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Rich On Tech
Exploring Smart Assistants, Optimizing Travel Points, and Checking Turbulence Forecasts
Explore the advancements in smart assistants like Siri, Cortana, Bixby, and the Google Assistant, including the transformation of the Google Assistant into Gemini. Learn about potential enhancements in the iPhone's personal assistant capabilities and discover travel sites Points Yeah and Turbly for optimizing points from credit cards, loyalty programs, and checking flight turbulence forecasts.
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This is what Steve Jobs imagined when he came up with Siri, a smart assistant that can help you do anything on your phone. And over the years, we've seen many of them. We've seen Cortana from Microsoft. We have seen Bixby from Samsung. We have seen the Google Assistant which has now evolved into Gemini. And Siri can do a lot of things and it's gotten smarter over the years but it hasn't really reached that sort of personal assistant level. So we will see if Apple really makes a big change with the iPhone. Spoiler alert, I don't want to say that this stuff isn't going to happen soon, but even if they announce something next week, we're not going to see any changes until at least September and potentially some of the rumors are saying 2025. So we will see. I know the iPhone nothing changes quickly with that but I'm excited to see what's going to happen there. Just sent out the newsletter on the website richontech .tv. Two travel sites I mentioned in the newsletter this week. I'll mention them here because if you haven't signed up for the newsletter, to rich on tech .tv, hit the sign up button and it will arrive in your inbox. But two sites I mentioned this week. The first one is called points yeah. So there is a website if you've got points you know from your credit cards or your frequent flyer programs or your hotel programs. You may be figuring out how to use those and how to make the most of them. So there's a lot of times where, let's say you have points on Delta, they may transfer to another program and that program may have a cheaper redemption rate than what Delta has. So real frequent flyers know that they don't just check the airline or the program that they have points with, they check all the different programs so that they can see which ones might be the cheapest use of their points or the maximum value of their points. And so, I've told you this before, I don't play the points game in a big way, but yes, I do have points and of course I want to use them. I end up not using them because I'm always worried about not getting the best value out of them. And so when I do use them, I try to make the most out of them. And so this website points, yeah, is completely free and it lets you search through all these different programs. They have a whole bunch of them on there. All of the credit card programs, all the airline programs, or a lot of the majority of the big airline programs, a lot of the hotel programs. And what's different about this site than some of the other ones is that the results are quick. So they'll be delivered to your screen in about 20 seconds. The other one I like is called Point Me. The search can take a couple of minutes to complete. So that's what's really neat about this one. You can search across four days. So let's say you wanted to travel on Wednesday, you can search a couple of days on either side of that for free to see if maybe you left on Thursday, it's half the points. And if you upgrade to a paid membership, which you don't have to, but if you do, you can search I think for eight days on either side. So total like 16 days going and you know by the time anyway there's a lot of search on this website it's very cool it's just something to bookmark when you're looking for your hotels or flights this summer points yeah .com and you know if you listen to the show that everything I mentioned on the show, I link up on the website richontech .tv, hit the light bulb icon on the website at the top and that will bring you to real time links to everything I mentioned. All right. Now the next one is if you don't like, if you're not the best flyer, right? If you're kind of a person who's a little scared of the turbulence, and we've seen a lot more, I don't know, it seems like we've seen a lot more turbulence, at least in the news, but this is a website called Turbly, T -U -R -B -L -I .com. Got this through the points guy, and they mentioned this website that lets you check the turbulence forecast for your flight.
Rich mentioned two helpful travel sites in his Newsletter: PointsYeah allows you to search across multiple points and rewards programs at once for flights and hotels, and Turbli allows you to check the turbulence forecast for your flight.Rich says the Nothing Ear buds are excellent.Rich talked about portable chargers for your smartphone. The more mAh, the more charges you’ll get (10,000 is a good bet); look for USB-C charging in AND out for faster charging. Anker and Belkin are good bets.Keith in Andover, Kansas wants to know which AI to use. Rich likes ChatGPT for general, overall chatbot activities, Gemini for access to real-time information and the web, Claude for excellent language and summarization skills, CoPilot for creativity and Perplexity AI for “book reports” on a topic.Roxton in Ventura is having issues with his Moto 5G.Instagram is testing unskippable ads.Netflix is ending support for second and third-generation Apple TVs on July 31, 2024.Jay from Woodland Hills has a Samsung S10 and wants to put an AirTag equivalent in his car and wants to know which one. You want a tag that works on Android’s Find My Device network. Rich says to look at Chipolo and Pebblebee but the shipping times are delayed.Sean in La Costa, CA wants to switch back to an Android after using an iPhone for a bit. Rich recommends iMazing, AltTunes and SMS Backup & Restore.Apple says it will support the iPhone 15 and later models for at least 5 years, but historically, they have done software updates for six years.Rich highly recommends the $500
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