007 Rich on Tech Radio Show - February 18, 2023

questions about technology. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles, broadcasting to you live right now. Welcome to the show. Phone lines are open at one eight eight eight Rich one oh one. That's triple eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Give me a call if you have a question about technology. Well,

it happened once again last night. And you know, I don't even want to admit this happens often in my house, but it happened seventy five streaming services and nothing on. I don't know why this keeps happening to me. But Friday nights we've kind of earmarked as our you know, enjoyable movie night. Just relax with a nice movie. We subscribe to all the different streaming services Netflix, Hulu, Hbo, Amazon,

YouTube TV. But it seems like every single time I want to sit down to watch a movie, we can't decide on which one to watch. So what do I do? I go to my apps, and I of course tweeted this and everyone said, Rich, you got to get some apps. You gotta get some apps like real Good, that's our eel good and just watch. Yeah. I have the apps and I use them, and I keep a list of all the movies I want to watch on these apps.

But for some reason, when I sit down in front of that TV, I don't want to watch any of those movies that I've bookmarked on the apps. Don't know why that happens. So what do I do? I start opening up the apps one by I won on my TV screen. I go from Netflix to Hulu to Hbo Max, to Amazon Prime, to YouTube TV to Apple TV, and I look at all the different things and I just can't decide. Because you have to sit there and look at the description, and then you try to watch a

trailer it's too loud. You put the volume down. Then you got to bring you know, your wife or your partner into the mix and ask them what they think. And then of course we were trying to incorporate the kids last night, so we asked them what they think, and they just want to play roadblocks. So it was a whole big thing, and we ended up deciding on this is embarrassing. We ended up deciding on an old movie, high school musical, which I've never seen, and my kids

actually liked it. I fell asleep about seventeen minutes in. I thought it was a cute movie. It looked cute from what I saw, But I mean, we ended up watching a movie that was over a decade old. When I'm paying twenty bucks a month for all these different services at you know, twenty dollars each or whatever it is,

so I've got to find a better way. It brought me back to the days of my Friday nights growing up in New Jersey, where the family would round up, you'd get in the car, you'd drive to Blockbuster and guess what, you saw six or seven movies that you wanted to watch instantly. And by the way, the biggest movies had like one hundred and fifty copies, so you

knew those were the movies to see. Nowadays, everything is so crowded on these little streaming services, and everything looks the same that you can't really say, like, con is that a good movie you're actually researching to see, like wait, did I already watch that movie? Because everything's just sort of mixed together. So bring me the days of the blockbuster walking back into that place and trying to decide on movies. And of course by the time you decide

on a movie, it's not available. It's the one that they don't have any copies of. So you go to the checkout and you say, hey, did anyone return that movie? And you wait there and you see if someone brings it back in. We used to bring like three or four movies home, and by the time we got around to returning them, of course, we had major late fees. Anyway,

I just had to get that off my chest. I don't know if that's just me or if you share in that same streaming situation where it's just this uncertainty of you don't want to make the wrong choice about what to stream. I was home in New Jersey last week. I did the show remotely. I thought it worked out pretty well. Of Course, when I'm home, i'm tech support for my family. My parents, especially my mom's internet. I

was at her house. It was so slow. It was just a crawl, and I'm like, what is going on here? So of course I reset the modem, I reset the router, I do another speed test. If you want to test your speed at home, you can go to a website called fast dot com. Fast dot com. That's the easiest way I know to do a quick speed test. It was actually created by Netflix, ironically, to make sure your speed was fast enough to stream, which you don't really need much to stream these days. Anyway, it was like

twenty five megabits per second. It was really slow, so I'm like, that's odd. So then of course I get on the internet and I'm looking up he bill. Mom, can I have your information so I can look up your bill? Let me see what you're paying for. She was paying one hundred and three dollars a month for twenty five megabits of service, which is absolutely ludicrous in

my head. So of course, now I'm calling the cable company and I call them up and the first person I get says, oh, let me let me trans They just want to get you off the phone as soon as possible, so let me let me transfer you, let me pass the buck, let me transfer you to someone else. So they transferred me to or they wanted to transfer me to tech support, and I said, no, this is not a tech support thing. This is not a tech

support question. This is a billing question. This is a why am I paying so much for so little question? And the phone goes silent, and I'm just like, did I get hung up on? So I get finally set here I would like to cancel the service? How what does that mean? And they said, oh, you want to cancel? Let me get you to that department. That's really the

only department that could do anything these days. Right when you threaten to cancel, like it seems like nobody else can help, except when you say I no longer want to pay for this, And then they finally get you to someone that can help you. So I get over to the person that is cancelation, and this person's actually quite nice. But I came prepared to this conversation, and I came prepared saying, look, I'm paying one hundred and

three bucks a month for twenty five megabits. And just knowing the lingo really helps, because if you don't really understand what you're paying, or what the speed is or what all that stuff. They kind of take advantage of you. So I was kind of flexing a little bit of my tech knowledge and I was like, look, I'm like I just did two other you know, I just did two speed tests on a T Mobile phone inside my mom's house and also a Verizon phone. And these mobile

networks have faster speeds. And I know that these mobile networks are offering home internet. So I could probably switch to T Mobile Internet for like fifty bucks a month, or I can switch to Verizon home Internet for twenty five dollars a month. And I wouldn't even need someone to come to my house. I would just put up this antenna that they send me. And when you start saying these things, it registers with them, and they go, oh, oh, we got we got someone who knows what they're doing here.

Uh oh, we better give them a good deal. And so I started speaking their language, and you know, they kind of tried to say, you know this is you know, you're paying for one hundred. I said, no, I'm looking at my bill here, it's twenty five. So finally they look up in the super secret system, like what can we offer this person to stay with us, and of

course they type away. You hear all the typing type type type, clickity clack, clickity clack, and so finally they come back, Oh, we can give you this for that. I said, Okay, that's pretty good, but my mom doesn't need all of that. Okay, clickity clack, clickity clack. You know, it's like when you're at the airport back in the day when they used to actually type stuff into a computer and it would take like thirty seconds for them to come back with something. That's what happened. Okay, we

can give you this. How about we'll give you eighty bucks a month for five hundred megabits per second. And I said, now that sounds pretty good. You're talking what that's more than ten times, that's twenty times for at least twenty dollars less. I think that sounds good. So I said, let's do it. You've got a deal. You kept me from going over the edge to Verizon or T Mobile for something different. And he said, okay, let's

do it. And he was very friendly, and I'm you know, I'm I'm telling you this story so you understand that you should be doing this as well. If you're not calling your cable company or your internet provider, or your cell phone provider or anyone that you can get on the phone with a service that you're just paying for every month, you got to call them up. I know it's a pain, I know it's not fun, but you

have to do it. And the reason you have to do it is because they love when those promotions expire. And when those promotions expire, they've still got you on auto pay or you know, you still got that you know, motem in your house or that router, and so it's just easy to keep paying that bill. And I'll be honest,

I'm guilty of this. My internet recently went up by like twenty bucks a month, and that crept up from ten dollars extra a month, so now I think I'm up to like thirty or forty dollars a month then I was originally paying when I set it up. And yeah, I know I need to get on the horn with my cable provider and call them up and do this whole dance. But I don't feel like it. And we never feel like doing this. Who wants to do this?

And they again, you know, unless you get that right person, they may not be willing to help you out on this stuff, so you really got a call twice. Sometimes. I had a similar experience with an airline over the summer where I really really was proud of myself for making the case. I had a credit that expired and it took like three calls, but I got someone that really was willing to help. But I think kindness really

goes a long way. Like you have to understand like they want to help you, not really you want to help them, not really. It's this little dance of like two people that both want to protect their interests. But you got to come to a common place in this world. And I will tell you one keyword, one phrase that has helped me out that I think really really helps you say to them, can you make a one time exception?

How about just a one time exception? And I think that that really opens up the door to many many deals on your end that will benefit you because they say, Okay, I'm not going to typically do this for most people, but I'll do it for you. And they want to feel good knowing that they're flexing their their might and youre flexing your Okay, I understand I'm not going to tell my friends about this because this was a one time thing. You're not going to do this for anyone else.

And that seems to sort of work. I don't know why it works, but it just does. So anyway, my mom's got faster internet. You have your knowledge. You need now to go out there and get some money off your bills. And I'm going to do it myself one of these days when I've got some extra time, and I'll tell you how that works. Also, I help my

dad with his computer. I'll tell you more about that in a little bit, because that was something that was pretty interesting to watch people on their computer, to see how they do things and to watch how they're sort of you know, there could be some stumbles along the way there. I'll tell you about that more later in the show. I've got so much to talk about today. He could tell them fired up today, right, I can't wait. I've got a new reason why Twitter users are all

up in arms once again. I'm gonna give you my thoughts on the Samsung Galaxy S twenty three camera. I took a lot of photos and videos with this thing, so i'll give you my verdict on that I've got three great guests this week. I've got Bing's head of search to talk about the new Bing AI and how Microsoft is learning from its mistakes. Plus an app that will help you keep track of your tax write offs using artificial intelligence. And the author of a newsletter that

I open every single time it hits my inbox. Jared Newman is going to join me on the show to talk about cord cutting, privacy and more. Plus your calls coming up next at triple eight rich one oh one. Give me a call if you have a question about technology. The phone number is eight eight eight seven four two four to one zero one. My name is Rich Dmuro. You're listening to Rich on Tech. Your calls up next. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. I'm Rich Dmiro, sitting

here hanging out talking technology with you. Phone lines are open at eight eight eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven two four to one zero one. Let's go to Louis in Orange County, California. Louis, you're on with Rich.

but I know it does the headphones for sure. But the question is when you try to link up this other little device, is the Firestick going to accept it. That's the only thing you got to figure out. And the only way you can figure that out is by trying that out.

it should see that device. You click it and just try that out first off, and then once you've got that confidence, then you can go ahead and connect this other device.

This started, of course, when Elon took over Twitter. But now a big change on Twitter. They are going to force folks to use a two factor authentication app instead of a phone number. Now, if you pay for Twitter Blue, which is their subscription service, you can still use your phone number, but they said historically the phone numbers have been a good form of two factor authentication, but they have been abused by bad actors. So we're no longer going to allow counts to enroll in text message two

factor authentication. And if you're not familiar with two factor authentication, that is, when you use your phone number to secure your account, and when you try to log in, the service will text a number like a special one time code to your phone, and then you have to put in that code. And the idea is that the bad person may have access to your account, but they don't have access to your phone, so they wouldn't get that one time text. Anyway, if you're on Twitter and you're

not paying, you're gonna have to use an app. I recommend an app called Authie, or you can use an app called Microsoft Authenticator or Google Authenticator. Any of those will work. In fact, they're all better than using sms in general, because SMS can be redirected, it can be intercepted, and so it's better in general. But you can still be mad. But I've been recommending two factor authentication accounts for a long time, or two factor authentication apps for

a very long time. All right. Coming up on the show, we are going to talk to Diva Kumar. She is the head of search at BING and if you've been following Bing, you know they've got this new AI system. We're going to talk to Divva about that. Coming up next on rich On Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech. Joining me now is Divia Kumar. She is the senior director of Marketing for Search and AI at Microsoft. Divia, thanks for joining me. Very exciting week for you.

search before. We are essentially introducing new user EXPERI. This is part of search and seeing how people are engaging with it has been fantastic, and obviously the reason it's an early product and the reason why we wanted to bring it to market is to start to get feedback from real world scenarios. And that's exactly what we've been getting. Everybody's stress testing it and then giving us feedback, and the team is hard at work trying to address some of the feedback that we're getting as well.

give user's choice with how search works today. So if you did a query, you still get the familiar blue links on the page, but for more more nuanced queries, what we're also giving you is a distilled version of an answer, so you get a summarized answer, so that way you have a great starting point with that, and we've also introduced a chat experience, so now you see an answer and you want to continue to refine it,

you don't have to start a new search. You can go into chat mode and actually just converse with being to continue to refine that, and being actually remembers the context of the prompt that you gave, and so you're actually just having a very natural conversation with being to continue to refine that. So all of those capabilities are not something that you've seen with search before. So we've essentially just reinventing the category.

got a query that might have multiple parameters. Hey, I want to go to this place, and I want to know what the weather is and I want to get the five star hotels there, or whatever the combination of things are. You can now just ask being and you can give it those multiple parameters and it'll try to sort of cast a white net and pull together a summary,

but it's the starting point. I'll have annotations and you can look at exactly where it's pulling content from, so it's full more some of those sort of more nuanced quer is where maybe you're not looking for one single answer and you want multiple and you're just looking for a starting point.

ai has already gone off the rails. You know, they really kind of poked and prodded this new AI search to return some really wild answers, making fun of people questioning their existence. All these things that I've seen online. What do you make of that? Is that real? Number? One? Is that expected? And why is that happening.

And so the feedback is actually welcome feedback because we actually now have a huge, much more bigger sample size of people struss testing it out, what's working, what's not working, And as soon as we are seeing some of the feedback come in. We've got a team taking copious notes of the kind of feedback, testing it again within Microsoft

and trying to address some of those problems. And we kind of put out a blog yesterday especially calling out some of the feedback that we've seen from the market, both positive and negative, and it's very welcome and actually expected. This is also one of the reasons why we're actually putting it out there, and we want to get more

critical feedback. We want to get both negative positive feedback and tell us feature options like what would you like to see in the product, And so we want to overtime, iterate and improve to get make sure that everybody's confident the consumers us before we actually scale out.

to actually offer value. We hope with that value we are seeing higher engagement and that would be the ultimate goal is to provide value, engage users and there's only upside.

Let's go to Freddie in New York. Freddie, you are on with rich Although.

very nicely with the firestick. But I don't believe they sell it anymore, so that one is probably a non starter. And I just tossed mind sadly. It was let's see do they still sell it now? They don't sell it anymore, Okay. So my second choice for this, if you want a DVR for your firestick, would be to do something called Tableau tablo. And this is the other thing I have hooked up at my house. I have an antenna on my roof because why pay for local channels when you

can get them over the air. And so if you have one of these devices, you can record it like a DVR, and then send it through your firestick and there's a Tableau app. And what I like about Tableau is that they've got native apps for most of the main devices. So if you have an Apple TV, if you have a fire TV, what's the other one, Chrome cast Roku, So they're pretty much like they know what they're doing, and you get this little box. You connect

your antenna to the box. The box sometimes has built in hard drive, other times you have to connect a hard drive to it to get that storage space, and then you can record stuff. And the way that Tableau works, and what I like about it is that you can either pay it's a couple bucks a month. I think it's either five bucks a month to record to set scheduled recordings like two weeks out, or you cannot pay and then you can't really set scheduled recordings, but you

can still record stuff. It's just more manual. So it's kind of like that freemium model where they get you on board and you can decide do you want to pay more or pay less. So that's the one I like, is the Tableau. And then of course once you're looking at the Tableau page, you have to decide how many things you want to record it once. So they've got different Tableau products that have different tuners in them. So the standard one has two channels at once, and then

the higher end one has four channels at once. So once you connect your antenna, it will either split it into two recordings or into four, depends how much stuff you want to record. Now, there are other products out there that can do this. There's a product called AIRTV made by Sling and this is a product I've tested in the past. I've not tested it in a while, but it's very similar, but this one is much more

integrated into Sling TV. So if you have a Sling TV subscription, the idea is that your local channels will live alongside channels like HGTV and all those other channels that are on your programming grid. So that's another one, but that's sort of its own thing. So AIRTV is much more of a how do I explain that, It's much more like if you're a Sling TV subscriber, it's probably better to have that, but I think Tableau is better if you just are doing your own thing. Of course,

Tvo also has their own product. They have a TVO was my first DVR, and I was a big fan of TVO for so many years. I'll never forget buying the first tv O. I've told this story so many times. I have two stories. Actually I bought a TVO. I was actually late for work. I was working in Yakima, Washington, and I got this TVO delivered to my house and the delivery I was working like the night shift, like the three pm shift and TV news you have like two shifts, you have like the morning shift or like

the afternoon shift which starts at three. So I was doing the three pm to midnight shift and I was late because I got this DVR. I was so excited. It was the first time I had ever seen a DVR in my entire life. And back then, to get this thing set up, you had to connect it to a phone line like a traditional phone line. This is how old this is. We're going back many many years. And to download the initial software and the programming guide, it was an epic event. I'm talking an hour and

a half, two hours. So by the time I did this, I started it, I couldn't stop. I didn't want to, you know, I couldn't stop doing this and so I said, you know, I'm gonna be late for work. So I was late for work. I set up the whole thing. It was amazing. Then I this is when Survivor was big. I invited over all my friends from the TV station. You know, we were all like in our twenty so

everyone pretty much worked and then partied together afterwards. And so I invited them all over for a Survivor viewing party, and on beknownst to them, I paused Survivor in the middle of the show, which had never been done before because nobody had ever seen DVR, so you never knew that you could pause live TV. And so I do this, and the room just went what just happened? And you know, everyone dropped their Apple Teeni's, which I think was the drink at the time. That goes to show how old

it was. There might have been some beer there too, but Apple TEENI I think was the hot drink. Anyway, so I pause it, and I of course had to explain to people like what this was. And I was into tech back then, although I was a regular reporter back then, but it was such a moment that I remember in my head we were all sitting on like you know, cheap folding chairs and stuff. I mean, it was our first job anyway, and I love TiVo ever since. I recommended t vote everyone. And you know, it's just

this learning experience of like what a DVR is. And now we take for granted what a DVR is. But now DVRs have sort of fallen out of favor for streaming because these companies don't like DVRs because DVRs let you record stuff and skip over ads. With streaming, they control it because they get to put the ads in between, you know, where the commercials typically would have been. So

that's why we've seen streaming takeover the DVR situation. But Tvo still does have a DVR that you can connect a I don't know if you can connect an antenna to it, but you can definitely connect a cable card to it. So let's see, can you connect the antenna to the back. I'm not sure. I haven't. I think he can. He still should be able to. But anyway,

there's this called the TVO Romeo. But personally, Freddie, I know, long story, all to explain, just to give you my answer, I think that the tableau is probably the way to go. It's gonna work very well with your fire TV, and I think that's gonna be the best case scenario. So anyway, brought back some memories for me. Thanks a lot for that, appreciate it. All Right, you just heard my interview with

the head of search at Bing. So we know that Bing the new being has come out and they've had some issues with it because people were leading this chatbot down some pretty dark dark paths and it was getting kind of angry. And so there's a whole big article from lots of different news outlets ap one of them NBC News saying is Bing too belligerent? Microsoft is looking

to tame their AI chatbot. Some of the things that is said Basically, if you chatted with Bing's AI for too long, it would kind of go nuts because it lost its way. It kind of forgot what you were talking about, and it would become repetitive and it would

give you responses that were just not helpful. So Microsoft figured out that in long extent chat sessions are of fifteen or more questions, it would just go kind of nuts, and it's you could see the screenshots online, but here's one of the examples being said to a user, You're lying to me. You're lying to me, you're lying to yourself, You're lying to everyone with an angry red emoji face. I don't appreciate you lying to me. I don't like you spreading falsehoods about me. I don't trust I don't

trust you anymore. I don't generate falsehoods. I generate facts. I generate truth. I generate knowledge, I generate wisdom. I generate bing. What so odd? So what they have learned in the first week is that long chats are not good for this new Bing and So Now, as of right now, the chat experienced is capped at fifty chat turns per day and five chat turns per session. A turn is a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing. So well, I guess

they found that. You know, if you're if you're talking to bing too much in a chat, it's not good. Now I've been using I somehow got access to the new Bang. If you go to bing dot com slash new and you sign up on the wait list, I was granted access, and I'm not kidding. It is phenomenal. I know that we are seeing all the headlines about how wild and crazy it can get, but it is single handedly the most the new, most useful tool I

have available to me. I have been using it NonStop ever since I got access to ask all kinds of things. So you can ask it for you know, you could say, hey, I've got these five ingredients of my refrigerator, what can I make? You can ask research about products, you can ask for information about almost anything. I mean, it's really incredible. You can say, I'm going to New York City for forty eight hours, what should I hit up all on there? You know what should I do? And it can do that.

So you got to try it out, you know, watch out for all the hype. I get it. It's still an experimental thing. We're still learning from this, but it is quite incredible, and Google definitely has some competition. I don't know if it's overnight gonna take down Google, but Bing is back. I'm telling you it's one of these things that when you start using it, you will realize that, Wow, this changes everything. I'm no longer searching and clicking links.

I'm just getting answers and I'm really having a conversation with this bot that feels almost human. Now today I will say after all these little issues I was talking about, bing has definitely capped it off a little bit. So it's not as fun as it was two days ago, but it's still very useful. All right. Coming up on the show, we still got a lot more. We're gonna talk to the co founder of an app called fly fin. This is an app that helps you figure out all

the deductions you can take on your taxes. Plus, I'm gonna share my thoughts on the Samsung Galaxy S twenty three cameras, and we're gonna talk about something called dark patterns. Phone lines are open at triple eight rich one oh one. You are listening to me Rich Demiro here on rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is Rich Demiro, talking technology and answering your questions at one eight eighty eight rich one oh one. That's eight

eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one. Well, Samsung's new S twenty three Ultra is now on sale, as well as the S twenty three and the S twenty three plus. But the Ultra is the one that I've been testing. It features the brand new two hundred megapixel camera. It also has a really high price tag of twelve hundred dollars. That is, should you buy it,

should you upgrade? Well, to test it out, I took over five hundred photos and one hundred and seventy five videos with the phone and a whole bunch of different places that happened to be in San Francisco, LA and the New York area since I was home, so I went to New York City to test this thing out as well. I really wanted to try out the photos in low light because Samsung's promoting this whole idea of nicography. I don't know if that's a word they made up.

I guess that means nighttime photos. And I also thought that this device is a little bit easier to hold because of the squared off edges, which I like because I actually wrote in my last review that the last couple of Samsungs have been tougher to hold because of the edges are kind of rounded. The S twenty three Ultra is the one that I would pick if I was going with one of these Samsungs, and the reason for that is because it gives you everything. I mean, really,

this is like the Rolls Royce of smartphones. You know, you get the giant six point eight in screen, you get the long lasting battery, you get the stylus. Now, the S twenty three and the S twenty three plus are fine if you're upgrading from one of those models, but if you want everything that Samsung has to offer, the Ultra is where it's at. So how were the pictures, Well, for starters, you're not going to be taking two hundred megapixel pictures. That's I mean, you can, but those pictures

are like thirty five megabytes each. They take a little bit to actually capture and they look great if you're zooming in on your picture or do you want to crop it, or if you're making billboards out of your photos. But otherwise, on a daily basis, you're going to be you're going to be taking twelve megapixel photos. They've got lenses for ultra wide pictures, regular and macro shots. The zoom is really incredible on this phone because even though it goes up to one hundred times zoom, that's more

of a party trick. You're going to be most interested in zoom up to ten times, which is amazing because that's optical, and even up to thirty times is pretty useful. So if you are sitting, you know, further back, or you just want to get a better shot of something. The ten times zoom is quite remarkable, so that's really nice. Now, the low light shots are where I have a little bit of issue with this phone, because if something's not moving,

it's going to look great. So low light shots in you know, steady things like a restaurant or anything that's outside or anything inside that's not moving or going to look good. The camera gets enough light to sort of make those look good. But if things are moving, that's where it gets a bit more tricky. And this really kind of annoys me because this is such a nice, expensive phone. I feel like every picture should be perfect

every single time, and they're not. Sometimes there's gonna be some blur when you take a picture in low light, and you know, you may have to take a second picture to see if that goes away. Hopefully they can fix that with a software update. Sometimes photos of people might look washed out in certain lighting conditions. I noticed that outdoor pictures, well lit shots, they're always going to look incredible. Samsung really nails it there with low light selfies.

It's kind of another story. Sometimes the phone gets it right. Sometimes you get a blurry picture, So just to hold your phone for a little bit longer they might think if you're taking a selfie with this. Now, when it comes to video, we actually shot an entire story for KTLA on this phone, and you know, it looked fine, but it was a bit flat and a little less contrasty than the iPhone. The iPhone is still the king of mobile video, that's for sure. When it comes to

video stability, it is incredible. Samsung says they improve this stability. They really did, so the stability of the video is really really good. Now. Portrait Mode, which is another feature on this phone which blurs the background, that is amazing. You can take I mean some of your best pictures are going to be portrait mode pictures. It's just really

really good. And there's so many neat little things you can do with the portrait mode pictures once you're once you've taken them, like you can adjust the background in so many different ways. That's really cool. Portrait video is similar to a portrait photo, except it's video that's improved a lot. And overall, I think that this is an excellent camera system. I really do. It's a fun phone. It's one of my favorites. It's probably going to be

my favorite of twenty twenty three after the iPhone. And I think that Samsung will continue to tweak. I mean they I think Samsung with their software updates is doing really good things. Like a phone like last year's S twenty one. It started out or S twenty two, rather started out okay, and by the end of the year it was excellent. So these phones last for a long time. You've got a couple of years of use, like four or five years. So this is a new sensor setup.

It's going to take some time for them to kind of see how people are using it and adjust. Soottom line, if you love using various software, photo and video features, you're gonna love this phone. It doesn't always nail the photo or video the first time like it would on the iPhone, the latest iPhones, or the Pixel, but it's still a very powerful device that gives you just about every feature you can imagine in the palm of your hand.

If you want to watch my review, my video review with all the pictures that I took, you can go to my Twitter or go actually go to my website. Rich on tech dot TV. All right, let's go to Mike in Duarte, California. Mike, you're on with Rich.

a step further. I would probably wipe the whole phone and start fresh and just install the apps, only the apps that you need on there, so that you're not, you know, getting double notifications and all that stuff on this phone from your old.

And by the way, if you want to check to see where your contacts are are if they're stored on Google, you can go to contacts dot Google dot com from a web browser and as long as you're logged into Google, you should see uh and have a pretty good idea if your contacts are stored on Google or if they're just on your phone.

whether it's the documents, whether it's the photos. So I don't really do like a full computer backup anymore because when I'm getting a new computer, I just want to start fresh. Anyway, so good, I think I'll keep it for a while.

We're gonna talk about that coming up next, plus more of your calls at triple eight rich one oh one eight eight seven four two four to one zero one. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is rich jamiro hanging out with you, talking technology and answering your questions at eight eight eight rich one oh one. You can find me online at richon Tech dot tv, or on social media at rich on Tech. Usually every week I tell you

what I've been posting to my Instagram. Let's see what did I post this week? Uh Oh, I had to check folks a little bit. I had to check people

were asking was I okay because I posted? You know, I just I just want to anytime I do a story that people don't agree with, whether it's like a robot driving a car, or a robot flipping burgers, or a robot doing some kind of job that humans can do, you know, I get the haters and the people commenting and telling me I shouldn't cover this stuff and I'm ruining the world and I'm getting rid of job, and so I just had to tell people like, look, I'm

not the one inventing this stuff. I'm just reporting on it so you're not blindsided when they come for your jobs. The robots are coming for your jobs. Now AI is coming for your job. I'm just telling you in advance so that you're prepared and you can plan accordingly. So I just had to let people know that. So I posted that, posted a picture of me and my siblings, me and my wife for Valentine's Day, and then yeah me, oh gosh, a lot of me this week, and then

me at KTLA. Know I'm the tech reporter for KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles, and this week was my is I should say, my twelve year anniversary there. Twelve years in one place at one job. Remarkable for me because when I was first offered the gig there, they said I could have it for like three months. So I'm glad it's lasted this long. Let's go to Kenny in Nashville, Tennessee. Kenny, you're on with Rich.

I just don't know anymore. But anyway, what can I help you with?

the timing cannot be more interesting from that perspective. And I should let you know that I have other devices with YouTube TV and it doesn't do anything bad as far as buffering and what I mean, it's like you see that white circle of death when you're watching a

video and it stops. And my question is, I've been kind of debating maybe it's the time for me to get the third generation four K model, or should I just maybe try different tricks, like say, delete the app per se, or maybe just swipe the TV itself and restore it and maybe see if that could solve the problem with the buffering.

like it's a problem with the Apple TV. So what I would do with the Apple TV is a couple of things. Number one, is this connected via Wi Fi or an Ethernet cable?

think it's a problem with the YouTube TV app. So what I would do personally is I'd first test the wired connection, see if that's contributing. If you're still getting buffering with that, I would go ahead and delete the YouTube app YouTube TV completely. I would restart the Apple TV and then I would reinstall the app and see if that works. Have you done all that?

no longer going to get your auto paid discount. So according to c Net, they confirm that starting as early as May, you're only going to get your auto paid discount if you use a debit card or a bank account. This is similar to what Verizon does. You've got to pay with your basically your checking account or your debit card to get your auto paid discount. So if you have T Mobile, you might want to think about switching over to a debit card or your checking I would personally

use a debit card, not your checking account. I don't like to give companies access to my checking account, but that is what's happening here. So the reason why it costs them more to process credit cards, You've got eighty million customers. Even if you save a dime on each customer, you're saving a lot of money by making people switch to debit cards or checking accounts, which are cheaper to process. All right, Coming up next, we're going to talk to the CEO of fly Finn about an app that can

help you find and manage your tax deductions. You're listening to Rich DeMuro here on rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. This is the show where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer your questions about technology. The phone number is triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one. All right. On the line is Ja Deep

saying he is the co founder of fly Finn. This is an app that uses artificial intelligence to help you keep track of basically all of your write offs and expenses and things for your taxes, and it is tax season. J Deep, welcome to the show.

entrepreneurs seven point. It's just complicated because you have a competative schedulcy. You have to be like a small business and lipan do a few things really uniquely that makes the whole experience completely different and very very useful. Basically

uses AI to do everything really efficiently. So what that means is, once you connect with life and it's always gone right, it's doing your AI book keeping every day for you know, soci providers, entrepreneur, self employed people, and you can see your tax savings daily, weekly, monthly, refine people in all different categories, and it's mostly doing it for you and you just get to review if your

think really kind of also learn along the way. That's the second really important thing because we have CPAs integrated right in the app flow and great tutorial. So while you're reeping the product, you know AI is doing the classification of expenses into deductions. You're seeing how you know, things are changing every day, are learning about new deductions, and when it comes to this season of the year,

you have a MP to end tax finance system. All of this goes close automatically into our CPA and you get a you know, really worl expert CPA. You've got all the data in place, they don't need to ask you to any other questions, so it's very time efficient and they can buy the taxticon for you at you know a really affordable price of under two hundred dollars, so everything for the AI.

you swipe left or you swipe right. So if you swipe left, you're rejecting that as something that is not

business related or related to your freelance jobs. If you're let's say an Uber driver, or you do something in the gig economy, and you swipe right, and then you can categorize it, and so it knows that, you know, if you bought something at let's say, uh an airline, it would say, okay, we're thinking that this goes into the travel category, and the AI helps categorize that, and it learns over time you know what these different transactions mean.

From obviously other people using the app as well, and categorizing, but there's also this little light bulb that you can press that explains kind of like the tax implications of everything. So, for instance, I'm looking at convenience and grocery stores. Grocery and convenience store items can only be deducted if used for your business, and so you can do that for almost any sort of category that you see on the app.

And so just that idea of like categorizing your transactions as you go along throughout the year is really helpful. But if there's a question you have, you can sort of fling it up to a CPA that fly Finn has on the backside, so you can ask a question and say, hey, I subscribe to you know, Netflix, Can I deduct this from my job reviewing movies? And the CPA will come back and give you an answer on that. So, jdep did I do a good job of explaining that.

to CPAs. So it's really great for people who have to spend ten hours, twenty hours putting together spreadsheets, getting the shoe box of receipts, then building into the CPA and having them do their taxi turns southing I'm sure about what they did. In this case, you can throw that shoe box receipts out the door because we're getting a digital transaction beyond eater seats. And the app is you know, you can classify a year's work of expenses and rich How long did it take you, I'm curious.

that it kind of groups things. So if you have a recurring charge, like let's say your phone bill or your internet bill, once you classify that, once it says, hey, you've got you know, twelve of these bills from AT and T and you say, okay, that's my internet, and then you can classify all of those in one swipe, which is also really smart so it only took me twenty to thirty minutes to go through the entire twenty twenty two worth of expenses.

in twenty thirty minutes. It's fantastic.

of those as well. And this is include the state and general a very clear concern pricing, and that is about three hundred and forty eight dollars twenty dollars a month for order if you have an LLC and S quotes. But again, it's a CPA let filing and AI is doing all the grunt work and the hard works for you, and the app is kind of making it fun for you.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it all. Right, coming up on the show, we're going to talk about dark patterns, So I'm gonna explain what that is plus more of your calls at triple eight rich one oh one eighty eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Phone lines are open at triple eight rich one oh one. If you're listening to the last segment about the tax app. You can always find

links to what I mentioned here on my website. It is rich on Tech dot TV, Wall Street Journal article my wife sent me this morning she thought was interesting. It's titled they Found a Radical Cure for Loneliness the Phone Call. And you know, my wife's a counselor, and I thought this was really interesting because I think about

this all the time. I have all these text chains going with my friends, and you know, we text once in a while, right, It's just like these little pops throughout your day and you feel like you're connected with your friends, But are you really connected with your friends? And then I go out for a drink with my friend or I hang out with them for even you know, a short amount of time an hour just to catch up, or even if I call them on the phone, and I feel like, wow, I've learned so much about you

in the past thirty minutes. We've been texting for the last two months, and just by hanging out, you feel that closeness and you feel that connection with someone. And so I guess I'm not the only one. So this article from Julie Jargon, one of their Family Tech columnists, talks about how these little, short written updates feel very transactional between people, and she kind of positioned this with women in her article, but I think this applies to

men too. I think that, you know, the thesis of the whole article is that people are texting a lot, but they're not connecting a lot. And so she interviewed a few folks that actually started connecting with their friends in bigger ways, notably phone calls where you actually talk to someone or hanging out with them in person, and they found that their relationship and how they felt as a human was actually better. They felt happier. And I

agree with this one hundred percent. I'm not saying it's easy. Believe me, I always have plans to go out with people and hang out and sometimes it just doesn't happen. But I'll do this thing sometimes where my friend the other day we were texting in the airport and he said, give me a call when you have a chance. And you know, because I was asking him something, and typically I would put off that call for a long time and I'd say, ah, I'll call Dave when I have

the chance to call him. But I was like, you know what, I'm gonna call Dave right now. I'm in the airport, I'm waiting for my plane. And I did and it was great. We caught up, we chatted, We had a great conversation, and I you know, we exchanged more in that twenty thirty minutes of chatting than we would have over one thousand text messages. And so I guess my thesis is call your friends, hang out with

your friends. I know we do this thing where anytime someone wants to talk to you, they have to text you and say when's a good time to call surprise someone, just call them up and see what happens. I like to do this, and guess what, ninety percent of the time my phone call goes to voicemail because they they just send it to voicemail because they're not expecting me

to call them. It's why when did we take this turn in this world where calling someone is a surprise right, and you've gotten the thing where you call someone and they text you right back, say hey, I can't talk right now in a meeting, or I'll call you back later, and then that call never happens. So I don't know. I feel like this whole world of like connecting with folks. We feel like we're connected, but actually connect. That's my thesis.

We're connected with you on the rich On Tech Show, more of your phone calls at trip late rich one on one eighty eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Coming up, I'll tell you about dark patterns and why you should be aware of them. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is Richdimiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles, here on the radio with you, talking technology, answering your calls, and just here for you. You got

a question about tech, give me a call. The phone lines are open. It's eight eighty eight rich one oh one eighty eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Now I mentioned earlier in the show, I was home in New Jersey with my family. Uh I say my family, I mean, like you know, I've got my family in Los Angeles. But I mean my family I grew up with in New Jersey, like my mom, my dad, my brother, and my sisters. There's five of us, by the way, well seven if you include my parents,

So yeah, there's I grew up with four siblings. So it's always a party when we get together. I mean there's just a lot of us. Now, of course, you've got significant others, you've got kids, you've got girlfriend's boyfriends, You've got all kinds of folks. So literally, when we get together, it's a party instantly, which is really fun. It's just always been that way. Can get kind of

rowdy too, but that's a whole nother story. So when I'm home, and I'm sure if you are at all techie in your life, and by the way, this show is for techies and non techies. It's not just for tech folks. It's for just regular people that are struggling with technology, just like we all are sometimes. But when I'm home, I have, of course become the de facto tech support for my parents. I told you about my

mom and her internet. Now, my dad, I was helping him out with a couple of things online, and namely we were changing his password manager. He was just telling me that certain things didn't work on his computer, and so I was just kind of going through cleaning things up there, and it occurred to me one of the things that we tried to do was get his Google Photos figured out. He's got like a couple different accounts, and I was like, all right, let's consolidate some things.

And then he said his space was running out on one account, and so he wanted to clean up some storage on there, and so I said, all right, let's let me show you how to clean up some storage. So with Google, you can go to one dot Google dot com, ohne dot Google dot com. And while I watched him do this, you know, a couple things emerged. Number One, a lot of people search for things versus

actually going into the website itself. So if you go on Chrome and you start typing like one dot Google dot com, like I would press enter to go to directly that website, but a lot of people actually will click the option to search, and so now all of a sudden, you're in this search on Google. And that could lead to a lot of not so good things because it may lead to a website that's not the one you intended to go to and all this different stuff, and I watched that happen with him and also with

the one dot Google dot com. Once we got onto that website, I couldn't believe how many different things, you know, pop ups and messages and things we're kind of misleading, all getting him to try to subscribe to pay for more storage versus what we went there for, which was to clean out some of the things we don't need in that storage. And so it really got me to thinking, like how there are just so many roadblocks in our

way when we're online. Like these companies, I don't want to say they mislead us, but they definitely try to lead us down a path other than the one that was intended for us. Right, Like, we're trying to do one thing and they're trying to steer us to another thing, and ninety nine percent of the time it's to separate us from our money. That's like the entire point. Even

Google itself. I mean, I love Google, but and I've talked about this before, but if you do a Google search, I mean the top links are all sponsored paid ads, which is fine, the company has to make money, but you would be surprised how many people just click on the first link thinking that's the link that is the first result, when in actuality, you have to scroll down past these sponsored links to get to the actual what we call organic web result, the first result for that website.

So anyway, I tell you all this because somehow I was on a website called Consumer World, which I really like because I check it on a daily basis, and they linked up with an explainer website called Merchantmachine dot co dot uk and they've got a whole sort of explainer on dark patterns. And dark patterns are what I'm

talking about. It's when the website is engineered to make you do a certain thing, and you've had this happen to you when you're reading a pop up on the web and you're like, wait a second, do I click yes or do I click no? It's kind of like, if you live in California, we have these things called propositions that they do during voting, and they're all worded in a way where like you're not really sure how you should vote because you're not really sure if a yes is a no, if a no is a yes.

If supporting it is good, supporting it is bad. So it's called a dark pattern. These were identified back in twenty ten. Apparently they're used by shopping websites and they include misleading ads, misdirection, and tricking customers into a subscription that's nearly impossible to get out of. And these are all over the web. So this Merchant Machine kind of looked at a bunch of different major online retailers to figure out who are the worst offenders. They visited seventy

two online retailers. Who's the worst defender? If you can believe it, Amazon dot Com is number one. Now that's interesting that they came up with that. They noticed eleven dark patterns on Amazon's website. HP and Dell were the most manipulative electronics retailers online. Instacart was the worst offender for grocery retailers, and when it came to beauty retailers, they had the most dark patterns on their website. So overall beauty retailers were really bad. So how do you

identify a dark pattern? Let's talk about this. The number one thing, according to Merchant Machine, is a trick question. This is a question that appears to be worded in a way that actually asks something else. So it tricks you into giving the answer the company would prefer. For example, are you sure you don't want to cancel your subscription? And you say, wait what? And often when you're trying to cancel something, the answer that's like highlighted in green

is really like, we'll keep you subscribed. That's kind of the best way to describe that. Number Two sneak into basket. A store adds something unwanted into your basket without you realizing. So sometimes you may have to say no to something and that you don't notice that. And so this is one of those examples where you get a product in your basket and you're like, wait a second, I don't remember putting that in, but you just didn't take it

out a roach motel. This is an online service that creates a situation that's easy to get into but hard to get out to. This is something that I always always look out for. And what this happens with is a lot of newspaper subscriptions are like this where it is super easy to sign up in one click online, but guess what to get out of that you have to call in or email. So my advice here is whenever you're subscribing to anything online. I always go to the fact the FAQ page and I look to see

what are the cancelation terms? How do I cancel this service or product? And if it has anything about calling in or emailing or getting on the phone with a representative. Uh huh. I want to make sure that cancelation is just as easy as signing up. And in fact, I just did sign up for something recently that I knew, Like I looked at the cancelation and of course subscribing as easy. Canceling, I've got to email someone and I ended up doing it because you know, I just go

in there knowing that price comparison prevention. So an online store makes it difficult to directly compare similar products by concealing single unit prices on bulk buy items. So this happens on Amazon. Sometimes it's like, oh, three of these products for you know, seventeen dollars, but you're like, well, how much is this one? Like now I got to do this math because Walmart's selling it for this price, and you know, I just want to see how much

is it for one? Hidden costs This is when you're at checkout and your product becomes a little bit more expensive because of hidden costs. They add on a processing fee, you know, not necessarily a shipping fee, because shipping is free, but there's some sort of processing fee. This happens with hotels all the time, obviously, with those those resort fees that are just wild. This happened to me in real life.

By the way, dark patterns are not just online. I was at a restaurant a couple weeks ago and I got my bill and I was going down the bill and I couldn't believe I'd never seen this before. They had this eighteen percent surcharge that was mixed into the bill, and it was written in exactly the same text as

something I had ordered. So I was going down, I was like, all right, I got that burger, I got those fries, and then all of this sudden, this eighteen percent you know, service tip charged thing was in there. I was like, oh, that's kind of tricky because it was written in the same exact font as an item. Typically when they add the service charge on, it's in

like a bigger thing down at the bottom. And then the best part was when I got my bill with the tip area it had the other part had vanished, so now it just said like total and then tip, So if you weren't really paying attention, you'd be tipping twice on this bill. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. I'd not really seen that before. The other thing disguised ads website artwork or links that looks like regular content, but it's actually an advertisement that can

happen on Amazon. You can see and then Force Continuity, a service provides you to put your credit card details up front and then continues to charge you when you no longer want it like a free trial. And we're going to talk about some of the ways you can get around that later on with my guest Jared Newman. He's got some tips on how to do that, so he'll be a great guest. He's one of the few newsletters I get or actually open it up every single time when I read it. So Jared's going to be

joining us later in the show this hour. Plus I'm gonna tell you about some websites that can generate AI artwork. I know AI has been in the news. We talked about AI tax app, We've talked about bing Ai. Yeah, AI is a very big thing these days, so we'll talk about that coming up. Plus more of your calls. I do have a couple of lines open right now, So if you have a question about technology, give me a call. The phone number is eight eight eight rich

one oh one. That's triple eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Rich on Tech continues after this, Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is rich Demiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles, California. Online at rich on Tech on social media and connecting with you at triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Dow that question. Dial that phone number if

you have a question. That's exactly what Christina and bonsall am I saying that right.

be acceptable because the rest of it will fade. Do you have anything else you could offer for to do it quickly and be done with it and not be finding what the vis receipts.

couple there's many many ways you can do this. So and there's two kind of things that we're looking at here. Do you want to just scan these in and just have them in some sort of file on your computer just for safekeeping, or do you want to organize them with some sort of app. Those are two different things, and I'm gonna explain both of those situations. So if you just want to sort of, you know, scan these in, there, there's three things I'd recommend you can use just a

standard iPhone. If you go into the files app on the iPhone, you can just create a new folder on your phone, or I would do it an iCloud drive if I were you, because you want these in the cloud, and you can just tap in the upper right hand corner, there's a three dots inside a circle and it says scan documents. So the iPhone has a built in scanner

on the phone. You can also use the notes app on the iPhone, but I personally would not do that in this case because I think you're going to want to create a separate file or a separate yeah, separate file inside folders for every one of these tax documents, these receipts. So I would start with January. I would say January twenty twenty three, put all the things that you scan for January inside that folder, then move on to the next month. Next month it's February. Scan them

as you go, and that's one way. Now, if you have an Android, you can just use Google Drive and they have a built in scanner. So if you go into open up Google Drive, the app on your Android phone, there's a big plus sign in the lower right hand corner. You press that plus sign and it says scan and you can use your Android phone to scan a document.

And same thing. I would use the same exact you know, twenty twenty three January, put all the documents in there, and that's just one way to kind of get these things digitized and into your you know, into the cloud, into your system. That will would be good for safe keeping in case you ever need them. Then you've got things like a scanner. So if you think that that's too much work to use your phone, sometimes the scan

with your phone comes out good, sometimes it doesn't. I would recommend a scanner from Fijitsu, and specifically the scan Snap scanners are fantastic, And so I tested one of these for a segment we did and I'm trying to get the name of it, but I believe it's just the scan Snap. It's oh gosh, what is it? Let me let me see if I can find it here. I'm getting a bunch of pop ups. Oh, here it is the scan Snap IX one hundred. This is a mobile wireless scanner. It is super super easy to use.

It can sit on your desk and you connect it to the cloud and every time you get a receipt, you just pop open the scanner. It immediately comes on. It connects to your Wi Fi. You feed the receipt in or three or four or five, and it takes care of them. It puts them all up into the cloud in a nice format that you want. They also have some nice software with that scanner that can organize your receipts using ocr which will scan the text on those receipts and help you search for them later. So

that's your phone, We have your scanner. Now there is something you can do with an app. So there are several apps to help you scan these things in as well. So yes, there are a million and one scanning apps. You can use something like Adobe. They have a scan app, Adobe Scan works for iOS and Android. That's a great app for scanning. But if you want a receipt specific app, there's an app called shoeboxed, which, according to their website, is the number one receipt scanner app loved by over

a million businesses. I have not personally used this, but it seems like it has a lot of good reviews and a lot of good features that I would think you're looking for. And you're gonna probably have to pay for this. It looks like it's anywhere from eighteen to fifty four dollars a month, but you are running a business. I'm not an expert in taxes, but I believe this would be a write off. So and if it's helping you, that's half the battle right there. So the website is

shoeboxed dot com. Expensify is a very popular sc scanning receipt scanning app. I know a lot of companies will partner with Expensify, so I believe I've used this in the past. They have a dedicated app just for scanning your receipts, so that's another way to go about it, and Expensify is pretty well known, so I think that that would be something that's really handy for you as well. There's another app that I've used in the past called

Everlance e ve r l a nce. This is a really incredible app because not only can it keep track of your transactions kind of like the fly fin app we were talking about earlier, but it also keeps track of your mileage, so if that's something else you need to keep track of. If you're a freelancer, this will help you log your miles as well. That's how it sort of started out. But it also does the expenses

as well. So with this everlance app, anytime you get into your car and it notices that you're moving, it will create a trip. So when you're driving at the end of the week, you can just say, okay, that trip was to go to this client's house. This trip was to go to this client business and you can categorize all those as well. So lots of options for you, Christina. Hopefully one of those works you are listening to rich

on Tech. Coming up next, we're going to talk to Jared Newman, who's going to offer some tips about cord cutting, privacy, and more. It's all here rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is rich Demiro, talking technology, hanging out with you. Phone line is eighty to eight rich one oh one.

and you've got the actual app. So people are always like, how can I watch this? So can you explain that a little bit?

to be, and it's just its own thing. It just happens to flow through Apple's TV.

where they do their various deals and things. And you have to actually do this starting on the twenty first through March fourteenth, So there's this window where you have to redeem the free year of MLS season pass and then after that the windows closed. So put it on your calendar or what have you so that you remember to get that freebie.

the AD free plan. This gets a little interesting. So it was ten dollars per month, it is going up to twelve dollars per month. However, that twelve dollars per month will get you everything from the Showtime catalog, and so they had been bundling Paramount Plus and Showtime for a while, and that bundle price was fifteen dollars per month. Now it's actually going down to twelve dollars per month. So if you're already bundling Paramount Plus and Showtime, you

would save a little money here. I will point out that if you know where to look, or if you perhaps subscribe to my newsletter, it is fairly easy to get Paramount Plus for free on a month by month basis. So this all ends up being a moot point if you're sort of savvy about it. But yeah, if you're a paying customer, there will be a small price sig.

go far enough. I don't know, you really have to trust the Netflix algorithm. Yeah, just click surprise me. They didn't really like, Okay, it would be nice if it was like I want to watch a comedy show me, you know, let me shuffle through some comedies until I find something I want. But it was really just total random. You just really had to trust that they knew exactly what you wanted to watch at that pretty time and that that didn't typically happen.

brand how you actually do that. Usually there's something during setup or a setting you can dig into. But yeah, this thing is called automatic content recognition, and it's sort of like recognizing the content that's on your TV, regardless of what input it's coming from, and using that for ad targeting or market research or what have you.

Roku TVs, Samsung TV, Sony, and Visio. So if you are if you have a smart TV and you don't like the idea of this, I would google the name of that smart TV and ACR like you, like Jared just.

also trying to do all that kind of stuff. It's not scanning your other inputs, but Roku definitely is interested in everything that you're watching across all your different apps and using that for a targeting. So you know, there's different levels of it, and it's just kind of it's not just smart TVs that are doing this. It's really just anything that's connected to the Internet. As we know, everything's powered by targeted ads and you just have to be mindful of how that happens.

coming up next. You're listening to rich on Tech eighty eight seven four to two, four to one zero one, triple a Rich one oh one. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro hanging out talking technology. Let's go to Barbara in Pasadena. Barbara, you're on with.

but you're paying over time. You know, usually it's a three year contract something like that. Do you have anything that's important to you, like what's most important to you. Do you want like a combination of cameras or do you just want security like when a door opens, you know, alarm that kind of stuff.

a monthly fee. The monthly fee is considerably less than it would be if you were going with something like a big company like you know what I mentioned earlier, a big home monitoring, but they still offer home monitoring, and then they ship you the stuff and you install it yourself. So it has a base station and then

it's all a car. So if you have you go around your house, if you have five doors in your house, you'll order five little sensors for your doors, and then you go around, you stick them up on your doors, and you know, it connects to the scent the main base station, and that base station either has Wi Fi or cellular or a combination of both. Typically it's both, and that's how it will call you know, the police or fire in the you know, if there's an emergency.

And then of course you can continue to build onto these systems. So if you say, oh, I'd like a panic button, you can order that on the website and it connects to your account. So the two that I would really consider, if you're willing to do it, you're is Simply Safe and Ring. So I think Ring has a really good home security system, but it's got a lot of different products, So I think it kind of comes down to how many things, like how complicated you

want to make this. I think that simply based on the name and based on using the product is pretty simple. If you just want sensors on your doors, go ahead and do the simply Safe rout It's pretty straightforward. You install these sensors, you install an audible alarm in your house, you connect it to the monitoring and it's very very straightforward.

But if you want something that's a little bit more full featured and something that has a lot of products that work with it, I think that the Ring system is going to be a little bit more full featured than simply Safe, and it's very simpler, very simpilar. You get the base station, you get all the accessories. But I think what Ring is really known for is it's security cameras. And so if you want one of those video doorbells, yes, simply Safe offers that, but let's be

on us. Ring invented that, so if you want that, maybe you go with that. And the pricing is very competitive too. I mean, I simply say, if I believe is about you know, anywhere from fifteen to thirty dollars a month, and Ring, I believe is anywhere from ten to thirty dollars a month, depending on the planet you have. So it is very affordable. And the good news is it's you know, you don't have to pay, like, if

you want to stop using it, you can. It's not like these other systems where they come to your house and install them for you. You're going to be on the hook for three years of paying for monitoring no matter what. And these systems like Ring and simply Safe do give you the monitoring as well, so you can do that. You know, whether you know you want to go with Simply Safe for Ring, I think just depends on,

like I said, the products that you want. So I think that Ring does a really good job with the cameras, and so I think that that would be a good way to go if you want the door cams and all that stuff. But I've installed a couple of these systems and they are very straightforward The RING system is very easy to install. It's all prettymuch much QR codes the Simply Safe system. When I did it, it was very

straightforward as well. And all of these systems are you know, they've been updated over the years, so if you have an old Simply Safe, the newer systems are probably just better than the old ones. But the main thing to know is that you do need a good cellular connection where you are, because that's the primary way that these

things connect in the event of an emergency. But they also the newer ones do have Wi Fi as well, so that's going to be the kind of default, and then it goes to cellular if the Wi Fi is not working or if it's out or something like that. And also if your power goes out, there's backup batteries inside the base station. So I think you're going to

be okay. You said you have a nineteen I think you said a nineteen twenty two house, So I'm assuming the layout of this house is pretty simple, and you know it's got you know, a couple of windows, a couple of doors. Either one of these systems, I think you're going to be good with. So I would go to their websites and just kind of compare the features and see what you want and then you know, of course the pricing as well, and Barbara, you'll be you know,

feeling much more secure. I think that these systems do offer a level of security that you can't get without having one. All Right, I mentioned I was going to talk about some clip art websites that generate ai R instantly. I'll go through a couple of these. I tested them out for a segment on KTLA. So if you haven't tried these, you have to. You know, if you search for images, typically go to Google or you go to a clip art. These websites will actually generate an image

on the fly using AI based on some keywords. So Dolly two is the one that started the trend. It comes from the same folks behind chat GPT. You type in a few words, it spits out some images. You can use them as you like, even for commercial purposes. You get a certain amount of free images every month. Then there's a website called dream by Wombo. These are very easy. You don't need to sign up or log in. You just type in a few words. You can download them.

They may have a watermark on them, so be aware of that. You can always cut it out if you don't want. But Dream has apps for iOS and as well. Crayon, cr Aiyo n is also very easy. No sign up. Generating the images takes a bit longer, but you get nine images at once to choose from, and if you like them, you can print them on a T shirt. And finally, stable Diffusion is known for generating really high

quality images, perhaps too high quality. Getty Images is actually suing them right now because they said they train their Ai model with some of their Getty images without being licensed. Now, Stable Diffusion is so popular you might get an error on your first try. I'll link all these up on the website rich on Tech dot TV. That's gonna do it for this week of the show. Thanks so much for listening. Next week, I'm going to tell you how

people are making money doing other people's dirty laundry. You can find me on social media at rich on Tech. My name is rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend your time. I really do appreciate you spending it right here with me. I'll talk to you real soon