#80 - 🤖 The end of the captcha, 3 magic words, Alexa makes the dead speak

Hello,

I hope you are well. After a short week's break, I'm coming back to your inbox with a program that's still just as eclectic.

• The end of the captcha
• A brilliant system for sharing a geographic position
• How Alexa makes the dead speak

As a bonus this week, I'm sharing with you the results of the survey I sent you 2 weeks ago.

🤖How iOS 16 wants to kill the captcha

A few weeks ago I was talking to you about the next disappearance of the password and everything that FIDO was going to change (I even dedicated an episode of the podcast here). The password is boring but you know what's even more annoying?

The captcha.

This diabolical invention which forces you several times a day to prove to a robot that you are a human has been widespread since the 90s to prevent robots from injecting malicious scripts into the various forms.

Only for us humans, it has become a real pain... But that could soon change.

In fact, Apple is preparing to launch iOS 16, the next version of the operating system and that could rid you of captchas for good.

This new feature called “Private Access Tokens” allows a site equipped with a captcha to validate that you are a human thanks to a certificate stored on your phone (and linked to your iCloud account).

The option is checked by default on the beta version of iOS 16 that I have been testing for a few weeks.

I reassure you that we are at Apple so it is Privacy by design to know that at no time does the site know who you are. He just knows you're human because you have enough money to buy an iPhone 🤑.

📍3 words to find your way everywhere

Attention, brilliant idea.

Today if you want to locate a place on a map you generally have 2 solutions:

1. Having an address
2. Having the coordinates GPS

Only the first option works less well outside of cities and the second is too complicated to memorize.

This is where the idea behind What3words is brilliant.

What3words has given every 3m x 3m square in the world a unique 3-word address. We can therefore find and share any place with just 3 words.

Thus the exact location of the Luxor obelisk located on Place de la Concorde in Paris is “///couler.déclic.fastueux”.

Of course there is a mobile application on iOS and Android if you want to use the service from a smartphone.

Then very simple, you can use the application of your choice to go to the place indicated by the 3 words.

Practical, simple and clever. Everything I love. A link to keep the next time you're looking to share the address of a slightly exotic place.

🗣Return to the survey

A few weeks ago I let you have the floor to tell me what you liked about this newsletter and especially what we could improve on it.
It was also an opportunity for me to get to know you better.

In the end 10% of readers responded. It's not crazy but it already represents a lot of material.

So I decided to share with you the main results:

• 9 readers out of 10 discovered this newsletter through Linkedin or a friend/colleague. So thank you for sharing this good plan and it encourages me to systematize Linkedin promotion, which I had put aside a little bit thinking it would be ineffective.
• When you don't read the newsletter it's mainly due to lack of time but never because of the title or the length...but the majority of people who responded read each edition 😎

In this newsletter you like:

• The tone and humor
• The fact that it is quick and easy to read
• The tools and good tips
• The varied subjects (both in substance and form)

What you like less:

• sometimes too much chatter before getting to the point
• certain tools sometimes pay off

You read this newsletter for:

• The day before tech
• An opening to new uses
• Concrete and fun anecdotes
• Digital tools

The top 3 subjects you prefer:

• Tech & Innovations
• Tools & productivity
• Personal reflections
• 70% of respondents have already needed to find information several weeks later and in more than 80% of cases you have found it... However, more visible and accessible archives would be appreciated.
• Another lesson, a majority of you have never listened to my podcast and some did not even know that I had one 😳.

In summary:

• I must boost the means of finding this newsletter
• You are very satisfied with the subjects, the format and the frequency
• The podcast is actually quite interesting few readers of this newsletter
• More tools and feedback

😶Amazon's next “good” idea

I already had the opportunity to share with you about the real uses of Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant and in particular the fact that a large part of users abandon the connected speaker once the novelty effect.

Amazon, well aware of the problem, is constantly working on new ways to get us hooked.

The latest is an option capable of mimicing the voice of any person: living or dead !

Presented at Amazon’s recent “Re: Mars” conference, this feature is based on new, ultra-efficient voice recognition technology. With 1 minute of audio recording, the AI is capable of learning to speak like a person.

The example given by Amazon during its demo was astonishingly naive: a child who asks his grandmother to read him The Wizard of Oz (because yes Alexa can already read books).

The story does not say whether the grandmother was still alive but the least we can say is that the effect fell through because the Critics seem to have unanimously found this to be a bad idea for a bunch of reasons:

• The door is open to deepfakes and other scams
• The traumatic side of hearing the voice of a missing person

Amazon has not given the date when this feature will be available.
And do you find it incredible or creepy?