Tech that listens, talks back: Kashyap Kompella lists his top finds of 2024

It’s been a tricky year too, for someone trying to juggle digital abundance and ease with security and privacy. My tech year wrapped? Here goes.

* Finally, a transcription tool that works

How long have we waited for this!? MacWhisper, built on top of OpenAI’s Whisper speech-recognition model, works with remarkable accuracy. It’s a reliable dictation tool too. It works well with accents and is available in a range of languages. I don’t yet know of a Windows version that works as well. But perhaps now there’s hope?

* A prompts manager

AI assistants can attend online meetings, take notes and summarise a discussion, but what about reading between the lines or decoding what has been left unsaid? The challenge has been finding ways to explain to them what is needed here.

Enter PromptPerfect, a tool that takes a single sentence and turns it into a detailed prompt that the AI assistants seem to understand far better. It works brilliantly across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity too.

Google’s NotebookLM has been another great find in this arena. It generates quick audio summaries of massive PDF or text files, turning dense material into something surprisingly like a podcast. The web chat experience even fields questions effectively, yielding an almost-eerie back-and-forth.

* Spooky eyewear and car-ware

I got my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses fitted with prescription lenses, and unless you pay careful attention, they look perfectly innocent. People are always taken aback when they learn that this pair can take photos and record videos (and other slightly-useful things). There’s a small LED light that turns on when the camera does, but it’s very easy to miss. My point being: While this is fun, is real-world privacy also now a thing of the past?

Our new family car, meanwhile, came with a tracking app that lets everyone know where it is through the day. In a sign of the times, it also came with an AQI reader and an air-purifier. All in all, a little unsettling.

* Have an apple, my dear?

I was sceptical about quick-commerce apps, but have ended up using them fairly regularly this year. Now, however, these apps are divvying each order up into smaller orders, to make better use of time, inventory and other resources. I’m really sceptical about this: Imagine the awkwardness of someone rushing through peak traffic to bring you just an apple or two! (True story)

* 3 small things

I’ve embraced three small things that have made my life vastly easier, in ways I didn’t expect them to. I now use the silent, haptic alarm option on my smart watch and I cannot adequately express the joy of waking up to a vibrating alert on my wrist that has disturbed no one else. Game-changing!

The other two things are both apps. School of Life, founded by one of my favourite authors, the British philosopher Alain de Botton, offers sagely advice on daily concerns both large and small (how to keep going; the psychology of avoidance; status anxiety). It really is marvellous stuff.

The other app: Sky Guide. Hold it overhead and it can help pinpoint stars, satellites, planets and the International Space Station. There is nothing like it for helping one figure out where to look during an interesting astronomical phenomenon. It’s completely changed my view of the great beyond.

One hack I’d love to see less of, meanwhile: QR-code menus. They’re just annoying. I want to put the phone away, not start to scroll all over again, when I sit down to dine. Isn’t it time we took this back offline?

(To reach Kashyap Kompella, email kashyap.kompella@gmail.com)