Cathy Healy

Cathy Healy works with K-12 classrooms worldwide as they make a difference in the world.

Cathy Healy

Advocate for K-12 Global Collaborations

Siri: A tease of greatness or great?

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If Apple’s Siri [personal assistant] works as promised, then it is going to be one of the all-time great innovations.

But most of us Mac junkies didn’t pay much attention. Why? We’ve had Dragon Dictate, et al around for years, and so our expectations for Siri’s competence hover somewhere down near Hell. Maybe she (why not a he voice?) won’t understand women’s voices as well as she understands men’s — like Dragon. Like me, too, that’s why I wear hearing aids. And that’s why I’m glad Dragon is getting better after all that iPad/iPhone data farming it’s done, but it still hits about 87-94% accuracy for me. 94 is tolerable; 87 makes me as nuts as AT&T’s dropped/gone-mute calls.

Experience with Google’s voice recognition probably makes people even more suspicious about claims for Siri. Google sounds pretty lousy, to judge by Gene Weingarten’s column in last Sunday’s WPost:

 “Because he is a modern man, my editor, Tom the Butcher, enthusiastically avails himself of new technologies such as Google’s voice-recognition system for phone and computer. Now, when Tom gets a voicemail message on his phone, he not only receives an e-mail alert but also reads the message itself as an e-mail sent to him by Google. And thus it is that, at 4:16 PM on September 13, Tom was alerted to the fact that I had left him this voicemail:

“’Hey, your ass is in the Interest River.’

“I often say odd things to Tom, but this seemed a little too odd. So he then listened to the original voicemail. What I actually said was:

“’Hey, ask me about the tree-trimmer.”

“Yes, indeed. It turns out Google’s vaunted voice-recognition software may be the most comically misbegotten invention since a man named Hans Laube patented something named Smell-Oh-Vision…..

Unless…Siri actually understands me!

I’ll find out Friday.

Kindle Fire: Will I replace my iPad? Or merely cope with two tablets

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Yesterday, a friend in Madison, Wisc. said that she is tempted to buy a Kindle Fire right now, even though  she “always waits for the second version of something.” She has been asking around to see what her friends advised.

This morning, I advised her to buy when the impulse strikes, because for sure, Kindle Fire will upgrade and get better within the next 6 to 9 months. And even more astonishingly interesting upgrades will happen in the following 6 to 9 months. Tablets are hyper-competative right now.”

I pre-ordered the $299 Fire this morning. Supposedly I’ll have it before Thanksgiving. 

Why did I order it?! I’m an Apple addict. I waited breathlessly for an iTablet from at least 2006, and pre-ordered the first iPad as soon as it was announced in March 2010. By then I’d had a Kindle 2 for a year, long enough to enjoy it — and to get “Kindle Elbow (like painful Tennis Elbow) from clicking with my thumb through 6.5 books in nine days traveling to and from a conference in Morocco.

I pre-ordered the iPad 2. I love my iPad 2. 

Again, why the Fire? 

The Pad is gorgeous but heavy. And it doesn’t replace my laptop. So now I travel with my iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, external HDs for photo and video dumps, camcorder, headphones, lapel mic and a zippered travel pack full of cords. The odd thing is when I was forced to use the iPad as my main computer during a three-day exercise in patience, I discovered that I DON’T WANT TO WORK on the iPad. Actually, I want to use it for pleasure, i.e. reading and watching news, reading books, reading email. 

I don’t read magazines on the iPad because you have to pay the newsstand cover price and that’s more than I’m willing to spend. I want a subscription which last I checked (awhile ago), was still being duked out by Apple and the publishers. 

Analysts have been predicting that Amazon’s Fire will appeal mostly to women, who aren’t interested in all of the computer options that the iPad (and other the tabs) offer. I’m as tech-addicted as the next guy, but if I’m emailing, calling, texting, and looking things up on my iPhone, and if I need my laptop for real work on the road, then maybe all I want is a lightweight, pleasure device that I can hold in one hand. 

And, that I can turn pages with the flick of a finger. 

I hope I don’t get Finger Elbow…but I haven’t yet with my iPad. 

Stockholm: What’s the opposite of moldy, smoggy, chlorine-y?

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View from walking path on Sodermalm Island, near the apartment of Dragon Girl hero, journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

I knew Stockholm spreads from the mainland across 14 islands in an archipelago of 30,000 islands, but I thought the islands were on the Baltic Sea and would smell salty and damp, which would cause the elegant old buildings to stink of mildew. But that was my ignorance. The islands are in Lake Mälaren, and the crisp lake air smells clean and fresh as an ultra-detergent promise, but better, because the scent of lilacs is pure. The old buildings I entered, didn’t smell, which is how good buildings should be. (My Wyoming bias)

Our tourist guides talked about the bad old days (19th century) when the lake was foul. Now it is quite clean and the treated tap water is so clean that the most elegant restaurants, like the Grand Hotel’s Terrace, serve regular water from stylish, hotel-branded bottles. You don’t need lemon slices or tea to mask the flavor — Stockholm water tastes like it was just dipped from a mountain creek.

I wish I had a glassful now. On this humid, high-ozone July day in Washington, D.C., when it is time to boil water again and replenish the pitcher of iced rooibos tea, I envy Stockholm’s well-thought out and well-funded “naturalness.”