With the arrival of the news and improved Siri AI, that has started to pay off. It’s early days but I’m impressed by what I’ve seen so far. Exhibit A: my Calendar app.

I spent hours entering every event (of any importance) in my Day-Timer’s to the Calendar app on my MacBook (The Great Calendar Project). Even attaching relevant PDFs when I had them. Don’t ask me why. Probably the same reason I’ve maintained this blog for 25 years. Siri AI now gives me a handy (fun?) new way to tap into this archive.

Pretty sure this is not what the Apple programmers had in mind as they worked on Siri AI. Most folks just want to know what’s coming up.

In the coming days and weeks I look forward to exploring what Siri AI can do with all of the data I have (obsessively) collected in various apps.

It replaces most Google searches, most ChatGPT or Claude interactions, and cumulative hours of fumbling and searching and dragging and copying and finding and tapping and pasting. […] You can ChatGPT your own life […] The hardest part will be getting out of the habit of opening apps, and remembering that you have Siri.

It’s tempting to tell those around you, “Wow! Did you know Siri can…” but I’m going to resist that temptation. Here’s the thing… Android users (who all secretly suffer from Apple envy) will insist their phones have done xyz since the early 70s. The anti-AI crowd simply doesn’t want to hear about… anything AI related. So I’ll try to limit myself to sharing WHOA! moments here.

But if you’re among the 2.5 billion Apple customers, you probably don’t care (about Android). People just don’t switch platforms—from iPhone to Android or vice versa.

I think Mr. Pogue might be right about Siri AI changing how we use our phones. I’ve already found myself picking up the phone less often. I can simply tell Siri to do such and such or ask it a question and it does it. Again, from Mr. Pogue:

An overwhelming side effect of AI Siri is that you don’t open apps anymore. You just ask and then read (or listen to) the answer. As a result, some app companies might not want to play ball. They want you to open their apps, so they can show you ads. That may be why the Gmail app, for example, isn’t Siri-compatible.

A few Siri AI baby steps:

As I listened I was impressed with how good this support lady was. Patient, polite (“thanks for confirming”), knowledgable. Maybe the best support call I’ve heard which I mentioned to my wife.

“It’s an AI,” my wife replied.

I was speechless (rare occurrence). I’ve been playing with AI for three years and have heard countless examples of AI “voices” and I’ve always been able to recognize them as such. I was completely fooled by the DirecTV AI.

“Are you sure?” I asked my wife. “Yes. ’She’ said so at least three times during the call.”

Still skeptical, I went to Claude for confirmation:

Voice AI for customer support has gotten good enough that many people can’t tell — that’s actually one of the selling points companies look for. A few things make it convincing:

• Natural-sounding TTS— modern text-to-speech (services like ElevenLabs, or the voice layers built into platforms like Google’s Contact Center AI, Amazon Connect, etc.) captures pacing, intonation, and small imperfections that used to be a dead giveaway of “robot voice.”
• Patience is actually easier for AI — it doesn’t get tired, frustrated, or rushed, so infinite calm is a natural byproduct, not a performance.
• Scripted-but-flexible responses — large phone-support call trees have always been semi-scripted; an LLM just handles the branching more fluidly and can respond to unexpected phrasing.
• DIRECTV specifically — AT&T (DIRECTV’s former parent) and DIRECTV have both publicly discussed using AI/virtual agents in their support lines, so it’s plausible your wife’s call routed through one, especially for a first-tier troubleshooting step before escalating to a human.

Tells that usually surface eventually: it struggles with a genuinely novel or emotional situation, it can’t access account-specific systems a human rep would casually reference, or the call abruptly transfers once the issue gets complex. If your wife is unsure, she could ask directly — some companies require disclosure now, some don’t.

Am I concerned that I can no longer tell when I’m speaking with a human or an AI? Not really. In my experience, humans are really shitty at this job. Bored/apathetic if not just plain rude. Slow. Everyone knows the drill.

Barb found this relic while cleaning out a drawer. Perplexity took a stab at identification (with very little info):

“This appears to be an original (1st-generation) iPod touch, specifically the 16 GB version, made in the 2007–08 period. It is the first “iPhone without the phone” Apple ever sold—and it has become a genuinely evocative piece of early touchscreen history.

At the time, this was unusually advanced hardware:

• A 3.5-inch Multi‑Touch display, the same basic form factor as the first iPhone.
• Wi‑Fi for Safari, email, YouTube, and the iTunes Store—but no cellular service, phone calling, GPS, rear camera, Bluetooth stereo audio, or App Store at launch.
• It originally ran a version of iPhone OS 1, before Apple renamed the platform iOS.
• The App Store arrived for it with iPhone OS 2 in 2008; this model’s final official operating system was iPhone OS 3.1.3.
• It used the large 30‑pin Dock Connector, not Lightning or USB‑C, and had a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

The original iPod touch was sold as an 8 GB or 16 GB model at launch; Apple added the 32 GB configuration in February 2008.

I think I purchased my first iPod (Nano) in 2005.

Barb purchased this trap for $35 bucks. Tossed in some cucumber and voila. He (she?) now roaming free in an undisclosed location. Click the “critters” tag below to see my previous adventures.

Sounds pretty good at first blush. But after watching the latest episode (Season 3, Episode 5) of Special Ops: Lioness, I’m not so sure. One of the characters is a college professor (who happens to be an agent of Chinese intelligence) lecturing an auditorium filled with students:

What is paramount to understand: AI will likely render what I do and what you aspire to do as obsolete.

Likewise to careers in marketing, accounting, engineering… whether software, biological, mechanical… data analysis, research management.

All of these careers will disappear in the next decade.

You must alter the focus of your education to include machine learning, computer vision and management strategies, NLP engineering, computer vision engineering.

And you must prepare yourselves for a world in which your endeavors are not compensated with money.

Your compensation is in the collective betterment of our society, of our state.

What, no money, you say? Yep, that’s the future.

Your efforts will be compensated through the services provided to you in return from the state… housing, health care, food, clean transportation, entertainment.

And as you prepare yourselves for a career in the future, you must prepare yourselves also for a world that replaces the imperialist goals and economic meddling of a “free–market society” with a dedication to a state that in turn dedicates itself to an equitable life for all humankind.

The episode was written by Taylor Sheridan, “an American screenwriter, director, showrunner, and former actor known for redefining the modern Western and neo-noir genres. After roles in Sons of Anarchy and Veronica Mars, he shifted to writing, earning acclaim for his “frontier trilogy” films: Sicario (2015), the Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water (2016), and Wind River (2017), which he also directed. His hit television catalog also includes Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Special Ops: Lioness, and Landman.” (Gemini)

“We humans are doing a fine job of wrecking everything, all on our own, denying climate change, giving into the same old tricks that lead to WWII and the Holocaust, so maybe it isn’t the worst idea to turn management of everything over to the machines.”

Roger Gardner and I hired Kay right out of college (Iowa State) in 1987 as we prepared to launch Learfield’s second state news network. Thirty-nine years! The most recent “new hire” in her newsroom was in 1995! Since day one it has been one of the companies most successful networks, due in no small part to Kay’s leadership.

It was the first network for which we created a website. Don’t recall why but probably because of the state’s high political profile. The earliest screen-grab on the Wayback Machine was from December, 1996 with another capture in January, 1997.

For reasons I never understood, web pages in those early days of the “WWW” all seemed to have a grey background.

These first efforts were hand-coded by Allen Hammock and Dan Arnall, two young college students we hired to help us “get online.” Those two, along with the amazing Learfield engineers, figured out how to “stream” audio in those early days.