In today’s issue:

1. Busy Week — lots of productive announcements

2. Setting up for 2025 

3. Time Management in the Age of A.I.

4. ChatGPT finally introduces Sora— how to get it; how it works

5. Richer A.I. Capabilities in Apple’s iPhones and Macs— finally, some impactful Apple Intelligence A.I.

6. Google introduces A.I. Agents— first impressions

7. Ho Ho Ho!

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Busy Week

This week was busy in the world in which artificial intelligence makes an impact on personal productivity with new products from major vendors. Read below for more details about each. We’ve been using them to gain insights for you, which we’ll pass along as we come to additional conclusions.

We’ve also included one fun holiday treat at the end (instead of our usual news round-up).

Setting up for 2025

Confirmed Achiever is tweaking what we deliver to you for 2025 and would love your input. So please let us know what you think. In particular, please sound off about the following questions:

• How often should we send to you? We’ve been sending monthly during 2024 (except November). Should we send more often? Only quarterly? Other?

• Are there any topics that we should add to our newsletters?  Anything we have included that totally missed the mark and should be changed or eliminated?

This newsletter and blog are meant to help you in your personal and team productivity goals. So keep that in mind as you make your comments.

And please feel free to share with your colleagues.

Time Management in the Age of A.I.

We’ll continue to produce our workshop program for clients who want their teams to benefit from effective use of time using proven techniques and new technologies in ways that they leverage each other for out of this world productivity gains.

If you’re interested in having us conduct it for you in 2025, you can find out more and set up a conversation to explore how to match it to your team at www.MoreFromDavid.com.

What participants say:

• "Such a great session! Very interesting on all the different styles of time management. I can't wait to start.”

• "Amazing session. Totally loved it.”

• "This session is essential in life.”

• “You hit the nail on the head”

• “The time flew by — so much info. When I noticed the time, the session was almost over”

ChatGPT finally introduces Sora

Sora is the capability of ChatGPT that allows you to create a video from descriptive text prompts. It has been in limited availability until this week, when it became fully available at sora.com.

With Sora, you can describe what you want the video to look like, including how long you want it to be, resolution and other settings; and it gives you a fully produced video. 

One of the nice features of Sora is that after you give it a description, it feeds back a story board telling you what it is going to depict and how that lays out over time. You can modify what it plans to do to have it depict more fully your vision; then after it generates the video, you can edit it. You can even have it generate multiple videos, and work on the one that you like best.

With this week’s announcement, Sora is available for free if you have a ChatGPT Plus (individual) account. Your limit is 50 videos per month at 480p resolution (or a smaller number at higher resolution). It is NOT included with ChatGPT Team, Enterprise or Edu plans; and you must verify that you are at least 18 years old to use it. Of course, the way a company packages its features changes over time; so consider this packaging the current model, and may change.

For organizations who want their teams to learn how to use Sora for their specific tasks, we can include it in customized “Time Management in the Age of A.I.” workshops, just let us know as we plan your program.

We’ll also include more specifics about Sora in future Confirmed Achiever newsletters.

Richer A.I. Capabilities in Apple’s iPhones and Macs

This week Apple started delivering iOS 18.2 for iPhone and MacOS Sequoia 15.2, both of which have a deeper level of Apple Intelligence, the company’s operating system.

If you had already upgraded to iOS 18.1 or Sequoia 15.1 on your devices, you may have already noticed some changes to Siri, and some remnants of AI in your mail, messages, notes and images.

With the new versions of operating systems for these devices, Apple Intelligence started to become much more usable in more circumstances. Among the new or ungraded capabilities:

• Siri more easily answers follow-on questions.

• If you allow your phone or Mac to access ChatGPT, Siri will ask you if you want to ask ChatGPT for specific answers.

• New image playground lets you create A.I. images from photos you submit.

• From a non-A.I. productivity standpoint, your iPhone has a new Mail app with categorization built in

• For some, a squeeze gets you deep info about photos you take

Although we’ll go into these more deeply in future issues, here are some brief take-aways from our initial use of these new/enhanced features.

Siri does allow you to ask follow on questions; but the feature still feels rudimentary. In our testing, it understands about half the time, and often shuts off while asking the second question.

The ChatGPT feature looks more useful, even in the first iteration. 

1. You don’t need to have a subscription to ChatGPT. It will allow you to access ChatGPT at no cost directly from Siri. You will, though, have to give it permission to do so before you can use this feature.

2. If you have a ChatGPT subscription, when you give permission, you can connect it directly to your existing ChatGPT account to get benefits of your Plus or Team account.

3. Siri asks before it sends the question to ChatGPT. That means your data stays in the Apple ecosystem unless you explicitly tell it to share outside the system. ChatGPT, thus can’t train its data on your info, unless you tell Siri to. share it. KEY: Don’t allow sharing of any of your personal data with ChatGPT from Siri. 

I haven’t seen a lot of productive use of Image Playground, but it was fun when I created caricatures of myself and my family to use on my phone.

The mail categorization feature organizes your mail into Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. It’s a lot like old features from Gmail for Categories as Inbox tabs and Microsoft Outlook’s Focused mailbox.

Traditionally, we have found the Gmail and Microsoft features to be so bad that we turned them off and highly recommended to clients to do the same. We’re experimenting with the feature on iPhone to see whether it’s any better than the Google or Microsoft versions, and will let you know as we have a deeper understand.

The categorization is currently only on iPhone, not on Mac, which is different than Google and Microsoft, where you can get their features on all platforms including Windows and web.

Unfortunately, they missed an important productive feature in the Mail categorization interface: Except in the Primary Inbox, Apple designers have removed the up and down icons to navigate between messages. So you have to go back to the categorized list before going to the next message. We’re not sure how they missed this one. It’s a pretty basic faux pas and takes away an important navigation aid.

The use of ChatGPT to identify objects looks pretty strong for a first entry into Apple Intelligence. For iPhone 16 owners, you can tap and hold the new camera button then ask a question.

We’ll be covering these features in later Confirmed Achiever issues.

Google introduces A.I. Agents

A.I. Agents, where your A.I. can run other applications for you, is likely to be a pivotal point in productivity for artificial intelligence in the workplace. This week, Google introduced Gemini 2.0, which enables you to build A.I. agents to create what Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls “our vision of a universal assistant”.

We have not yet had a chance to play extensively with Gemini 2.0. The feedback we’re getting from early adopters is that it is slow – taking several seconds each mouse movement and click, which might be too slow for many users.

Google counters that the initial version is to let you see how the tool is behaving, and that the slow cursor movement allows this. 

We’ll be keeping our eyes on A.I. agents for you and sharing how we extract the most productivity from them.

Ho Ho Ho!

On Dec 12, ChatGPT rolled out Santa Voice. So you (and your kids) can now chat with Santa Claus in ChatGPT.

To gain access to Santa, if you’re using voice in ChatGPT, go to the list of available voices, and turn on Santa.

The last word

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David