Love the Big Screen of the iMac
Is really good to have my Mac back on the desk and available for use. I was able to use it for about two weeks. The hard disk was replaced after it failed. When it first failed it wasn’t too bad because it wasn’t making any noise but when I started making funny noises I had to get the new hard disk put in there. I went to the Apple Store in Barcelona and it took a week to get the job done. During that time I was an iOS warrior. My primary computer was my 12.7 inch iPadPro and a very close secondary computer was the iPhone. I really enjoyed the reliance upon the mobile computing for the two weeks. I wrote a whole series of posts based on my experience over at NoStylus. Because I was writing a daily post on my experiences I knew that using iOS mobile computing even more than I would do otherwise. The thing I missed mostly was the DragonDictate, otherwise known as Dragon for Mac version 5. Despite missing the accuracy and speed with which I can dictate using DragonDictate I was able to do a lot of dictation using Siri. I found Siri works best when I was using a 4G connection on my devices. I got pretty good accuracy even when I was using the iPad via the hotspot from the iPhone. Later in the post I talk about the Amazon Echo.
I have recently done my first Raspberry Pi project which allowed me to set it up as a home-made Amazon Echo. There were some limitations and the main one being that you can’t have it listening all of the time as the Amazon Echo does. The other limitation is that the information is largely based in the USA as that’s where the actual device has been released. Amazon can’t be bothered to send it to other parts of the world. Because of this it’s not really worth making any comparisons between Siri and what you get with the Amazon Echo. It’ll be interesting to see how wide the spread will be for the Google Home product. The great thing about Siri is that it is available in an awful lot of countries. It is very clear with these products coming to market that artificial intelligence is the direction in which we are heading. Will be out to use our computers in the same manner as they do on Star Trek. All we’ll need to do is to talk to a computer to get it to our bidding. It’s not going to matter whether we are talking to the large mainframe computer based on the starship Enterprise, otherwise known as home or if we are using one of our mobile devices such as our iPhone or an iPad. The computer systems are getting far better at speech to text conversion and so therefore getting better at answering our questions and giving us intelligent answers. Will you get an Amazon Echo if they become available in your part of the world?