Google AI, Bugs & TikTok Teens
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #172 ❤️
This week we’re coming at you with a tech heavy edition, with Google’s new AI features front and centre, and various ways to get out of video calls…
Plus, what general madness is Musk up to now, and why is it important, how the CEO of a tracking app made peace with the teens he was helping track, and why there are currently more women than ever in the workplace, and how can we keep them there?
Let's get into it.
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#1 - Google Gets In On AI
Last week at the Google Cloud Next 2023 conference, Google announced a load of new AI features, the most exciting of which may allow you to skip out of meetings…
The biggest in their list of announcements was the unveiling of Duet AI for Google Workspace, their answer to Microsoft 365 Copilot, which has been getting a lot of attention. Much like Copilot, Duet AI is focused on enhancing productivity.
This is where the meeting bit comes in, sick of being added to meetings you don’t think you need to be, and attending either on the off chance that you do, or just to say you did? Well, Google can do that for you. By using the “attend for me” option in Google Meet, users can send Duet AI in their place. Duet Ai can then share any pertinent messages to you, take notes and create action items.
If you’ve been added to a meeting you DO actually need to be in, but you’re late because your boss or your client started talking about their weekend at the end of your meeting and you just couldn’t get away, no worries, keep smiling politely and when you join your next meeting late, Duet AI can give you a “summary so far” of what you’ve missed so the meeting can carry on as planned.
Did downloads for Google Meet just go through the roof? While it would take a lot of work for companies to change their entire operating systems, as let’s be honest, more people are using Microsoft Teams than Google Meet, but we can see some CEO’s being tempted to up sticks and change. Or, Microsoft are going to have to get a move on and offer the same thing.
The power of the Google brand does give their AI products a legitimacy that has been missing from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and other upstarts, and the same can be said for Microsoft’s new AI offerings. We’re more inclined to trust them.
Google is far from the only search engine, it wasn’t even the first, the first one was called “Archie”. Still, we’ve never heard anyone say they’re going to “Archie” the answer, have you?
#2 - Talking About Video Calls…
After a pretty bad few weeks from a PR perspective, including Zoom’s decision to get everyone back in the office because apparently you can’t run a business via Zoom, even though that’s what it became essential for post Covid (ouch) to their backpedal on their cool feature “No Meeting Wednesdays”, not to mention the whole stealing your data for AI… they’ve introduced a pretty nifty new feature.
The feature in question, following on from Google’s Duet AI sending a robot in your place, is the possibility to organise asynchronous video calls – i.e. not at the same time, i.e. time travelling. Well, kind of.
Zoom Clips will let you film your part of the call, you can explain something out loud (often a lot easier) and share your screen. For example, you’re a global company (like us) who’ve built a web page (as we often do) for a client in a different time zone (again, check), and you need to get together so you can take them through the page “in person” as it can’t be explained in an email.
If time zones clash too much, Zoom Clips is a great way to take a client, employee, or basically anyone, through work in a visual way without one person taking the meeting at 6am while the other takes it at 9pm.
A feature like this has the potential to make explaining difficult or more visual concepts remotely without the stress, or even just the added admin, of trying to organise meetings. It’ll cut out the small talk too, which can be a good or a bad thing.
You can record video clips in Teams and Slack, but it’s not quite the same feature in terms of screen sharing. Looks like they might be back in our good books. At least from a features perspective anyway, their company culture seems to have gone mental…
#3 - Musk Madness Continues
As we’ve become used to the chaotic nature which has characterised the transition of Twitter to X, it seems to have changed our very understanding of the app itself, which could become problematic – especially as the US presidential election race begins, and the platform becomes flooded with campaign information.
The concept was explained by Alex Hern, author of the Guardian’s tech newsletter, as Twitter/X’s “new image problem”. The idea being that whatever happens on the app, we don’t know if it’s a bug, one of Elon Musk’s many whims that might disappear any second, or a lasting change. Basically, the app now has the image of unpredictability and chaos that comes with Elon Musk himself.
Hern sorts product news about the artist formerly known as Twitter into three categories, actual product launches - meaningful changes to the site, Elon whims – anything that can be done within about 24 hours of his highness’ demand, and bugs, which he describes as the inevitable consequences of doing the first two under erratic leadership with a skeleton staff (the rest being either fired, laid off, or escaped).
The proof that it’s becoming difficult to tell them apart came when all pictures posted before 2014 disappeared from the site, including the famous Oscars selfie taken by Ellen Degeneres.
A mass deletion of old images definitely sounds like something Musk would do, either to cut costs, make a point, reintroduce old image hosting as a paid service, or just because he feels like it, and days went by without any comms on the subject.
Finally, on Monday, the images returned with a note simply stated that a bug had been fixed. Later that day, there was another change – the removal of headlines from link previews on the site. This time, Musk posted a message that began “This is coming from me directly”. It’s always a good sign when customers can’t tell what’s a bug and what’s an “improvement”…
Add that to Musks apparently being so active in the Ukraine war (apparently manipulating Starlink communications to alter the course of the conflict, such as when he turned them off during an operation, forcing Ukraine to change the course of a naval attack) that he is treated as an “unelected official” by the US government, and the presidential elections should be fun…
#4 - CEO vs Teens – Life360
Have you heard of Life360? We hadn’t, but it’s been around since the very beginning, just as Facebook and LinkedIn were getting popular, and it has a pretty decent following, notably in the US, and over 50 million monthly users.
What does it do? Well, it spies on your kids. Or, at least that’s how they saw it.
The creator, Chris Hulls, was inspired by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where families struggled to find each other in the wake of the natural disaster, to create a way for digitally native families to safely keep an eye on their children.
Originally refused funding because investors thought teens would think it was creepy, funding was eventually acquired and the app has been used ever since by plenty of families to track their kids, until the teens, who it turns out DID think it was creepy, got an outlet where they could share their grips with the app – TikTok.
Hulls, who didn’t even have TikTok, or teenage kids, discovered this when he went to a friends house and was described by his friends teenage boy as a “TikTok guy”. His world came crashing down a little bit when he went onto TikTok and found himself public enemy number one of teens across the US, who were filming videos with him as the background about how “evil” the app was and how they were sick of being spied on by their parents.
In response, Hull took to TikTok live to try and explain to the teenage masses that the app was supposed to help them – giving them back their freedom by allowing parents to know where they are without literally following them around or keeping them in the house, and discovered that some parents were perhaps being a bit overzealous with it.
Thanks to the input of the TikTok Teen Squad, as we’ve decided to call them (bet they love that) a new product feature came into life – “Bubbles”.
Bubbles allows parents to see where their kids are, but only to an approximate location – up to 25 miles, which can be chosen by the parents depending on either how chill they are are or how small your town is. The bubble will “burst” however in the case of an emergency, and can be toggled off if there’s a safety concern.
Thanks to his crowdsourcing with TikTok users, the app has become even more popular, and basically ended up exactly where Hull hoped it would – as a sign of freedom and a contract of trust between families. In this case, he was right to engage with the haters, because as Hull recognised, they were also his core customers.
#5 - Women In The Workplace
A topic close to our hearts, as a majority female company (check out this great article on our female-led team and how they’re changing the tech world), this week it was announced that the participation of women aged between 25 and 54 in the workplace has reached an all-time high, at just under 78%.
A statistic described as “remarkable” given the evidence the labour force gender participation had been widened in the wake of 2020.
In addition, it’s women with young children who are leading the pack, with those who have children under five being on the highest upward trajectory in terms of participation in the workforce.
This participation seems to have a lot to do with the rise in flexible working since the pandemic, and these stats are even more important in the context of many corporate companies (we’re looking at you Zoom, your time-travelling video chats won’t distract us from this one) rolling back flexibility as the pandemic becomes further away in our memories.
Reshma Saujani, the founder of Moms First and Girls Who Code, describes flexible working as not being “a nice to have for working parents, it’s a must have, and that’s especially true for working moms who we know are responsible for an outsize share of the unpaid labor at home”.
She also notes that the fear is that as working parents have finally got space to breathe, the rules may be rewritten, hoping that CEOs will start to take notice of the positive stats with regards to flexible work, rather than pulling everyone back into the office as a “knee-jerk reaction to a bad quarter”.
And while workplace participation is at an all-time high, Saujani notes that women in senior leadership roles are currently quitting more than they have in the last five years as CEOs push back on flexibility, and send the message that flexible working is something you can have, unless “you want to be in my seat.”
Here’s hoping that flexible work continues, for us, as a fully remote company since the very beginning, it certainly will be.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Geoguessr
So, we didn’t even know this existed, but there is an online game called Geoguessr where you, obviously, guess the location of a certain image.
One guy is so good at it, that people have come to him with personal requests, including one person who wanted to find their birth mother but only had one image of her on the beach and the fact she was Vietnamese.
Reader, he found her.
He can probably also find you from any photo you post on Instagram, so be careful.
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