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Tech in 2020 is All About Looking at the Future!
28 Aug, 2020
5 min read
The latest in the world of tech this week comes from Microsoft, and it’s not a big thing like we have had the last couple of weeks but a pretty significant one. Microsoft is adding a transcribe feature to Microsoft Word.
A little detailed snippet from the Microsoft blog:
Transcribe in Word is available today in Word for the web for all Microsoft 365 subscribers and is supported in the new Microsoft Edge or Chrome browsers. With Transcribe you are completely unlimited in how much you can record and transcribe within Word for the Web. Currently, there is a five hour limit per month for uploaded recordings and each uploaded recording is limited to 200mb.
But what I want to talk about is what the feature will do in classrooms and interviews. If what you do requires taking notes, as a student or interviewer does, Word can now offer transcriptions of recordings, which takes it a step further as a note-taking application. If your organization or school already uses Office 365, you can use Word to get your work done without having to pay for a special note-taking app with a transcription feature. Transcription with the Dictate feature takes your note-taking and writing flow up to a whole new game.
This just might be the thing that helps us all get through the increased screen time we have right now.
If you try out the feature and would like to share your experience, tweet us at @biztechcs.
Amazon’s offline store Amazon Go was a fresh, experimental concept of cashier-less shopping. Now they have taken that concept and their acquired experience of running offline stores and opened a new Fresh grocery store. Unlike the Amazon Go stores that have sensors and cameras all over the store, the Fresh grocery store has Dash Cart.
The name borrows from the now-retired Dash button that you could install in your house and allocate to a certain everyday product that you’d need to order on a regular basis like toilet paper or detergent.
The Dash Cart is meant to make the shopping process quick and cashier-less. You walk into the store, scan your Amazon account into a Dash cart, fill it up with groceries, and exit from a special lane for Dash Carts, bill paid directly online. In reality, there are a couple of caveats. For now, you can’t put more than two bags of groceries in it and every time you put something in you have to wait for a beep. If it doesn’t come, it wasn’t able to scan the item and add it to your cart.
The concept has evolved to this much within a time span of half a decade. Dash buttons launched in 2015 and Dash Cart in 2020. I am forgiving of first gen tech, after all, we have all lived through the first touch screen phones, foldable phones, and more. History says it gets better.
So I am looking forward to a day when grocery shopping comes with the adventure of going to the grocery store and picking up things by my own hands but not having to wait in long lines to pay the bill.
Amazon might even sell their Just Walk Out technology to other retailers so I can rest slightly happy knowing that this will not add to their usual anticompetitive behavior.
Overall, tech in 2020 is looking to the future even if we don’t know how we will make it out of 2020.
