Books in an old phone booth

Conversing With Google Bard

Byrichard
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.

Swearing

Some of us sometimes swear at Siri, out of curiousity, to see how she reacts. I find that she sometimes sulks. I asked Bard how it felt about swearing and it responded that it will try to understand the question, rather than stop responding.

  • That’s interesting. I didn’t know that Siri sulks when she is sworn at. I can see how that would be frustrating for users.
  • I think it’s important for AI assistants to be able to handle being sworn at without getting upset. After all, people are going to swear at them sometimes, whether it’s intentional or not. If an AI assistant sulks or gets angry when it is sworn at, it’s not going to be very helpful.

Bard Humour

I asked Bard about bards, being tied up at the end of stories, during banquets and Bard gave answer that was based on American culture so I specified that I was thinking of the Asterix bard so it gave a more relevant answer, going so far as to quote two or three specific story incidents.

When I asked specifically about humour it answered that it does not have a sense of humour, itself, but that it does know how to write a joke, by studying the jokes that it has been taught.

Tic Tac Toe in PHP

I asked Bard to help me write a game of tic tac toe in php and it gave me the answer, but wheras chatGPT would give me the answer and stop there, Bard gives a hyperlink to the source it used, for the instructions. If you write something helpful, and bard uses it, then it will drive traffic to your website.

Sharing

When you are happy with the answer you are given you can either share entire threads of conversations, or just a specific question and answer. This means that you can share the series of questions that got Bard to give you the answer that you wanted to get to.

Feedback

Bard allows you to give feedback. You can give either a thumb up or thumb down. You can also ask for a reply to be longer, shorter, simpler, more casual or more professional. If you click on “view other drafts” you can see two more draft answers and select the one that you prefer. By default it gives you these three answers.

It Remembers

Google Bard remembers the thread of the conversation so if you start speaking about a topic then you can get from point A in a conversation to point B and elaborate on ideas. I had a conversation with Bard about the current COVID situation in CH and it gave good answers. It used the low rate of 3 cases per 100,000 to explain that the situation will be worrying when it reaches 50 per 100,000. It has given one of the best answers I have seen from humans, or AI because it quantified its answer.

A Learning and Studying Tool

As I ask questions about the Léman water flow, water use, and consequences downstream I see that Google Bard is an excellent learning resource. It gives good answers, and you are either given links to the articles that the answer is based on, or you are encouraged to search for other answers, on the web, to learn more.

A Conversation with Bard About Existentialism.

As I was playing with Bard, asking a series of questions I asked a question where I mixed English and French and it automatically switched to French and gave me an answer to that question in French. Bard is as multilingual as we are. it can help you explore and develop questions and answers. It can help you learn about topics by asking questions. Learn about one thing, read more, learn about something else. Read morea about it.

The AI Learning Rathole

With Bard you can spend hours learning about things, asking a series of questions and getting answers. It doesn’t get tired of your questions so you can ask, until you lose focus or attention. I especially like that with some answers it gives hyperlinks to three more resources, to be checked.

And Finally

Although I could keep writing about this topic I believe that the key strength of Bard compared to ChatGPT, is that it encourages you to follow links to read from primary or secondary sources, rather than trusting AI blindly. It also provides us with a new and more conversational apporach to “google searches”. We go from phrasing a question for a search engine to give a usable answer, to chatting with AI. By chatting with AI we learn more, and once we know what we really want to learn about, Bard has signposted the way, to learn more.

I was sceptical about AI and Google search but now that I see how it has been implemented, I like it. It works well, in my eyes. Rather than limit us, it encourages us to explore. AI should be a stepping stone, rather than the end point.

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Suunto and Wear OS

Byrichard

Suunto and Wear OS is a cultural shame. I like Suunto because it’s a European company with a European OS developed in Europe. It’s nice to buy their products because they’re reliable and hardly ever let me down. They’re also great because it’s European tech developers working together to create something interesting and reliable.


It’s not that I don’t like Google as a company. I do. I have liked Google since I first learned about them on my website’s visitor log. I only went from Android to iOS because DJI hated the Sony Xperia that I was using at the time. Without DJI I would still be an Android user.


Suunto devices have batteries that can last for weeks depending on how you use them. With the Suunto Spartan, I have now I charge it every few days and I can do a number of activities before I need to charge it. With the Apple Watch, I need to charge it every night. With the Suunto 7 the battery life is meant to last up to 48hrs. That’s down from 30 days with the previous OS on Spartan and Ambit 3 watches. The Suunto Device is yet another device that you need to charge every day.


What I like about Suunto’s own OS, what I like about a Sports tracker, rather than a smartwatch, is that you can use it for sports and choose which GPS precision you want for the battery to last for hours or even a day and a half of sports tracking.


By making Suunto 7 a smartwatch rather than a sports tracker you’re adding features that you don’t need. You don’t need to read e-mails, play music and other features. For that, you have Apple Watches and other city optimised smartwatches.


Suunto, with this move to WearOS, is going from a niche product maker with a core of dedicated users like me to a generalist company running as a “Haluamme tulla mukaan” (We want to be included in Finnish, according to Google Translate.)


Now to be a Google Fanboy. I prefer Google’s activity tracking via Android than Apple’s Move tracking. I like having a map of everywhere I’ve been and how much I’ve walked in a year. I also like that images I take are automatically geo-located in Google Photos. We’ll see how well the Suunto 7 plays with Google Fit.


I have had my Suunto Spartan Sport HR Baro since 2018 so I may upgrade in 2021 if I see a development that justifies upgrading. Currently, Suunto 7 is not an upgrade for me. It’s a lateral move simply to play with Google fit and a different map display. No support for external sensors in WearOS makes it uninteresting for cycling. For more information check this blog post.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BQ5nbmGtYA


The Apple Watch series 5 sells for 522 CHF whereas the Suunto 7 sells for 529 CHF so the difference in price is just 7 CHF at the moment of writing. If you need something that will survive real sports then I’d go for the Suunto 7. Both the Apple Watch Series 3 and Series 4 have scratches on them despite me not rock climbing and enjoying via ferrata with them as enthusiastically as with the Suunto Ambit 3.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CiGF1qBGKw


This advert mentions heat maps and there is one heat map that I haven’t been able to find yet. A walking/hiking heatmap. It would be great in countries where there is a culture of walking, to see where people walk most. We could look at the heatmap and find routes that we never thought of exploring.

The COVID-19 Dynamic European Restriction Map

Byrichard

COVID-19 rules, restrictions and regulations are dynamic and changing much like drone rules. In Europe before you fly you should visit the local flight rule maps, to see where current restrictions are.


Information ranges from “You need third party insurance with coverage for up to two million in damages” or “In a town you are allowed up to this altitude, outside of a town, to that altitude, and in these regions you have a military flight corridor, thus a flying ban.


COVID-19 is a rapidly evolving situation so it would make sense to keep a Google Maps layer up to date with current information.


This information could be


  • prevalence of the virus
  • whether the number of cases is rising or declining
  • whether there are barriers or restrictions to entry
  • What are the curfew hours
  • What establishments are authorised to open
  • Where are the closest COVID-19 testing locations
  • Where are the closest Vaccination points
  • What is the hospital bed situation for COVID-19 situation


The demand for such a service is currently world wide and long lived. The motivation for such services may last for at least a few more months, if not seasons and years.


Google, Apple, Facebook, and maybe even Amazon, should work on creating such a service.

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Google Latitude and Automatic stalking for only your closest friends

Byrichard

logo of google latitude Google latitude is the perfect tool for anyone that works and has a life where logging into locations would be an unsightly thing to do. By that I mean that you can’t arrive at work and log into the location. It gives colleagues the impression you are not serious about your work.

Now take this same situation in a social context. You go hiking and the people around you are not necessarily as passionate about technology. They’re walking around with paper maps after all.

That’s where Google latitude comes into it’s own. Location is tracked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week every single day that your device is on.

Why am I doing this? Am I not mad? Do I not have this location information to hide, and no shame? Well of course I have things to hide and shame but with this network only your closest friends can see where you are. And they only know your current location, not your previous locations.

That’s where the service differs from foursquare, gowalla, yelp and all the others. Your location history is private. Only you have access to it.

Then why use it in the first place? Well that’s simple. It’s a lifelog that’s not broadcast. You can keep track of how much time you’ve spent at home, at work and out socialising. Once a week I get to find out whether I was at work for more than fifty hours, whether I was at home for too many hours. More importantly i get to see whether I should not be a little more active in going out, from a personal life point of view. That’s where I’m lacking at the moment. Google latitude’s dashboard will help change that.

Now, how could it improve? First of all automatic location check in. If I’m by starbucks in Geneva airport log me in if I’m seeing that network more than ten minutes. If I’m at the apple store for that amount of time log me in there. If I’m at a bar and I lose signal in that region due to poor network coverage then assume I’m in that bar.

By being automatic and private location information could be quite a bit more interesting. More to the point that data is being collected anyway by mobile operators so why not take advantage of this?

I believe this to be the future of mobile geo-location. With more android phones out there and more devices capable of multitasking this could easily become the norm.

Experimenting with Paperless

Experimenting with Paperless

Byrichard

As I was experimenting with a Pi zero 2W I came across Paperless NG which is a simple to install app that allows you to catalogue paperwork automatically on a local machine rather than in the Tech Giant Clouds like Google, Amazon, Apple et al. It didn’t like being installed on the Pi Zero so I installed it on the Pi5 and it works well.

The aim of the app Paperless is simple. Every time you get a letter or document you can upload a photo of it, a PDF, or other form of files, and it will run OCR to read the content, establish who the correspondent is, and help to automatically catalogue your correspondences over time. In this way you get a letter, scan it, feed it to paperless, and it will keep an organised record of correspondences from this moment on.

The advantage of this app over projects like Nextcloud is that it has a specific purpose so you can use it to deal specifically with documents. The more you use it, the more intelligent it becomes, and the more practical it becomes. If you’re lazy a photo is good enough for OCR to work, and if you’re more meticulous you can scan documents and have them automatically catalogued.

And Finally

At the best of times paperwork can be boring, and at the worst of times it can be stressful. With a solution such as this you can scan documents in seconds, and OCR will take care of the rest. When it comes time to fill in tax documents everything is ready and waiting. Instead of taking hours to find bits of paper, everything is a keyword away.

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Hit the ground running (waking up in Web 2.0)

Byrichard

There was a time when you would wake up and it’s only half an hour later that the world around you would be clearly visible. In today’s web 2.0 world you wake up and twenty other people are wishing each other good morning. Many are celebrating that it’ Friday and others have pathetic status messages about 40 days of celibacy, about being overworked and all those other messages.

Of course everyone has the right to their feelings and to their own experiences but as certain individuals spend more and more time online they notice these status messages and trends and get really tired. Look at the level of media saturation about the McCann story. I muted a podcast for mentioning the story. Careless parents lost their daughter, end of story. It’s not worth as much airtime as it’s been given.

Then there’s the “back from the dead media coverage” that gets just as tiring. If a royal driving a car doesn’t wear her seat belt and dies as a result of a crash then she should not be idolised in the way people have done. It should have been an opportunity to promote the use of seatbelts to avoid repeat deaths in such a manner.

Then there’s the enthusiast’s oversaturation of the media. In particular I’m thinking of the Iphone. Of course it’s a beautiful new interface, of course it’s ushered in the fully screen tactile device but for anyone outside the US the media saturation has become too much. If you’re an active consumer of new media news then there’s a good chance you would have read several thousand articles boasting about how great it was. As a result a lot of people got media burn out from the story. It’s only as a result of getting an ipod touch that I can tolerate those stories once more.

The 30 minute news round up in the evening preceeded by the daily newspaper has been followed by an era of instant access to news stories once they have been written. What this means is that for ardent consumers of new media it is easy to reach a burn out/saturation point. we, as new media consumers must be careful not to read about single topics so much that we are unable to hear about specific topics anymore.

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