How Do Google Docs’ New Auto-Generated Summaries Work? and the Productivity News This Week

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In this Cast | How Do Google Docs’ New Auto-Generated Summaries Work?

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | How Do Google Docs’ New Auto-Generated Summaries Work?

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

It took returning to the office to realize how working from home changed me

Whats the Secret to Happiness?

Supercharge Employee Productivity In The New Hybrid Workplace: Teach Them How To ‘Drive’ – 

Stop Procrastinating and Tackle That Big Project – 

Googles finally straightening out its legacy free G Suite mess

The Google News Progressive Web App is getting a massive Material You redesign to match mobile

Google Photos can now directly delete within albums gets new date overlay

Apple embraces Googles Live Captions and introduces similar feature for iPhone iPad and Mac

Amazon releases new Kindle update which solves many bugs

Amazon’s new Fire 7 tablet finally has a USB-C port

Productivity Resource of the Week

Skiff Mail is taking on Gmail by betting on privacy  and crypto

Amazon Drive

Featured Story of the Week

How Do Google Docs’ New Auto-Generated Summaries Work?

Announcements

• Microsoft Built is this week and next week we will have Anything but Idle 108 with Art Gelwicks
  

Other News

Period Productivity: The Art Of Working With Your Cycle, Not Against It – Zoella – 

Sugar and Mental Health

Is there a better way?

One Week’s Worth of Mental Health Days Will Increase Productivity at Work, According to a New Study | abc10.com – 

What Not to Do When You Slip Up at Work

11 Ways To Boost Workplace Morale As A Leader

The InkPlate 10 e-paper display now available worldwide via Crowd Supply

E Ink clock shows time and a host of other info

Raw Text Transcript | How Do Google Docs’ New Auto-Generated Summaries Work?

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:02

Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community, welcome to Anything But Idle, the productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:15

And I’m a goose qubino.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is episode 107107 for May 23 2022, how do Google Docs, new autogenerated summaries work? And, of course, the productivity and technology news this week, each week Gousto. And I read watch listen to as much productivity and technology news as we consume. And we review and discuss the best headlines of the week for you. So with that, let’s get into our productivity headlines. Gousto what’s our first headline this week?

Augusto Pinaud 0:48

Okay. Today, our first article, sorry, I lost, I lost myself in my notes. That is great. The first article is from Yahoo News. And it’s I took returning to the office, it took returning to the office to realize how working from home change me and you and I have been discussing this for the last two years, you know, it’s not coming back what we were in that December 2019 is no more. And what we are now is we have two options we stay which what we learn for good or for bad, or we go and learn something new. There is no other options into this one. And if tourney’s writing, say, you know, I now the office where I used to go now is distracting me, it’s loud. And she made the point. It’s not that my house is quiet, you have kids and all this running around. But it is a different thing, it is a different way to make it out. So it gets to be distracting, you need to retrain yourself, as you said in the article, conversations that will have been minutes now it’s getting longer and longer to talk to people. And this is a cost that companies are going to need to realize about coming back to home and he’s retrain people. Again.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:17

I think the the luck of the draw for her is that she is able to work from home and not have to put in all of the additional work and hassle. You know, it’s a commute, she’s saying, I think a 90 minute commute to work each way. That’s a That’s a lot. And of course, you know, there’s three hours of your of your day, every time you go into the office taken away from you. Plus the cost of gas right now is pretty high, or petrol for those of you who are outside the US. And you know, like I totally get all the reasons why she enjoys and appreciates working from home. And I also see the flip side, which is there are a lot of people who can’t wait to get the heck out of dodge and go back to the office. Because many of those things happening at home are also hurting their peace of mind and their ability to do their work. And then of course, there’s the I guess tertiary crowd, which is they love the socialization, right, they miss their colleagues, they miss the the socializing that they do with people because they’re not doing that level of socializing at home, most likely, or it’s a different kind of socializing. And they appreciate that. So it’s a mixed bag. I think ultimately, as you and I have discussed, no one solution is right for everyone. And companies need to embrace flexibility, dynamism, adaptation in the face of what we’re going through, because this is a big change for all of us. All right, on to our next story this week,

Augusto Pinaud 3:40

is secret of happiness by our dear Gretchen Rubin. And she went into you know, what is people ask her what is the secret to happiness? Well, relationships, self knowledge, you know, but at the end of the day, you know, she said, you know, recognize what people need. And one thing that caught my attention was when she will let me point out a couple of different, you know, morning people a night people and say, you know, I used to think she said that everybody could be a morning person, if they just went to bed on time. And she realized how that’s not true. What I think is important, is that you understand going back to what you said about self knowledge, what you are, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t a morning person or not what matter is where you are and she tells a story somewhere in the article about a mother really frustrated because her husband, it’s useless in the morning quote on bad mood, quote, unquote, but and then Gretchen Rubin who happened to know to new the husband said well, you know that he’s an idol. And why do you don’t ask him to do the night instead of the morning and this count him. And I love that because it is so simple as an example. And we tend as humans to overcomplicate that, instead of look for those simple solutions that will move everything forward to good,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:17

very hurt her discussion on the fact that our differences, our uniqueness is actually really important and imperative to us actually working well together, all all across the board. And the the interesting thing, to me, at least in the discussion that was had was that it related to there’s a lot of discussion around personality type indicators and, and social styles. And the idea of a social style is that you have different people who want to digest and interact with people in different ways. So if someone is very analytical, they want to read all the material, they want to, you know, digest all the information. And then they want to communicate that information with others or make decisions, that kind of thing. expressives are people who want to, you know, socialize, and you know, they’d like the dynamic interchange between people, there are directors who just want bullet points and move on, they don’t want a lot of communication. And all of these things create conflict, right. If you’re an analytical and I’m a director, there’s going to be a conflict there. And that uniqueness is good for for us to have. But it’s also important for us to understand how to work with each other productively. And that’s what kind of stuck out for me here with Gretchen Reubens article, and I thought it was really interesting in that sense. All right, on to our next article,

Augusto Pinaud 6:33

supercharge your employee productivity in the new hybrid workspace, teach them how to drive. And this is a very interesting example because, you know, as the article says, we mostly lived in our auto pilot, you know, what are your what are our autopilot? What are the behaviors that we have? What are our habits, and we tend to go into this habit, okay, instead of drive. And, interestingly enough, as I was reading this, you know, and I was thinking, Okay, have I, you know, before going on my days of working on corporate America? How much did I empower everyone to be a driving instructor. And I’m going to say, I teach, to coach and so on. So when I was employed a lot of people to drive, okay to have that drive to discover that drive? How many people I have in power to be the driving instruction? Maybe not that high. So that was a very good insight for me. And the third one is, where is that what he called the Highway Code? And he’s referring to the I would code on the United Kingdom for driving. And really, where is this code for success? And I haven’t seen it on many of the corporations that I have work directly as an employee, or that I have work later on. Where is that code? Where is that code that you share for people to work? was very interesting article.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:25

I really enjoyed this article. And I thought it was really well thought out. This is the author of the habit mechanic, and his name is Dr. John Finn. And he brings a lot of really good thinking to this process. I don’t like the term habit, and you know that. So I would, I would step away from the term habit and in what he’s talking about, but how he couches culture in this conversation, I think that’s really the most important piece here. So I think we all need to remember that. If we if we think about habits or to individuals, as culture is to organizations, it’s people’s habits that develop into the culture of an organization. So we need to remember that these small things that we teach people end up having ripple effects. And we need to keep that in mind as we keep growing and growing and growing our organization. But on the on the ground level, what he talked about, which is helping people learn how to, you know, learning, teaching them how to drive and really showing them that they can be the instructors of the of the systems in their own environment. I think that’s a really, really powerful message to just spread. So I highly recommend that you. You know, check out this article when we post the links. And I what I really enjoyed about this article, though, was his he calls it the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, the VUCA world. And I liked that I liked that term, because it didn’t come because there’s so much of what causes people to be disabled when it comes to productivity, right? It’s those are the things that are productivity disabled, there’s when things are just volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And so I really, I really appreciated that concept coming out of out of him there. All right, on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 10:20

Our next story is from the Harvard Business Review. And it says stop procrastinating and tackle that big project. And it goes into how to work with procrastination and to commit to the deadline, make the experiment try different things. Kind of procrastination is such a different, difficult beast. It’s a good article, it’s a good read. Is that enough? I don’t know. I really don’t know. It’s such a such a beast to deal with procrastination. And the best I have found is new furies book. The now habit, the now habit, thank you very much.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:05

Yeah, no, I thought the article provided some really good one to three perspectives here, all of them are probably helpful alone, and also helpful combined together to be able to mitigate these kinds of procrastination issues. And you know, the three things are quite simple, which is like start with a simple behavior change, and then move on to committing to a certain due date, as I’ve noted, to everybody, everything. Everything that I do in my world, every project is dated, it has. And people will say to me, Well, you know, like, everything has a due date, then it’s arbitrary. No, because I, I look at every due date as non arbitrary. And it’s just, it’s a, it’s a healthy delusion, let’s call it that, right. But the reality is, is that everything that I do, I put a due date on it, because I want to know where it fits in my world. And if it can’t fit, timeline wise, then it needs to move. And being able to see it in that visual timeline is just helpful for me. I’m a Gantt chart guy, I just really appreciate that sense of it. And so I like that. And then, of course, the third concept they talked about was making it an experiment. And as I have said many times, we’re all productivity scientists. You know, most of the time, when we’re thinking about productivity enthusiasts, we’re either performers, right, we’re performing in some way, shape, or form, or we are scientists, or we’re running experiments. And so if we could put ourselves in both of those mindsets, this is where I would add to this material, which is under number three, you can actually say instead of making an experiment, think to yourself, What if I were doing this in, you know, onstage doing this in front of an audience or performing in some way, shape or form? You you act differently? It’s like wearing a mask. You You approach the world differently when you do those things? One way to do it is to think what would David Allen do? Just pulling somebody out? What would Gretchen Rubin do right? In that circumstance, Gretchen Rubin is an upholder. She’s, she’s if she’s determined to do something, she’s going to do it. And she’s going to have the discipline to do it. You can kind of summon that person. I know some people use fictional characters, superheroes to be able to do that kind of thing. And, and that’s the, that’s the flipside to the making an experiment concept, you can actually do this level of performance and making it performative.

Augusto Pinaud 13:26

And actually, it was discussing was a friend of mine, who is a podcaster. And he had a small, really small podcast for fans of Formula One racers, okay. It’s a very specific niche anyway. He was talking to somebody, and they told him, Well, stop trying to be new for what you mean yet think that you are just the podcaster the look, the guy who is making the show, but don’t think you are making the show think that somebody else and he said, as soon as I started doing that, I start relaxing and the quality of the show when significantly up because he was not him trying to be good. He was willing to be that podcaster instead of himself.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:11

Absolutely. All right. So with that we have reached the midway point, not really, but we’ve reached the end of our productivity articles for the week. We’re going to come back after the break and talk through the tech articles, our featured story, we have some productivity resources of the week. And so now word from our sponsor this week co working space by personal productivity club we’ll see after the break

Sponsor Voice Over 14:32

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:42

Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. And I’m joined Of course with acoustic pronounce the inimitable acoustic pinout for the second half of the show. And so, by the way, if you’re there and want to ask questions, feel free to throw those in the chat or comment below the video. And we’ll be happy to jump in and help out if we can with any questions. Okay, so what is our first technology article this week,

Augusto Pinaud 16:05

Google apparently figured it out their legacy free G Suite mess. And that means you’re going to keep for free all the accounts that you have retested?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:17

No, because I already converted them all.

Augusto Pinaud 16:20

Oh, that’s because you went too fast.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:24

I should have just waited, it’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. This is really actually for those folks who had, say, a personal domain and a personal G Suite account. And they just wanted to keep it for those reasons. I was using mine for for demo purposes. And so I’m perfectly happy to make that a business costs. But the idea here is that it is not free completely, because you still do need to keep up the registration of the domain that you were using. So you have to pay for that domain. But then Google is giving you some limited amount of space and whatnot within the Google workspace environment. So that legacy

Augusto Pinaud 16:58

domain was free on that legacy. I didn’t I wasn’t aware of that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:03

Yeah, you would still have needed to register, the domain isn’t a good domain domain was always reached. As far as I’m concerned, I always had my domains registered independently. So maybe someone out there perhaps had it for free. But I doubt it, I think the registration was always independent of that. So you won’t pay for the accounts or the data and the custom domain support, but you will still have to have the domain. And presumably at some point, you’re going to hit the data limits. And you’ll still need to upgrade when that time comes. Or you’ll need to play the game of, you know, deleting past email and deleting files from Google Drive, and so on and so forth. It’s just a headache over time. So at some point, people will be upgrading, anyway. Sounds good. So but it’s good that they’re doing this because there was a number of people who they don’t, they’re not really using, you know, that much data, they’re just using it for the personal email domain. And so it’s a nice, it’s a nice feature. So there you go. All right, on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 18:00

So Google News, the Progressive Web App is or a PWA, it’s getting a massive, massive redesign, they’re trying to make it more functional better. So if you use Google News, that’s good news for you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:18

I do and I’m very excited to see what it’s gonna look like, I hope they don’t mess it up with the material you want. I really like the current experience of Google News, because it just puts the data front and center. You know, it doesn’t, it doesn’t clutter up the experience, I feel like the material use going to space things out a bit more. So I hope we have some options to like have a compact view, so to speak. So I’m a little bit concerned about that it’s going to make maybe make the entire environment a little bit more cluttered. And I’m not I’m not particularly excited about that. But, but I do recognize that they want to make all of the Google Applications match the material you design. And so for consistency purposes, they have to make that happen. So I’m, I’m cool with it.

Augusto Pinaud 19:06

Cool. Our next news, Google Photos is going to start allowing you directly delete without within albums and get a new date overlay for your pictures start working that way. So they’re making it a lot more powerful, both for Android as well as the iOS application.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:27

Yeah, so it used to be that, at least as far as the data is concerned, used to be able to just scroll down and as you scroll down on the right hand side, you would see the year kind of passed by as you as you scroll down so you know generally where you’re scrolling in the perspective, they’re providing a little bit more granularity now in that perspective. So you can see things and and seeing that date, kind of like hover over the particular sections is just kind of a nice feature to have. I do like this ability for you to be able to delete now from the mobile device, which has been always available. Google Photos web, you know, if you’re in an album, you could just delete anything from the system. And I get Google’s interest, right, which is, the more photos you store in Google Photos, the more Google Drive space you need, and therefore, the more more you’ll pay. But this is just like, let me delete my own photos, please. So you know, you have to, you have to pan all the way to the right in order to be able to see the option, but it’s there now. And many times I am in an album, reviewing the album and deleting things, because I take photographs all day long of things that I’m like, Okay, do I need to fix this? Does that need to go to the library does that need to go to the store? You know, that’s kind of how I track what I’m doing. So just snap a photo of this, snap a photo of that. And at the end of the day, I want to be able to just, you know, take all those things I’ve thrown now into my today folder in our today album in Google Photos, and just, you know, delete them as I know, exactly. So it’s like, it’s like another inbox, right? So I’m like, Okay, no, I do have to do something with this. Let me show that to Evernote and create a task. And then here, okay, that’s a delete. And so it’s just nice to be able to do that. So I feel like being able to do that now on mobile, especially when you’re on the road, and you want to be able to do that type of processing, clarifying and organizing from the mobile, I think that’s going to be a really good new feature to be able to utilize kudos to Google Photos.

Augusto Pinaud 21:18

Is Apple embrace Google Live, and Google Microsoft Teams has have this. And it’s very useful, especially when you are in meetings, multicultural emails, where the level of English may not be the same one on every level. And using the captions helps incredible into those translations and understanding what is happening. So regardless if they’re copying Microsoft, or Google or whoever, I’m glad that’s coming, or a similar version of this will come to the iPhone and the iPad and the Mac. So basically, as you are in the video call, the phone will be able to do listen, translate and produce the closed captioning, or the equivalent to closed captioning industry.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:05

Yes, so so this is live captions, so that everybody’s aware, and live captions can be turned on within the Chrome browser, it can be turned on on your Android OS on the operating system level. It’s a really, really handy feature. And Apple bringing this to the entire ecosystem is it’s fantastic. I think it’s great. Now I’ve got it turned on on my Chrome inside the Chrome browser. So anytime there’s audio being spoken, it immediately starts to provide captions of those across the board. So it is a little bit weird at times, because like there’ll be places where I don’t expect captions to be showing up. And they still do. But they’re also really helpful when, say, for example, I’m in an environment, my headphones are not working. Well, it’s picking up captions from the application itself. And so it will start showing me what the person is saying. So even if I can’t hear them, I’m able to understand what they’re saying. And that’s so, so helpful to be like, Hey, you’re muted, or things that are that are just very, very, like productivity drainers, after, you know, death by 1000 cuts throughout the day. And so I really, really liked this feature generally. And I think that anybody who is productivity minded should at least try it out to see if it does help you in certain contexts, where you’re going to want that to be available to you now in Chrome. And that means all chromium browsers, so Microsoft Edge, you know, opera, brave, otherwise, you can actually go into the Chrome settings and turn that on, you could turn it off and on as you need it. So just be be mindful of the fact that you have that capability, wherever you are. And I like it not not only for the like English as a Second Language type circumstances where I’m trying to receive English and not understanding someone, but also in environments where I don’t want the audio playing I but I still want to be able to kind of keep an eye on what’s going on. Right. So it’s just like, it’s just like, so I use the the picture and picture. Chrome extension, which is, which is built by Google. So if you if you go into the Chrome Web Store, there’s a picture and picture. And so that puts a little, you know, video feed in the corner of the screen. And I can continue working and keep an eye on things that are happening from any video feed on any browser tab. And so having those live captions runs means that I can kind of have that going on and still be doing other things. So if I need to jump in and pay attention to a particular thing in a video I can now and so it gives me that duality of picture and picture plus the live captioning. So you can get a lot more done when you don’t need to have your primary attention on video for an extended period of time. But then you need to clue in on something to kind of watch the words as you’re doing it or for me, I like to take notes in Evernote while I’m watching a video and many times the video I don’t really care about the video itself. I care about the audio coming out of the video. And so but I still want to Keep an eye on what the speaker is doing or what the speaker is presenting on screen. So I’ll have it in picture picture be taking in full screen, the Evernote notes and and have that on my on my screen in large part and but I can see the captions. So I can I can take from what I need to as I’m, as I’m listening along. So again, this is for Apple, but just be mindful of the fact that you could do all of this. And I’m really, really looking forward to seeing this on the Mac and on my iPad. So I can do the same level of work in that in that space. So very cool. Very cool. All right, on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 25:40

So our next story is Amazon release almost malware a couple of weeks ago, in a firmware update that we’re trying to do. And it was a problem. So two days after, within the day, they pulled them out. And finally, they released the new Kindle solve in the box, they create, plus a bunch of other things. So just let your Kindle update, and you will get the new version without the box. So next,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:12

so hold on. A second thing that I just like, keep everybody mindful of is that I very rarely update my Kindle. And the reason for that is that, you know, since it’s an e reader, and I only use it for reading, I typically keep it powered on, but I do not turn on the camera, the the Wi Fi on it, just generally I keep it I keep it off and disconnected. And I only turn it on when I need to, you know, download a book or those kinds of things, I’m turning it on and off. And that keeps the battery fresh for sometimes weeks, you know, without me needing to plug it in. And I’m a heavy reader. So you know, I’ve got I download a whole bunch of books, and then I read right through them. And then I plug it in and reconnect, do the synchronization and so on. It’s at that point that I will usually do the updates. And that means that if these kinds of things happen, I’m very rarely impacted by them. Because it’s only when I turn it on and do the update. And that means it’s unlikely that you know, like a bug fix that they did today and fix tomorrow is really going to affect me. So something to keep in mind is that if you don’t want the productivity hit, just, especially with a device like that, like I can’t do that with my computer, as soon as a security update is pushed out. I want that implied, but not the feature updates, necessarily. But certainly the security updates. You know, you can’t really do that with always on always connected devices. But something like an e reader, you can easily go if the if it’s working and and you’re not experiencing the bug, then don’t go, you know, chasing waterfalls, as they say let the system kind of just do its thing and update when you synchronize. All right.

Augusto Pinaud 27:56

Well, our next story. Great, thank you very much my computer. Okay, I’m back is about the new Kindle Fire the seven. And they have the Kindle seven that has been the cheap entry level. But the problem is, it’s slow. It’s not a great machine. So Amazon finally updated. And they put a USB C port into that and they’re claiming has a better battery a better press kernel that I haven’t tested. We had an old Kindle Fire seven that is not that great. But I’m really curious is that USBC is like that overdrive button that we used to have in the cars on the 90. You know, that’s that’s what I read when when I saw that he’s like, Oh, you put on overdrive buttons that you can I can now play with it as I’m driving.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:50

Well, I’m I’m pleased to see USBC taking over as the universal standard. And, you know, like the UN USB is for universal. But the c part is actually really, really just I’m delighted I know we’ve talked about this a few weeks ago about how just amazing it is to go on a trip and just have one cable. Although right now I’m carrying two because I have an older iPad, that’s still

Augusto Pinaud 29:16

sort of still not USBC but my iPads are but that’s coming.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:19

Yeah, and just like as soon as this iPad gets dead gets changed out, which will be fairly soon. I’m going to just be delighted and being able to go everywhere have a singular plug that can just charge everything and and so good and good on Amazon for bringing the fire seven tablet up to up to date with the USB C port. And I really hope they do that with the Kindles. You know the e reader soon as well. You know,

Augusto Pinaud 29:43

there are two things. There was another news I don’t remember now it was last week that we put it on the nodes or in this one, but where they finally left. I like to say what’s Android nine to a new version. So under has been rumors that they’re going to bring, you know, writing to or notes to that Kindle. But what’s interesting with this release is normally they dump everything at the same time. And this time they’ve released the seven. And you hear nothing about the other. So I’m keeping myself hopeful that he’s that something is coming, that is going to be worth to talk.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:29

I’m not going to hold my breath, but I will, I will, I will ride, I will ride I will ride your optimism. All right on to our productivity resources of the week, as you all know, against you and I come across many personal productivity tools, apps and services in our productivity journeys. In this segment, productivity resources a week, we each bring you one new or old, we think you might like. And so with that the first resource this week is an application I recently came across. And I’ve been pretty impressed with it. It’s called Skiff. And and I think it’s a it’s a play on skiff, as in the, in the federal government in the presidential White House, you have something called skiffs. I think they have them in Congress as well. But they’re basically these very, very secure rooms, where no technology is allowed. And it’s shielded. And, you know, like, everything is brought in and out very securely. I think it’s playing on that concept, I don’t know. But that’s kind of where my mind went. Either way, it’s supposed to basically challenge Gmail, and be this private email, and collaborative workspace. And if you think about it, it has not only mail, but it also has something called pages. And pages allow you to, in essence, create a collaborative workspace where you can, in real time, create a workspace document workspace with other people. And so it has a little bit of a notion feel to it. And the interesting thing is that this is all being done through IPFS. And so if people don’t know what IPFS is, it is the interplanetary file system. It’s basically a peer to peer network and a protocol for being able to both store and collaborate with data using distributed means. So you are in essence, you know, all the data is sitting on various different systems akin to maybe BitTorrent, something like that. And you then don’t have a centralized server, right? It’s all decentralized. And everybody is sharing that data. And the redundancy is the number of machines that are holding and operating the various nodes, the various data bits that are moving around. So that’s how Skiff works. There’s a free plan. And yeah, so if you’re, if you’re interested in having a more secure email experience, you can go up and sign up for a free plan. And I think the paid plans are eight bucks a month. And it gives you the capability of of having that. So just something to, you know, check out and play around with if you are looking for something a little bit more secure than a Google Gmail account. Okay, so what’s your resources we can

Augusto Pinaud 33:09

talk about, I want some drive, because somebody was asking me about storage pictures and all this. And I mentioned Google. And it’s Yeah, but I don’t want to have another bill. And so we check then I thought about Amazon drive, and I completely forgot about it. So Amazon drive basically allows you to do the photo storage they give you, if you’re an Amazon Prime, they give you a free unlimited, you know, full resolution for a storage, plus five gigabytes of video storage. nonprime customers get five gigabytes of photo, but their plans start at two bucks. So they are competitive with Amazon. But if you are already prime member, then you get that plus you can also other stuff and then sharing his pictures into your echo your shows your Fire tablets, and everything else. So if you are a prime member, this is another benefit that you may get.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:09

Yeah, I use this as a secondary backup of my photos. And like all of my photos are just automatically backed up there because why not? You know, it’s free with my prime account. So I just basically back everything up there. So yeah, absolutely, definitely worth checking out. All right. With that, that takes us along to our featured story of the week,

Augusto Pinaud 34:30

how Google Docs the new out to generate summaries work and it’s based on an article Google Docs announced now that they are going to tax get your documents and they will be able to generate summaries of that so you can read and you know two questions came to me after this okay, then why do we are writing such large documents? Number one, but number two, how scary or not as scary is this? You know, can you get this 25 For now you’re going to Get a paragraph on how good this paragraph will be. So I don’t know. I’m very curious. I’m really looking forward to have this apply to things. But I don’t know I missed. I wanted to see I will hold my opinion until I’d see it in practice in the day to day with this.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:29

Yeah, so So here, here are my thoughts. One, this is really helpful for environments where you have really long documentation because of legalese. Right, you have a contract where you want the contract to just, you know, summarize the major points of a contract. And many times these contracts are Performa, they are very easily understood through machine learning. And then it can bring up the key points, maybe the salient points are just the parts that are different than the performer, the template that is, and so I can see a huge advantage in being able to do something like that, I see the ability to take, say, for example, I’m writing a short story. And the short story is, you know, maybe 2030 pages in length. And I want to be able to just see a summary of that story. And kind of see what the system is picking up as the most salient points, or I write an essay for class. And I want to see whether or not the, the machine learning algorithm picks up what I’m saying, based on, you know, what I’m writing. So this kind of, for me, it’s a feedback mechanism, not so much a summarizing mechanism. This is only being displayed to the author of the document. So no one else collaborating on the document is going to see these auto summaries. So, so be mindful of that as well, that this is something that you are providing feedback to the system in order to get, you know, information and understanding about what’s in the document. But those are not being shared with others. And you can give feedback to the system to say, Okay, this is, this is an appropriate thing to include in the summary or this is not. And so, I like it, I like the idea that you can go through and create your own summary by going in and suggesting particular pieces as being good for the summary or not, I like the idea that this will eventually grow into new and better features throughout the entire Google ecosystem, like I can think of like being in a Google meet meeting, right, it takes the transcript, and then exercises from it the tasks that people know that they were going to do, it can exercise, potentially, the the salient points within the meeting, like I see a lot of opportunity there. Or say I missed a professor, you know, gave a presentation during a lecture lecture, and I missed it. Now, I can just pull out the best points of the lecture and listen to the whole thing, you know, so there can be some really good pieces there, I see, I see a lot of really good opportunity there. And even if it’s not in the Google ecosystem, I can just copy and paste the transcript into a Google Doc, and then it’ll summarize it for me. So I like the idea that I can kind of baling wire and duct tape it together to fit my needs for productivity purposes. So I see, I see this being more and more applicable to so many different environments over time. And what I really hope is that it actually gets to the point of Excel has a feature, sorry, Google Sheets has a feature called Explorer. And Explorer allows you to ask natural language questions of the database. And so you know, what you have in the workbook is all of this data, and you can ask natural language queries. And then instead of you having to write very complex SQL, you know, and so on, so forth, to be able to, to get the queries to work, you can just do these very simple questions in, in the Google Sheets Explorer tab, what will be really wonderful is for you to ask those questions of a document so that you could have a Google Docs explorer option. And instead of it providing a summary, it provides you back answers from the text itself. So you can say, hey, you know, did I say something? Or did did so and so who wrote this article, say something in this particular, you know, document, and it can then find it and analyze it and give you a question back akin to the way in which you would say the big G a question, you know, you’d be like, Hey, Big G, you know, you know, how tall is Tom Cruise? You know, because that’s like, a common question. And, and then if it’s in the document, it can, it can look for it, interpret it and provide an answer back to you. And I think I think we’re seeing like the precipice of a really, really important set of features that I think will be really, really good for us to have available to us going forward. So really excited to see it. And I think, yeah, I’m bullish on this. I’m pretty bullish on this on this feature and looking forward to seeing it. Go out. Alright, Soon enough, you’re

Augusto Pinaud 40:00

going to see it

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:02

on where two announcements.

Augusto Pinaud 40:04

So the announcement we have, again, is the Microsoft built. It’s happening this week. So it’s a developer conference. But I’m sure there are going to be things announced. That may be interesting. But if not, come back next Monday. We will do Anything But Idle 108. And we invite art Gelwicks to discuss more about Microsoft build, and the productivity and Technology News of the Week.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:33

Fantastic. All right. Well, with that, we have reached the end of the productivity and technology news this week. Thank you, oh, Cousteau, for putting together the show this and every week. My pleasure. Oh, okay. on anything but idle.com, you will find our show notes. Our show notes are contain the links to all the stories, our productivity resource resources of the week are extra stories we didn’t get to cover today on the show. And they include text transcripts, both one that’s readable on the page, and one that you can download offline to read offline and listen to you offline with the podcast. So after looking at the show notes, and determining that we might have missed something, feel free to leave a comment on the episode page, you can tweet or DM us at Anything But Idle or you can tweet or DM us at either of our Twitter profiles. But Anything But Idle is set up for that. You can use our contact form on the website, anything but idle.com forward slash contact. And that’s where you can let us know if we’ve missed something. If you have a question or a comment about anything we’ve discussed during the show, you can do the same there in any of those places. Also know we have a group dedicated to Anything But Idle inside a personal productivity club. You heard it during the show sponsor at personal productivity club has that group dedicated to Anything But Idle. So if you go to anything, but idle.com forward slash community. And I’ll throw that up on the screen for the folks if you go to anything but idle.com forward slash community, you will be taken to join that group. And then you can discuss all the productivity news that you’d like to during the week. If this is your first time watching the live stream, feel free to click the subscribe button. You’ll get notified when we go live weekly. If you are watching after the fact you can also click the subscribe button. And then you’ll know when we go live weekly. If you’re listening to the podcast, you can also subscribe to us or that is following us for free in your podcast app of choice. So really appreciate the Thumbs Up on the videos and the commentary and the engagement. And so thank you for all of that. With that. We will see you all next time on Anything But Idle here’s to your productive life.

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.