Tech News Weekly 325 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. I am joined by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of the Verge, who stops by to give us her review of the Echo Hub, amazon's answer to the smart home hub screen that will control all of your lights and other smart home accessories. Then we talk about how Wise had a security incident. We explain and explore exactly what happened and what Wise is doing to solve the problem. Afterwards, chris Hoffman of the Intelligence stops by to give us his review of Microsoft CoPilot Pro, explaining how it differs from the other versions of CoPilot and whether it's something you should consider subscribing to. Lastly, we talk about some new additions for Apple, including a new Apple Sports app and iMessage getting post-quantum encryption. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

0:01:02 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT.

0:01:10 - Mikah Sargent
This is Tech News Weekly Episode 325. Recorded Thursday, February 22nd 2024: Reviewing Amazon's Echo Hub and CoPilot Pro. This episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by Vanta. From dozens of spreadsheets to fragmented tools and manual security reviews, managing the requirements for modern compliance and security programs is increasingly challenging. Vanta is the leading trust management platform that helps you centralize your efforts to establish trust and enable growth across your organization. G2 loves Vanta year after year. Check out this review from a Director of Information Security. Vanta has helped to build trust among colleagues, who then translate to customers and prospects. What used to take me 4-5 hours to complete on a weekly basis, our preliminary trust report takes care of it in a matter of minutes. I can't wait for our custom framework to be 100% mapped to automations Automate up to 90% of compliance, strengthen security posture, streamline security reviews and reduce third-party risk. To learn more, watch Vanta's 3-minute demo video at vanta.com/tnw. That's vanta.com/tnw.

Welcome back to the show, Jennifer.

0:03:01 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Thank you, Mikah. Always a pleasure to be here.

0:03:04 - Mikah Sargent
Always a pleasure to have you on. Let's kick things off. Can you tell us a little bit about the Echo Hub? What is it? How does it differ from Amazon's current Echo lineup? What can people expect from this unique device?

0:03:21 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
The Echo Hub is the newest gadget from Amazon in its Alexa speaker lineup, which includes speakers and smart displays. This is a new category for them it is a smart home controller. It's actually built as the Amazon Echo Hub smart controller. The idea behind it is to control your smart home. You may say, well, I already do that using voice. You can still do that with the Echo Hub. It has a speaker in it, microphones, far-fowl microphones, just like all of the other Echo devices.

The big difference here is a smart home dashboard. You and I have talked about in the past, micah, being able to control your smart home with a physical control other than just relying on using your phone or voice control. There are always times that you need that. One of the key ones and one of the reasons I really like this device, is when you have other people in your home. This is like a wall panel that you can go and just tap a button to turn off the lights. It can also act as a control panel for your ring alarm system. Instead of having a keypad on the wall, you can just pull up the keypad for the ring alarm system on the controller. It's a very unique interface for an Echo Show.

You do not see the smart home dashboard on any of the other Echo Show devices. It's just for this Echo Hub. It is $180, so it's a bit more expensive than the other Echo Show devices that it sort of sits with. So the Echo Show 8 is design-wise they look quite similar. Echo Show is only $150, so you're spending about $30 more for this sort of unique interface. It is unique. There is nothing like this for the DIY smart home If you have a high-end system sorry my thumb, I tried not to do the thumbs up, it just happens sometimes, sorry. This is sort of a product that you see in higher-end systems for smart home like Savant or Control 4 or Crestron this control panel on your wall where you go and tap and turn lights on and off, play music, lock doors, adjust your thermostat. But those types of devices with a system like that are thousands of dollars. This at $180 is actually quite competitively priced. So it's an interesting gadget.

It's a brand new entry for Amazon and in the past their Echo Show displays have had some touch control interfaces for your smart home devices, but they've not been great experiences. They're a bit laggy, kind of hard to find, Not really what those devices are designed for. Those devices are really designed voice first. This is very much designed for touch first.

0:06:12 - Mikah Sargent
Nice. One of my first reactions upon hearing about this. I remember when Amazon announced it and I thought, okay, but why can't they just update my Echo Show that I have with this functionality? Why can't they just add this UI to the device that I already have? And then I read your review and that kind of explained to me that this is a little bit different. It's got some hardware packed in it that makes it unique to many of the Echo devices that are already out there. So can you tell us about why this is the true smart home hub in comparison to kind of what's been offered for the most part before?

0:06:52 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yes, so this is called the Echo Hub, whereas all of the other Echo devices are Echo Speaker or an Echo Show, and the reason this is called a hub is because it has smart home radios built in. So it has a Zigbee radio, it has Thread, it also has Amazon Sidewalk Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Now, those last three are in all of the other Echo devices, but the Zigbee radio and the Thread radio are quite unique. There are only three other devices in the Echo lineup that have those. One of those is the most recent Echo Show 8, the third generation, and then the Echo 4th generation speaker also has those radios. It also doubles as a matter controller, but so do all of the Echo devices. So it is comparable hardware-wise to the Echo Show 8, second, third generation, but because of the UI you're getting that extra smart home element on this versus the Echo Show 8.

But you are very right. They could, I think, bring this smart home dashboard to the show line and that may happen. You know this is a first iteration of this product. If it's successful and people are interested in it, I could definitely see Amazon bringing this interface to other devices. However, it does have two other kind of key features that you don't find on any of the show devices or you do find on the show devices which is the main one here, is there is no camera in the Echo Hub.

That means that you can't do Alexa video calling, you can't use it as a security camera, which you can do with other Echo shows. But for some people, no camera is a good thing. A lot of people don't want cameras in their homes at all, and if that's someone like you, you may not have wanted an Echo Show for that reason. And this makes that a bit more appealing because it does everything that you might want an Echo Show device to do, but without a camera. And then the other feature that's different here between most of the Echo Shows and the Echo Hub is there are no ads, and I don't know that that's going to stay that way.

But if you're familiar with Echo Show devices, kind of a feature of them is they have a rotating home screen which shows different content, and you can customize this so it can show your photos, it can show your most recently watched videos, it can show suggestions for things you might want to do with Alexa routines, it can tell you about your Amazon deliveries, and this sort of home screen will just constantly rotate, which can be helpful, but also when it pops up random stuff that you're not interested in.

It's also kind of annoying and a lot of people I know really don't find that a useful of the devices, and it's one reason that people don't like them. So this doesn't have that. And the way the Echo Hub works is when it's not showing your smart home dashboard, it shows just a nice picture which you can customize. You can also have it show your own photos and it has some kind of cool kind of video effects, so it's kind of a nice sort of aesthetic look in your home. It's not just a blank screen and it's not showing ads for Amazon services, but and it's a clock too. So you know who doesn't need more clocks, right, I see I would be when you get close.

Well, one thing that just to finish, when you get close to it without the camera, instead of the camera it has a little PIR sensor, passive infrared sensor. So as you approach, the screen automatically turns to a dashboard, which is not something any of the Echo shows do. With an Echo show, you'd have to tap to then get to whatever smart home control you want. But with this, it shows you your dashboard as you approach, so that you can just go straight in and hit that light button or music button and and have whatever action you wanted to start working.

0:10:42 - Mikah Sargent
I would pay extra for an Echo show that didn't do that annoying thing that it does where. I mean I feel like I've told it a hundred times I don't care about sports and it still ends up somehow.

0:10:55 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Suggesting stuff to me.

0:10:57 - Mikah Sargent
Like, the only thing that I like out of that is when the jokes pop up and I just try to guess what the answer is going to be, and so I don't actually ask it, but I'll read it. Like the one this morning was how does a pig wash its hands and or clean its hands? I think was what it said and my how, my guess I didn't actually ask it, but my guess has to be hogwash, I mean, come on, hogwash. So who knows if that's the actual answer?

0:11:24 - Chris Hoffman
but that felt right, so I have fun doing that.

0:11:27 - Mikah Sargent
That's the puzzle that I have in the morning, but outside of that, yeah, I just wish it would show me the time and you know maybe some photos, because I have photos in there too, but they hardly ever show up because it cuts to something where it's going. Which is better? Chocolate on Graham crackers or peanut butter fudge? I don't stop, stop.

0:11:49 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
I know and I made the mistake of asking once when the next Kansas City Chiefs game was because I wanted to see Taylor Swift. And then nonstop I get alerts for Kansas City Chiefs stuff. I don't care that. The right end tight receiver has taught me to have a dream.

0:12:08 - Mikah Sargent
Amen, neither do I. So that answers the question kind of about the comparison between the two. But one thing that stuck out to me is is Well, actually, no, no, let's back up, because I do want to hear, just in general, about your experience with the Echo Hub and actually using it. How did it compare to using this standard Echo Show? And then, to take that even further, you talk about how it's an extension of the ALEXA app. You can tell us about that as well?

0:12:42 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah. So one thing I didn't mention that is Unique almost to this the hub is that you can wall mount it. The Echo Show 15 can also be wall mounted, so there is another. There is another one in the category, but this one, by putting it on the wall you can get more it's. It makes it a really useful Controller to sort of have by your front door or by an entryway. You can put it on a stand to the stand costs extra, and so I found it useful.

I tried it, I have tried it for a week and I put it by my front door and then I also have had it on my desk, and in both places I found it really handy for really quickly changing something in my setup, like turning the lights off in my office when I'm going on a zoom call or Activating the alarm system when I'm walking out the door. So, yeah, it just that extra friction that most other smart home controls Provide or bring up, such as having to swipe to get to something. So if you use your phone you have to unlock it first and open the app or use your voice. You normally have to wait a beat. This device. What impressed me about it was Amazon really put some thought here into how quickly it does what you want, and that just makes it for me a really useful device.

I also like and I didn't get to test this, but it's USB C powered, whereas all the other echo devices use a barrel plug, and because of the USB C option you can connect it with power over ethernet, which makes wall mounting a bit more, an easier, more attractive Proposition, although nothing mounting anything on the wall is never easy, but if you're gonna have this in your home, you know, for a long period of time, I would definitely consider putting it on the wall.

I mean, ideally I could would like to have one downstairs, like by my front door and one of my desk. That would sort of be how I could see myself using this and something that's really interesting. I didn't get into a lot into my review, but this is a matter device, so as matter expands and matures and you can work with All the other smart home platforms and more devices, I could potentially see this. If you are in the Apple ecosystem or a different, you know, use a different smart home platform and you can get all your devices into Amazon. You could just use this as a wall controller and not use Alexa in any other way, so it could be an easy way to add smart home control to whatever platform you use to run your smart home and so I guess, to kind of wrap this up, when it came to using this, how much did?

0:15:22 - Mikah Sargent
How much easier was it for people who are not like you and like me, in terms of the, the everyday user, who kind of gets annoyed by having to speak out loud to get lights to turn on and off or Figure out how to pull it up on their phone? Did it make a real difference? For those folks who are not the enthusiasts when it comes to a smart home?

0:15:46 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah. So again, I've only had it for a week so I haven't been able to put it to a lot of those tests, but I did get my husband to play with it and my husband does not like smart home stuff and he was like, oh, this is kind of cool. So I, you know, I I could see, and especially you know, if you put it on the wall or put it on the kitchen counter. It's an easy device to interact with. It's also easy to set up and it's one of the great things about it that, again, you can't do with the echo show so much. It is super customizable so you can have exactly what buttons you want on that front screen so you can make it easy for people in your home to use and put the things that they're going to probably want to do on that panel rather than, you know, having all your weird and wonderful routines front and center. So I think that makes it it's a more of a communal Device for people to interact with and you know, if you have some, a house sitter or a pet sitter, it would be easy for them to use to disarm alarm system. It's very similar to an alarm system panel.

It's actually, I would say I mean a lot of people probably comparing this to the idea of saying put in an iPad on your wall, which I know a lot of people who've you, who use Apple home, have tried to try and replicate this kind of functionality. And the big difference I would say here is this is actually a little slow. It's not a tablet. It, you know it doesn't have a battery in it. It is not a snappy processor, it is not there's my thumb again and it is, you know. But then if it was an iPad on your wall, it would cost more than a hundred and eighty dollars. But for just pressing a button to turn the lights on and off and it has one of the other kind of neat features that they've done is it's not just your devices on the screen. When you have, say, your living room set up, it will have a button for all lights on, all lights off, so you just tap that. You don't have to go through and tap each one or create a group, and that tap is fast.

But what is slow is when you sort of have to swipe or go into different menus. Then it starts to feel like what it is, which is basically an echo show. It doesn't have any more power behind it, as far as I can tell, um, but it is, you know it has. It definitely has a few Areas where it could have. It could be improved, but for a sort of first attempt and for what it's set out to do, which is to be a communal, easy to use touchscreen interface for your smart home, they've definitely come out with a good, a good product.

0:18:18 - Mikah Sargent
Nice. I have a feeling that, um, those short term renters and, and, uh, airbnb people will probably Be on board with this as well. Now, you mentioned the price. It's about 180 dollars. Um, but if our listeners are interested in purchasing, purchasing this, is it available now? Will it be available soon?

0:18:38 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, so it was. Uh, it was released on Wednesday, so yesterday, um, so yeah, you can buy it on amazon, best buy, um, and I think it's also in um. Oh, there are a few other places. But yeah, you can definitely get it and, like I said, you will need to buy the stand separately if you want. If you don't want to warm out it, that's like 30 dollars and if you don't like the white, it only comes in white.

Um, they do have little snap frames that you can put on it and so you can have different colors, and amazon says one of them is paintable, so you can kind of have it fit in with your decor, which goes to conversations We've had in the past about how smart home tech doesn't always look great in your home, and so they put a bit of thought into that, and when you're not using it, it's a digital photo frame if you like. So, um, it's got. It's got a lot going for it. Nice Well, except for it's from amazon, yeah.

0:19:30 - Mikah Sargent
So I know some people that's its own thing, right? Some people like okay, well, that's enough for me to not be into it. Um well, thank you so much for joining us, uh, and of course I should mention that pretty soon we will be seeing you regularly. I'm looking forward to that. Uh, jennifer has agreed to be one of the guest co-hosts for Tech News Weekly. Uh, so all of you listening and watching out there will get more from uh Jennifer. But of course, now is the opportunity for you to let folks know where they can go online to stay up with what you're doing.

0:20:05 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, so you can find all of my work at thevergecom, and I also occasionally do some video on the socials at tiktok and Instagram um, I'm smart home mama on those platforms and then um also on xjp2e.

0:20:23 - Mikah Sargent
Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today and, yes, we will be seeing you soon.

0:20:27 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, my first show is gonna be on my birthday, oh.

0:20:30 - Mikah Sargent
Well, all right, write that down. We gotta bring party hats.

0:20:36 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Thank you so much, great Thanks so much, maker. Bye Bye, bye, bye.

0:20:40 - Mikah Sargent
All righty folks coming up. Next my first story of the week, but first let's take a quick low break so I can tell you about BitWarden, who are bringing in this episode of Tech News Weekly. BitWarden is the password manager offering a cost effective solution that can drastically increase your chances of staying safe. Online Account switching has come to the BitWarden browser Extension. Now users can log in to up to five Separate accounts and switch seamlessly between them in the desktop and mobile apps and browsers as well. These extensions help keep your work and personal accounts safely separated. For self host organizations, bitwarden has developed a helm chart to enable deployments to kubernetes clusters. This allows companies already using kubernetes to keep their software stack simplified without needing to add a new service. Generating and managing complex passwords is easy and secure. With a trusted credential management solution like bitwarden, named by wired as best for most people and honored as fast companies 2023 brands that matter in security, it's no wonder why BitWarden is the open source password manager trusted by millions. Get started today with BitWarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan, or Get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bitwarden.com/twit. That's bitwarden.com/twit. All righty back from the break and it is time to talk about Wyze, as in why did why's let us down?

No, um, I received an email earlier, I believe it was earlier this week, I may have been the end of last week from wise, and in the email I was alerted to the fact that Wyze Experienced a server outage, or I should say a service outage. Um, wise explained that on Friday morning A service outage led to a security incident. I, my account, was one of 99.75 of all wise accounts that were not affected by the security events, and so I was happy to hear that. But it's important to Understand and kind of explain what the heck happened. So the way that wise explains it is as such uh, aws amazon web services is the partner that wise uses for a lot of kind of its online processes, and there was an aws outage that caused wise devices to go down for several hours on friday morning. Uh, when that happened, if you tried to view live cameras or if you tried to view events which, of course, live cameras are sort of your ability to go in and stream live from your cameras what your cameras are seeing and events are when a camera picks up on something and then records a thumbnail or a video so that you can go back and watch that thumbnail or video. Look at that thumbnail or watch that video. That was not working, so if you tried to do it, you weren't able to because of the aws outage. Wise then Worked on getting those those cameras back online, getting that service back online so that you could view your cameras, so you could view those events.

And when that happened that is when a security issue took place, when wise was bringing things back up some users would see an event thumbnail and the thumbnail was not a thumbnail of anything that their wise cameras were looking at and when they tapped on the event, it would bring up one of two things it would either bring up a larger view of the thumbnail. So, for example, if I was one of the accounts impacted, I might. I have a wise camera. That's my garage, so the only thing that I should ever see on mine and the only thing I ever do see on mine is the garage door opening. Those are the events that take place usually whenever an Amazon person is putting a package in my garage, and I can usually see one of the cars that's in the garage, if not that I see the concrete floor. But in this case I might see I don't know a chicken Out in a chicken coop Because somebody has a camera wise camera that they use to look at their chickens. And so I would see this thumbnail of chickens in a chicken coop and go what in the world? I tap on it and one of two things would happen I would either get a bigger thumbnail of those chickens so I could really make out the beaks and the feathers and see if there were some eggs inside of the coop, or video where I could literally watch those chickens pecking at each other and eating food and doing whatever else it is the chickens do. There were 13,000 users who received thumbnails from cameras that were not their own, so 13,000 users who may have received that chicken thumbnail, and of those 13,000 users, wise reports that 1,504 of those users actually tapped on the thumbnail. So a very small percentage of those that received that notification actually looked deeper into it to try to see the chickens beaks. In some cases, if they didn't see an enlarged thumbnail and wise doesn't specify just how many people this was they saw the video. They actually were able to see the video running around now.

What I've just described is something pretty innocent, but can you imagine if you had a camera inside your home and you're learning that someone else was able to view live video of the camera that's inside your home? That's obviously very frightening, very concerning, and Wise explained how this happened. First and foremost, if you were one of the people who was actually affected by this, you have been notified. And then they go on to specify for me. In this case, again, my account was not one of the accounts affected. Now, aws is responsible for the you know the larger part of the service but when it comes to an account, sort of getting connected between its user and the device that is owned, right, so a user who logs into the app and then the device that exists in their home in my case in the garage in the process of Connecting the two. That is where the issue took place and and Wise says that it used a third-party caching client library that they recently kind of added to their system Because everything was coming up at once. That caching library was receiving lots of requests. It was a huge amount of load on the, on the system, and so when that happened, it somehow caused device ID and user ID mapping basically the link between the two going this is this user, it should look at this camera. The link between the two got messed up and so it said this is this user and it should look at the chicken camera instead of looking at the garage camera, like it's supposed to Basically, it got overwhelmed and it made a big mistake.

Wise has implemented several changes. The company says that they have added a layer of verification before users are connected to event videos. So in this case you would tap on the event and then there's now an extra layer of verification that takes place in the background to make sure that the user ID matches with the client ID. And then on top of that, it is not currently using any of the caching at all right now for determining the user-to-device relationship. So basically, they've completely thrown out as it stands that third-party caching client library until they can find quote new client libraries that are thoroughly stress-tested for extreme events. So they said we're going to make sure that we're not even doing that caching until it happens.

There is some context here. In September of last year WISE had almost it was a very similar incident where the company basically reported that its users had reported that they were seeing video that wasn't their own, that basically users were able to see other users' footage. So this had happened before and before that, you may remember, quite a while ago now, wise was kind of under fire because the company knew that there was an issue with its first generation of its WISE camera and that those cameras were vulnerable. And the company did not disclose that those first generation cameras are vulnerable and many a consumer tech publication and many others basically wrote off WISE at that point and said you shouldn't get a WISE camera, wise does not have your security in mind.

After that incident the company really did implement a lot of changes.

They it built out a security team, it implemented multiple new processes, it created dashboards, it maintained a bug bounty program and the company says that when this happened on Friday, it was undergoing multiple third party audits and penetration testing at that very moment.

And so the company has been kind of trying to repair its security image leading up to this incident, and so to have this happen again has just kind of been not great for WISE and, I think, for many of the people who continued to trust WISE even after that original issue with the version one of the camera and then, subsequently, the September 2023 issue. So, if you are a WISE user, make sure you check your email to see if you were one of those affected by it and if you weren't be aware that apparently this is something that can happen and it's something to you know. Just kind of keep in mind. Maybe, if you do have WISE cameras indoors, I think at this point, it's my recommendation that you probably don't have those security cameras indoors. Frankly, I'm not fond of having any security cameras indoors, but particularly a company that has had two of these issues leading up to this point. Alrighty folks, we are going to be back with another interview momentarily, but it is time to take another quick break so I can tell you about Thinkst Canary who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly.

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Alright, we are back from the break and I am excited for our next conversation. It's all about Microsoft's latest co-pilot offering Joining us from the intelligence. It's Chris Hoffman. Welcome to the show, chris. Hi Mikah, great to be here. Great to have you on the show. So you got to kick the tires on Microsoft CoPilot Pro. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about it. How does it differ from Microsoft's standard co-pilot offerings, from its business offerings? How much does it cost? Where is it available? There's a lot of questions, but I figure it's great to sort of set the initial understanding.

0:34:18 - Chris Hoffman
Absolutely. So there's three co-pilots. Now there's the standard co-pilot. It's free. It's built into Windows 11. If you have a Windows 10 PC, it's going to arrive on your Windows 10 PC soon, if it hasn't already. You can access it on Bing. You can access it on the CoPilot website. You can get in the CoPilot app on Android and iPhone and that's totally free. And if you've used Bing Chat in the past, it's Bing Chat.

So now we have CoPilot Pro and Microsoft is charging $20 a month for this. So CoPilot Pro gets you some extra features. It gives you priority access to the chatbots. You're not waiting a long time for responses if it's busy. It gives you boosts for generating AI images and Microsoft Designer without waiting. You get 100 boosts a day. So the idea is you can generate all the images you want without waiting, like the free users.

But more importantly, co-pilot Pro enables access to CoPilot, microsoft's AI chatbot, in Office app. So it's integrating to Microsoft Word, outlook, excel, powerpoint and OneNote and the integration is actually pretty deep. And if you've used CoPilot on Windows 11 and kind of been a little unimpressed like it's a great chatbot but it doesn't do much with Windows, it does a lot more in Office, so it works in Office for Windows, mac and iPad. I've been using it on Windows 11. You also get the CoPilot Pro features, the priority access and everything in the mobile apps.

So on the business side, microsoft also has something called CoPilot for Microsoft 365. And that's just more of a business product. So if you're a consumer you don't want to think about that, but it's a little more expensive for businesses and it also kind of integrates with business data so you can have it pull the meeting notes for like a Zoom or Teams meeting and combine it with something from a spreadsheet and create a PowerPoint presentation and kind of gather all that data together. But that's not something you get in CoPilot Pro. So that's just for business. So on the consumer side you just really need to think about CoPilot and CoPilot Pro.

0:36:17 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Now I'm curious to hear about the. What is the technology behind the scenes here? Is Microsoft using anything other than OpenAI's GPT-4? Is it rolling its own in some way, or is this all kind of based on that partnership with OpenAI?

0:36:33 - Chris Hoffman
So this is definitely all based on the partnership with OpenAI. It's using GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo, so that's what you get in Chat GPT-Plus which is, by the way, that's the same price as CoPilot Pro. So it's kind of Microsoft's Chat GPT-Plus in a way. And for image generation it's using OpenAI's Dali 3, which is also something you get with Chat GPT-Plus. So, technology-wise, if you've used CoPilot or if you use it being Chat, it's really similar. So it's just integrated into Office. So it's a big deal. A lot of people use Chat GPT. There's probably a lot of people copy-pasting between Word or Excel or PowerPoint in Chat GPT, copy-pasting between Outlook and Chat GPT. So the big deal here is you don't have to copy-paste anymore, if that's what you're into. But technology-wise it's really the same. And Microsoft I was at the event in September where they announced CoPilot and they were talking a lot about you know they do some type of processing. You know it's integrated into Office, so they're doing something on the back end, but the model, the large language model, is opening out as GPT-Plus. Yeah.

0:37:36 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely. Now let's talk about what it can do. We actually would love to hear about your review. The most compelling aspect of CoPilot Pro seems to be how you can use it in Office apps. So tell us a bit about that experience and you know kind of. What ways did you find it was useful, what ways did it fall short of expectations, and all the details in between.

0:37:58 - Chris Hoffman
Yeah. So it's a big question and it's all like everything with AI and chatbots, it's kind of a philosophical question as well too. So I'll break it into two parts because there's two things I think. So first of all is the Office integration, which is really well done, and if you've used, I already said, co-pilot and Windows 11 is a little bit of a not great integration, but you know, co-pilot Pro is the most useful I've ever seen CoPilot.

You know, when I open Word now there's just a box that pops up when I open an empty document that says, hey, what do you want to write? And I could plug in you know, write me a letter about this and it will write a full letter. That kind of never gets old. I keep saying you know, word can write documents for you. Now you can ask it to put together PowerPoint presentation for you. It will generate AI, art and everything. I've been working with a long kind of Word document recently. It's made 50 pages. I'm trying to find things in a document. So rather than hitting control F and searching, I say, hey, co-pilot, like what does the document say about this? And it answers the question. It's like well, that's pretty useful. You can ask it to rewrite little bits of text. You can, you know, obviously, have it summarize emails, write emails for you, so you can have it adjust formatting so you could say, hey, you know, do this formatting. Or you know, like I said, powerpoint presentations. I personally don't use my PowerPoint presentations, but you know the formatting and the creating of the slides and doing all that type of thing can take a while. So CoPilot can do that for you. But that's really cool, that's all really great.

But then let's go back to what I said earlier, which is this is the same CoPilot, this is the same Bing chat. This is the same kind of chat GBT technology. So how useful have you found that? Like, is that something you as a you who's listening right now? How useful have you found that? That's really useful than having it in office, having an outlook word, et cetera. That's a big deal, Right, and then that can save you a lot of time.

But if you're sitting there saying like, well, I don't know, I haven't really found chat GBT that useful, it doesn't work for my workflow, then you know, is that useful for you? Like, I don't know I'm, you know I'm a journalist. I read newsletter, the Windows intelligence newsletter. I read a computer world column, I wrote a review of CoPilot and you know I'm not, I didn't have CoPilot, read my CoPilot review.

I'm not turning over my job to that, so, but you know, for certain types of writing you know I had chat GPT a while ago write like a dispute letter for me, like give me this boring boilerplate form letter with these citations. I did a great job of that, like I'm. That that's the. So, if and like I said, it's amazing for answering. You know, answer a question based on this document, do some boilerplate is probably not going to. You know, take your entire job over.

But also, you know, with chat GPT, with co-pilot, it does better when you look at it, look at it as a partner. It's not going to write do everything for you, but you know you ask it for something and it gives you something. You're like well, let's iterate on that, let's add this, let's add that, let's change this, let's change that. Maybe just give me suggestions for how I might reword this paragraph and then you know. So you know how useful is that. It's chat GPT, right, it's co-pilot. So how useful is that to you? It's really nothing new in that sense, but it's integrated into office, which is huge.

0:41:09 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, now you did mention in your piece to kind of differentiate that the co-pilot that's currently built into Windows 11 that Microsoft's looking at adding to Windows 11, excuse me, windows 10 is not very powerful, so to speak, in the sense that it is just kind of this little thing you can chat with and maybe it can change a few settings.

But to differentiate that you said this, which is built in from the ground up with Microsoft Office with all of these tools, is a little bit more powerful. Can you kind of talk about that and what it means in terms of what the capabilities are? Can I tell it to look at a PowerPoint that I recently created and then generate a Microsoft Word document based on that PowerPoint? Like, does it have that awareness of jumping between apps? Can I tell it hide this toolbar or bold this text or, you know, find every instance where I use the word I don't know camel and make that italics? Is it able to get that in depth, versus something like chat, gpt, where you can't really do that because it's mostly just happening in a web browser and you would have to figure out some other way of kind of moving it from there to there. Does it help that it's integrated?

0:42:40 - Chris Hoffman
Yeah, that's a difficult question. I went to say no, yes, no, yes, because you know it has access to your. It's not just, you know, on Windows 11 co-pilot sidebars kind of, it's just a chat experience. You talk with it and you can provide it images and you can ask it to enable dark mode. But you know you can't say, you know, do all this stuff on my desktop. You can't say, hey, do it through my files with co-pilot and word. You know you can't say like, hey, change all the formatting this document. Hey, what does this document say about this or that? You know you can have it do a lot of that. I don't think you can have a change toolbars or anything. Maybe you can. I didn't try that, I think. That, I think is a bit of a. I don't know if let downs are a word, but one one.

One really cool thing that Microsoft showed off in September the big co-pilot launch event I was at was the ability to kind of pull data from everywhere for a business right. So they had a I mean kind of a ridiculous demo, I think where they like oh, let's pull up the business data and then we'll decide what office that we're going to. We'll decide with new branch of the company we're going to open and then write an announcement email for that. I hope no one's making business decisions like that. But you know, you might want to do some checking first. But I don't think that you can say like, hey, go dig through my one drive, dig through all these documents and give me this information. It's very much like I'm in this word document, so give me an answer based on this word document. You know I'm, I'm, I'm in this Excel, I'm in this PowerPoint. So adjust this PowerPoint spreadsheet Like Microsoft I think is working on, you know, co-pilot integration in one drive and we might see more of that, but for now it's kind of just built into each office app and it kind of is, you know, you're dealing with one individual document at a time, so you can't say like, hey, I have this Excel spreadsheet open, now go do this, go do that.

So it I say you know, a little bit disappointing sense and there's some limitations in Excel. Excel is a little bit more in preview and you know I had some. It's early, it's a preview, it's not perfect, you know. I mean, even if you're using chat, you'll be to your co-pilot anyway you're going to have. It's not always going to do everything you wanted to, but it really is. Is you know, I'm, it's, it's chat GBT, or as co-pilot in office with access to a lot of things? Like you can say like, hey, change all the headings in this document to this formatting Boom, done, you know. So does that answer your?

0:45:05 - Mikah Sargent
question. It's very, it's a preview.

0:45:06 - Chris Hoffman
It's very muddy, it's it's AI, it's very. It can do some things that can't do our things. You're sometimes you're surprised at what it can do. Sometimes you're surprised at what it can't do.

0:45:14 - Mikah Sargent
So, speaking of it being a preview, do we, do you have a date at which this is going to be available to everyday users yet has, as Microsoft said, that?

0:45:25 - Chris Hoffman
Well, yeah, it's actually. The funny thing, is it we're all talking about is, if it's new Microsoft launched it last month it is available to everyday users, but you do have to pay, so there's no free trial. You will have to pony up 20 bucks for the first month. You can cancel it anytime after that. There's no long term commitment but there's also no free trial, so it's 20 bucks a month. Now you know, if someone's already paying for a chat GBT plus needs office a lot, then it's a seems like a no brainer probably to switch from chat GBT plus to this, and chat GBT plus obviously has a good chunk of subscribers. So it's really kind of Microsoft answer to chat GBT plus with office integration. But you know, if it sounds interesting you should, and it sounds like it's worth 20 bucks, you should give it a try. But you know, if you want it, anyone can can try it if they're willing to pay. That yeah.

0:46:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah. So it's interesting because it sounds like it's still a preview. It's still in the works, it still needs improvements, but Microsoft is going to make you pay $20 to to use it, with no free trial. Is that, is that, I guess? Does that stand out at all? Or do you feel like it is enough of a you know day one product that it's worthwhile for folks who are going? Oh yeah, I want to have that experience right next to my word document.

0:46:52 - Chris Hoffman
Such a difficult question. I mean, in a world where chat GBT plus is also $20 and it's the same technology, it makes sense Like we don't fully appreciate just how expensive it is to run these models in terms of the computing resources. But you know that, being said as an average person, you know you also you don't just need to pay $20, you also need a Microsoft 365 subscription. So that's not too bad, right? If you know, it's $100 per year for a family of up to six people from Microsoft 365. So that's pretty cheap and you get word and you get one terabyte of storage for everyone in one drive and all that good stuff.

But then Microsoft comes in and says, now you need $20 a month for co pilot. And you're like, well, okay. And then Microsoft says, well, that's $20 a month per person for co pilot. So now you're like, oh, so now I'm going to pay $100, you know, for my family for Microsoft 365, and I'm going to pay over $1,000 a year if everyone wants co pilot access, which is pretty expensive. But if you're just an individual and you think you're going to get some use out of it, like they, there may be some serious time savings. Yeah, if you spend a lot of time in office apps. Yeah, right.

0:48:01 - Mikah Sargent
That makes sense. I guess the last question that I'll ask then is you mentioned that it. You know Microsoft launched it last week. What is the day? Where do people actually go to opt into this, to get it? Can they open up PowerPoint and then an ad will appear where they can just clip me, tell us how to get it. Where do we go?

0:48:23 - Chris Hoffman
Maybe we probably will see ads for it in office and windows soon, if they aren't already there, but you can access it on Microsoft's website. There's a whole co pilot pro page. You know. One or two little clicks and then it's a subscription attached to your account and the bill you $20 a month and you can cancel after the first month. So it's really only a $20 commitment to give it a try.

0:48:44 - Mikah Sargent
All right. Well, chris Hoffman, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Of course folks can head over to the intelligencecom windows to keep up with what you're doing, and on computer world as well, with your column but is there a place that people can go if they want to follow you online?

0:49:04 - Chris Hoffman
I think, head to the intelligencecom windows. I write the newsletter and I think the best way to follow me is to write to my newsletter.

0:49:11 - Mikah Sargent
Wonderful. Well, that is what we'll have people do, then. Thank you so much for joining us and I'll see you again soon. Thanks, alrighty folks.

Before my final story technically stories of the week we have another break, and this time it's time to talk about Wix Studio. Who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly? All right, it's debate time. Who gets more out of Wix Studio? Is it designers or is it devs? First off, if you don't know about Wix Studio, it's the web platform offering the flexibility agencies and enterprises need to deliver bespoke sites hyper efficiently. So now that you've got that figured out, let's get back to the debate. For designers, you can create fully responsive websites, starting with a blank canvas, or choose a template for any layout and tweak per pixel with your CSS If no codes your thing or you just like to move fast. There's also a ton of smart features, like native no code animations and responsive AI that adjusts every breakpoint. And for devs, wix Studio offers a powerful suite of homegrown web APIs and REST APIs. You can quickly integrate, extend and write custom scripts in a VS code based IDE, alongside an AI code assistant Plus, it's all wrapped in rock solid, auto maintained infrastructure AI that writes your code or fixes your breakpoints. Fully responsive editor or a zero setup dev environment. No code animations or no code animations. Designers or developers. Search Wix Studio and find out for yourself. Go to wix.com/studio or click on the link on the show page to find out more. Our thanks to Wix Studio for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly.

Alrighty folks, we are back from the break and just a couple little stories for you. Up first is a new app from Apple has hit the app store. It is the Apple Sports app. If you are a sports fan, then perhaps this will be the app for you. The Apple Sports app lets you select your favorite leagues and your favorite teams and kind of stay up to date with what those leagues and teams are doing. So I have the app downloaded to my phone and you can see that I have selected some different teams. So basically, what you're presented with in the first case is a screen of different leagues and different teams that you kind of select which ones you want to kind of subscribe to. So I'll tap on manage in the top and you can see that I have subscribed to the PAC 12 conference. I also have I get technically, you kind of favorite. These. You favorite the Bulls, the Chicago, kansas City these are soccer teams. Kraken, which is a national hockey league team, the Lakers, the Oilers, the Warriors. I don't know many of these, but I just chose some. You can also subscribe to leagues in general, so you could subscribe to the NBA as a whole. You know Major League Baseball as a whole. Maybe that's something that you're into.

I'll tap done and now I can see these different options. So if I tap on Major League Baseball, of course there aren't any upcoming games. But if I tap on PAC 12, I can see that today there are four games Washington versus ASU or Oregon State versus Cal, wsu versus Arizona and then Oregon versus Stanford. If I tap on Oregon versus Stanford, the game is tonight at 8pm and on top of having the overall kind of ranking and how teams are doing, I also get betting odds in this. So if you are a sports better than this might be something for you to pay close attention to. There's also this kind of nice subtle animation going on in the background for the two teams. So Oregon with this green and Stanford with this white. It's kind of a little subtle movement. I can swipe between the different games. I get the game information, like what time exactly it takes place, where it's taking place. So Washington versus Arizona is taking place at McHale Memorial Center in Tucson, arizona, and I get information about the specific conference as well as overall.

And then let's go to I want to add the NHL as one of the leagues and then I will tap on the NHL and you can see a look. The Kraken, which are one of my favorite teams, not really. I could tap on that and also get information here. So again, the betting odds, which appears to have Seattle as plus 100 for it. I honestly don't know what these odds mean precisely within betting. So I don't know what's good and what's bad, but usually negative is bad, right, I don't know, although I guess if the negative wins, then you could end up making a lot of money, right? Then you get information about the Eastern Conference as well, including points and losses, wins, that kind of thing. So it's a very I think, stat packed is the best way to put it a stat packed app for those of you who are sports fans who want to stay up to date. It does have notifications so you can get notified about when your teams are playing and get a little bit more information about that as well, and then you can also sort it by your league, by your team, so I can see that, for example, the Lakers and the Warriors are playing and they're playing in San Francisco tonight at 7 pm and I could get a notification about how they end up doing so.

Someone is saying in the Discord that negative is what the favorite team needs to win by. It says Van 155 means that I have to bet $155 on Vancouver to win $100. Okay, so there you go. If you're a betting person, that's great for you. Can you tell? This is really not my thing, but I did want to talk about it. It's a new app from Apple. They don't release new apps a whole lot and I would call it a pretty simple app, but still much like the Stocks app. It'll probably never be on my phone, but that is well, except outside of me showing it to you, but that's the Sports app.

The other thing that I think is far cooler, in my opinion, is that iMessage is going to be getting what's called post-quantum encryption. So post-quantum encryption is a. It's an idea that soon there's a chance that we will have quantum computing that is actually viable as a technology that can be used day to day. And when you have quantum computing, you have far more powerful computers that are, in many cases, able to break the encryption standards that we have in place today at a rate that makes it economically, physically and emotionally viable, which is something that is not the case as it stands. So, when it comes to quantum computing, the thing that you should understand at the very base of it is that in the current state of computing, at the very base level, you have what bits and bytes, and each of these, well, I should say bits, and bits can either be a one or a zero. Okay, so here, one and a zero, and that is, each bit can be a one or a zero. With quantum computing, bits can have multiple states, so they can exist in more than one state, and that it just means that there's more possibility, which means more computing, which, once you sort of scale out from that, means that, holy cow, these computers can be a lot stronger than what we have currently, and if the computer or more powerful than we have currently, and if the computer is more powerful, then it can break through that encryption. So we need to have protections in place in the event that quantum computing becomes something that can be deployed at scale, so that that encryption cannot be broken.

Apple has added encryption, or and will be adding encryption called PQ3 to iMessage. It's going to launch in the next versions of iOS, ipados and MacOS, and Apple calls it quote the most significant cryptographic security upgrade in iMessage history. They plan for this to completely replace the current encryption protocols by the end of the year, and, of course, this is just something that's going to be, you know, added as you update your devices. When it comes to how things currently are, there are a number of cryptographic algorithms in place that are, in many cases, open source and have been used for the longest time by many a tech company. Apple's PQ3 is based on what's called the Kiber algorithm, and Apple is joining the likes of and this is according to the Wired article Signal, as well as Proton Mail, who are working on a post quantum encryption protocol, and a few other companies and kind of services that are working on this.

What's kind of cool, though, is that, when it comes to how Apple is doing its post quantum encryption, the company is going to build upon the encryption that already exists they call it a hybrid design. So it will use the current cryptography which they use ECC, elliptic curve cryptography and then these post quantum encryption together. So you will have to not only beat, defeat the standard ECC cryptography well, I shouldn't, that's repetitive but you will have to beat the elliptic curve cryptography. You'll also have to defeat PQ3 after you've defeated ECC. It just means that it's even more encrypted than you would expect. And Apple goes even a step further by making it so that different chunks of a conversation are going to be assigned different cryptographic keys. So you can imagine that you have a long iMessage conversation with somebody and this conversation spans months and months and months. Over time, your phone is going to get a new cryptographic key so that even if a bad actor gained access to your most recent cryptographic key and therefore broke through the encryption to gain access to your messages, they would not have access to the entire backlog of your messages because they would not have the cryptographic keys necessary to unlock those parts of the message. Now, very cool, we're excited this is happening.

But you may be asking if we don't have viable quantum computing and there's every chance that we will never have viable quantum computing then why are we implementing post-quantum encryption now and not waiting until that future in which we see that quantum computing is actually going to be viable and actually going to happen. Here's something that I didn't know, and it is that many bad actors, many nation states, many groups are actually holding onto encrypted data and we're not going to be able to do that. Encrypted data, encrypted payloads and in some cases, have been for years so that when quantum computing becomes viable, they can go to those caches of information that they've just had sitting there and actually break into them and get that data that they want. And so the idea is that the sooner we implement this post-quantum encryption the better, because it means that if nation states and others are gathering all of this information, even in a post-quantum world, they won't be able to access that data. So, as it stands right now, there are bits of data that are encrypted, but encrypted at the pre-quantum level that will, if quantum computing becomes as viable as they hope, will be broken into and we will gain access to that information. So wow, wow, wow. I thought that was really kind of terrifying and interesting, and I'm glad that, even though it may not be a viable situation, that companies are working on making sure that these messages are encrypted in a post-quantum world. So go read the Wired article from Matt Burgess for all of the details about Apple's PQ3, as well as some of the other cryptographic technologies that are out there encryption technologies that are out there. It is a really, really interesting, really sort of data-packed read. So check that out for more and pretty soon you know update your phone because you will have cryptographic protection in place when the quantum computing and the qubits enter the realm.

Folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. Can you believe the show publishes every Thursday at twittv. That's where you go to subscribe to the show in both audio and video formats. If you would like to get all of our shows ad-free, well, you should check out Club TWiT to help support us. $7 a month, $84 a year. You get a lot of great stuff. You get every single TWiT show with no ads. It's just the content. You also gain access to the exclusive Twit Plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show, special Club TWiT events all get published there and you gain access to the members only Discord server A fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club TWiT members and also those of us here at TWiT.

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