ALPHA IS NOT GOOD
Apple Makes Me Install Betas
The Feature Devil made me do it!
Every year I say, “No Apple betas this year. None!” And every year Apple makes me install betas on one of my devices. At least one device, and often on everything I own.
Betas can be fun, even useful. But they can also be annoying, frustrating, and even dangerous. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, warns you not to install Apple betas on any device you need for work.
Well, I’m not working, I’m retired! Yes, but the point is that betas can interfere with your fun just as easily as work. So if I had any intelligence, I’d only install betas on a spare machine, something I don’t use often.
Honestly, I intend that, I really do. But somehow that spare machine gets traded in or given away to someone who needs it and I quickly tell myself that’s okay because I’m not going to install any betas this year. When I say it, I mean it, and when I mean it, I stick to my word.
Until I don’t.
And after all, are you really breaking a promise when you made it to yourself? It’s not like I promised a young child a gift and gave it to someone else, is it? I mean, obviously I’m okay with installing the beta or I would have said something, right?
And it is not really my fault. Apple makes me do it.
This time it was iPadOS 17.4 and it’s surely the silliest beta I ever installed because it is a Release Candidate beta, which means the stupid thing will probably be released this coming Tuesday and today is Friday.
Yeah, I see you doing the math on your fingers. Yes, I could not wait four days.
So what was so enthralling — literally — about this beta? I’ll tell you what drowned my neurons in anticipatory dopamine. It was Transcripts!
Podcast Transcripts
I gasped when I read about this! So many times a podcast has said something too quickly and no amount of skipping back and playing again lets me guess what was said. I have even resorting to recording with the Translate app to find out!
But now, once you figure out how to do it, Apple will show you its AI generated transcript. You can even stop the podcast from playing and just read the transcript. That’s something I much prefer to do because I can read at least twice as fast as anyone can talk and I can skim for what I want four times faster again. From now on, unless I’m driving, I’ll be reading podcasts rather than listening.
But what you cannot do is read it from the scrolling screen as it will jump around unexpectedly as you scroll. What you need to do is click anywhere and choose Select Text. That gives you a plain, not jumpy window where you can read, or select and copy,
Oh, how do you turn the transcript on? Click this little gizmo with the double quote marks to toggle it on and off.
If you have stopped the playing podcast, you can click anywhere in the text to start at that point.
There is one thing missing. When the podcast has multiple speakers, there are no labels to tell you who said what. As most podcasts introduce other speakers, a smart AI could pick up on that and put it in the transcript or at least label text as “Speaker 1” and so on.
But other than that, the text looks great. It seems to be quite accurate. So accurate that I really would like Apple to answer a question:
If you can do transcription this well from a podcast, why do you screw up so much when I want to transcribe my speech for a text or email? Whatever magic you are doing here, why can’t you do the same when I tap the microphone?
I hope, hope, hope that this is one of the AI things that will find its way into *OS18.
