to assume between Excel on the web outlook, I mean Microsoft came from a server first on-premises non-web application first scenario and kind of has molded all their applications to work on the web versus all these newcomer, I mean newcomers, Google's been around for a while, but even them G Suite, slack, all of those kind of started with internet first browser, first web first mindsets I would say very much so where
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That's I N T E L L I G I N k.com/podcast for more information or to schedule a 30 minute call to get started with them today. Remember intelligent focuses on the Microsoft cloud so you can focus on your business. So all that being said, that was a good. Ramp for you. . That was a good rant. Do you wanna talk about Azure AD today too? Yeah. We can probably fit in some Azure AD stuff. Now fit in some Azure AD stuff. So this is one Scott, this was end of April really I guess only a week ago.
And this is an interesting one because I've actually had a couple of clients come to me and directly ask for this. They came from the on-premises windows management world, GPO servers, ad domain connected to computers, all of that and asked for, they're like what's Microsoft's alternative if you're gonna do Azure AD for lapse or this local administrator password management and setting all that up. And there wasn't a good story.
I've come up with workarounds where you could do like a request with a user account that had its password recycled nightly and was a device admin and Azure ad. But then really you're sharing the same account among all your devices. So it's not really local. It's like if you actually knew what was going on, you'd be able to use that administrator password on any machine,
not just your own. But within the last week, windows has now rolled out Windows lapse feature into public preview for Intune and support for hybrid Azure AD or Azure AD joined.
So if you're looking for this local administrator password feature and being able to roll this out, again not GA yet, but in preview you can now do this natively within Azure AD and they have a good article, we'll post it out here pretty straightforward in terms of going in and setting up your device settings and Azure active directory going under account protection and setting up a lapse windows lapse local admin password solution within one of your endpoint security profiles.
And then going in and setting up some of the basic information around password complexity, administrator account name, password lengths, post authentication actions. So there's a quite a few configuration options you get right out of the gate. How long password age days are in there backing up the password where you wanna back up the password to Azure 80 only or I'm gonna guess active directory is another option in here.
But this article does a good job at kind of walking through how you would set all of this up within Intune. I will say it is Intune so you are gonna need Azure ad premium. This is not one you're just gonna get for free out of the gate. Interestingly enough you can do it without in tune. Can you? You can. I did not see that in the article. I missed it. It's a long article. It's not in the article but it is in the official documentation like. The learned documentation.
Yeah, so a couple of things. So client support for this. If you're going down and you mentioned preview status, which usually implies you've got some kind of subset of clients out there that it's gonna work with. You do need to be on specific versions of Windows clients. So Windows 10 you have to be on the April, 2023 update April 11th, 2023. Same for Windows 11, both 21 H two and 22 H two. There were also updates released on April 11 for those.
And then you need to be on Windows server 22, uh 2022 rather or Windows server 2019. So as long as you meet those kinds of things, you're okay.
So the the actual article for getting started with this, it has a call out in there if your devices are Azure active directory joined but you are not using Microsoft Intune, you can still deploy Windows laps for Azure active directory in this scenario you must deploy policy manually for example, either by using direct registry modification or by using local computer group
policy. And that's about it. So yeah you can do it without in tune, it's just gonna take more on your side to get it done more. Work. Well and that is an interesting note cuz if you're looking at the very top under the prerequisites for laps, it is an in-tune subscription as a prerequisite but apparently that's like an optional prerequisite then based on how you wanna push it out. And then Azure active directory free which is the free version which makes sense.
And I guess here it does kind of say it under there too with Azure ad free, you can still use all the features of labs but it's more like you said then buried further down. It's the automatic policy deployment aspect of it that you would get within Tune. Yes. Your experience is going to be different when it comes to policy management, policy creation, all those kinds of things. But uh, if you are not in tune inclined and you're like ooh this is interesting, there is a path forward there. Well.
And I guess the nice thing about that path forward is you could test it out. Like if you have a couple devices, you wanna see how this works, test it all out without having to use Intune to push out the policy, go test it on your device, set up laps, see how this works, set it up on a test device if you really like it and you don't wanna manually
push it out to all your clients. Go look at. I'm curious, so not trying to skirt licensing requirements, what would happen if you'd go get the in-tune trial because you wanted lapse for all your devices, pushed it out to all your devices and then let your trial subs subscription expire. Like technically the policy's still there, right? Obviously new devices if you don't have in tune it wouldn't push 'em out to new devices. Yes. But I don't know that it has to continually call back. That's.
A good question. I don't know what policy peel back looks like when a trial ends. Does the service reach out right before? I don't know. It's a good question. Ends somebody test that out because I'm not about to test that out anywhere cuz I don't wanna blow up a bunch of devices unless they're standing one up and just try it. Shoot. Your shot. I'm trying to think if I've had some, I don't think it actually peels it back because I think it's a lot like
gpo. I mean GPOs stay applied, you wouldn't get any new updates to it but once you push out those settings and update cuz really it's updating the registry, right? It's not like it's reading it live, it's updating the registry. The registry's gonna stay set until it says don't update the registry anymore. Correct. Yep. Yeah but like you said, once your in tune's gone, any new devices, any changes to it, if you ever wanted to pull it back you'd be outta luck.
But this was a nice one to see come again especially cause I've had a couple clients come and ask for this directly. They're like we're all Azure AD joined, we use labs on-prem, we don't have on-prem anymore. What's our solution? It was, it's hacky, you can make some stuff work but it's definitely not anywhere near that functionality that you would normally get with lap.
Yeah so I I I can think of like beyond just base deployment, the other nicety that you would get out of having Intune licensing here is going to be reporting both at the device level. So hey did this like individual device have this thing pushed to it and how is it configured? What's at stake? Yep. But there's a uh, effectively like a workbook I guess it's a dedicated workbook inside of your endpoint management in Intune for Windows lapse management as well.
So not only can you see at the individual device level and report there and see what's happening, but you can also get the all up aggregate view of your kind of device posture and how that deployment has gone for you. Which is probably more than a little annoying to do in any kind of like at scale way, you know if you've got more than a handful of clients. Yeah. Well and the other thing within Tune is you get all the other in-tune features, right?
You can go take advantage of conditional access and all your other policies and all that. Yes. None lapse related. Absolutely there's a lot of benefits to Intune. And did you also see Scott, this is one of the first times I think I've seen this, that this is also supported for G C C high like day one it came out to the public cloud and GCC High at the same time.
that is Cindy one. I don't think I've seen that too much. No. It is, I'm guessing it's because I don't know that there's actually much new here. I mean Windows lapses has been there forever. You've been able to do with G P O and it's really just bringing that policy and then there are a couple features that came like the password retrieval is within Azure ad, but I think a lot of times with GCC Hyatts because they have to get certifications for new features or new code or some of that.
And I'm wondering if this was straightforward enough that there was not many hoops to jump through for approval for gcc or maybe GCC is the one that's always been asking for this. So they just did it for everybody at once. Because I can also imagine that this would be a feature that a lot of those GCC high gov clouds, all of those different types of higher security tenants would actually really want or be interested in. Where did.
You see the note about GCC High? I don't see it in any of the, at least the doc that you had shared. It is not in the doc I shared it's in another doc. Uh, let me, I will send you this one. It's in the, is that the documentation? It's in the learn documentation. Oh it's. Under You search specifically under under Intune support. Yeah, it, I see it there. GCC high right there. So, so what else has come to Azure 80 Scott? There's been a few more. G CCC high not G C high below.
There's been a few more Azure AD things that have come out in the last few days. Do you wanna do one more? Sure. We can do one more. I I think there's a bunch. So, so uh, I'll put a link in the show notes. There's actually an article that was published about a whole bunch of Azure ADSS slash intro features that came out. One of the more interesting ones that kind of came across was the ability to do certificate based authentication with mobile devices.
This is something that was at least uh, certificate based authentication or, or CBA was announced back at Ignite 2022. So it's been kicking around for a while now but now it is also generally available on mobile. So the cool thing here is it supports not only on device certificates but you can also do external security keys. So that could be like your N F C U B key, your iOS or your Android device, all that good kind of stuff.
So I think for B Y O D customers like bring your own device, this is a really nifty capability to have. Yeah, I had missed, I saw the headline, I had not had a chance to read this article yet before today cuz it came out yesterday. But yeah, the Azure AD CBA and iOS mobile with the u b key CBA on Android with the UB key. I'm gonna have to go play with this in a little bit and test it out but this is
another one. I do have clients that use cba, especially mobile devices being able to push out CERT based off or and they do it for a lot of their email being able to push email config out to manage devices using cert based off. So this is one we're gonna have to look at trying to start rolling out and playing with there. I always like giving you a new task. Add your sticky note list. To go play my sticky note list.
That never gets any shorter because you add them quicker than I can get them done. That's the one. Yeah, that is a good one. And now Scott, it's time to go automate our podcast synopsis with Azure Open AI G P T . This was another article that came out, I haven't read it. It's a whole article from Microsoft and how you can do pod abstracts with Azure Cognitive Services and open ai. We should try this. We can get Synopsis, you don't need to write our two sentence pod descriptions anymore.
You can let open AI do it for you . You can let open AI do it for you. You can do, I've seen folks do this with Whisper, I don't know if you've played around with Whisper at all yet. I've not played with Whisper yet. So Whisper. Is an AI juice transcription engine for audio. So you take like a Wave file and you pump it into Whisper and it runs the model
on top of it and it spits out SRTs TXTs. Uh, you know, like if we wanted to caption our YouTube videos for this podcast, we should really just slam 'em through Whisper and let 'em go and do its thing and it'll do a better job than like auto captioning in YouTube or anything like that. So yeah, you can totally just take the output from something like Whisper and pump it into chat G P T and then come back with a summary for you.
It's kind of interesting, I don't know if you've been paying attention to like one last quick digression here. We talked about Home Assistant a couple weeks back and all the home assistant updates that have been coming out lately are focused on really like voice improvements, which I think is kind of interesting. So they've started to add all these kind of base layers and plugins to Home Assistant for being able to do voice integrations in multiple ways.
So one is, you know, like if you're talking to your little device in the other room, you wanna say like, Hey device do this. So your device basically needs to do voice transcription and bring that back and pull it back. So the way the home assistant folks are doing it is they're using some of these open source models and transcription engines like Whisper to actually do that translation , which is, which is kind of cool.
So like the latest versions of Home Assistant basically have whisper built in. So that's when you're talking say to your mobile device and you're signed into the app and you're saying like, Hey do this, do this, do this. It's actually taking that and it's recording that audio in real time, passing it through whisper, getting an output back. And then they're using large language models to take your request.
Like hey Dingus, turn on the lights in the living room and Uhhuh, run it through an l m to have it output a common command. So if I say, Hey Dingus, turn on the lights in the living room and you say, Hey Dingus, turn on the living room lights. Those ultimately mean like the same thing, but there's probably just one common shortened command to push them through.
So they're doing it both ways. They're taking, they're taking human voice and they're transcribing it and then they're taking the transcriptions and they're passing them into AI models and they're having the AI models distill down to common commands that then can be executed within like home assisted as an engine. Which is actually like totally, it was kind of like, I was like, oh yeah, like that's how all these things ultimately work at the end of the day.
But it was kind of cool to see it just spelled out that way. So I, I'll have to see, I saw some good videos on YouTube about the latest update. I'll see if I can pop one in the show notes for for you. All. Right. It'll be interesting to look at that and see how that continues to
change over the coming months and years. So the captions, speaking of captions, I've been doing them in YouTube, Scott and I need to go look Da Vinci Resolve is what I use to do the editing of our YouTube videos and in their latest version they came out with 8.5 beta one, they added right in there generating captions from the audio and I don't know if they're using Whisper or something else in the backend, but I can go edit all our podcast,
edit the podcast together and then say go make captions for me from the audio tracks in it adds a caption track in there and then when I export it I can export the caption track as a V T T and they have like four or five different caption file types that you can generate.
So I've been doing it, but I just do it right alongside editing the video cuz even these video editing tools are starting to build that language transcription right in, I. Forget which model they use in Da Vinci but it's, they kind of made it like the serviced script if anybody has ever played around with that. Yeah, I didn't look, I just saw it showed up in there so I was like, ah, it should, good. Try. I don't think they're using descript in the background but it's,
it's totally something descript ish. So the Da Vinci stuff I've seen, I haven't played with it in person, like you've probably got more hands on with it than me, but from what I've seen of it, it's, it's basically doing the same kind of thing. Take the audio, translate it through, put it into the text.
But then the really cool thing like the the nifty thing about something like descript as an engine, so descript is basically an audio really like kind of spoken word, very like podcast focused thing, but it lets you just in real time edit text and then it does like the underlying clip edits for you on the other side.
So if you wanted to, you know, strike an entire sentence out, you just strike the sentence in descript and then it strikes all that audio automatically clips it and shortens it up and and does all that stuff and Da Vinci's doing for something very similar. Yeah it. Is, it's kind of nifty.
They haven't gotten to the point yet in 8.5 where they let you edit the audio based on editing the subtitles and I just looked and I don't know that it's only been within the last two weeks that they came out with this update and I don't know if they even said what they're using in the background to do it, but I have seen some of those tools that let you edit your audio by editing the text and it is pretty nice cuz then you can just search the text for all the times you went.
Um mm-hmm and delete 'em all and quickly remove that from your audio. Yep. But, but that's Scott, I should probably let you go. I have a feeling my son is trying to lock me in my office because he shut the door and I hear things being tied on the doorknob. All. Good stuff. So I'll let you go to it. As always, thanks for the time Ben, I appreciate it. All. Right, thanks gal. We'll talk to you again next week. Yep. Bye. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes.
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