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So much has happened since my last post in 2016, mostly terrible things, but a few good ones. I won’t talk about the terrible ones here (many of you probably shared some of them), so here are some of the good things.
All of these are on the technology front.
I discovered Alexa!
I cannot sing the praises of the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Tap enough. They have added so much to my days and nights. The main reason I bought my first one was to listen to Kindle books.
Alexa reads them out loud and she has a pretty good reading voice, tone, inflection. Not as good as most human readers, but much, much better than the text-to-speech readers I have seen over the years (though ZoomText is also great at reading). But Alexa can do so much more than that.
I got a Jitterbug Smart!
I’m sure I was way behind the curve on this one. Almost everyone I knew had some kind of smartphone. I knew I had to join the club. After dithering about which smartphone I should get, doing endless research, and getting nowhere, I was pleasantly surprised to get one in the mail, a gift from my ever-practical and decisive boyfriend. The Jitterbug Smart was a big improvement over the dumb cell phone I had been using. So many accessibility features and so many Android apps out there to help me do what I need to do! Like the Read It To Me app that reads my incoming texts aloud, Google Voice Search, traveling directions aloud.
I traded in my Windows 10 tablet for an Android tablet.
I got a Windows 10 tablet last year and used it a little. But the accessibility features were not as good as the ones on my Android phone, so I traded it in for an Android tablet. Great improvement!
I bought a Google Home!
My boyfriend rolled his eyes when he herd I had added to my collection of talking and listening gadgets. Though the Home is not as attractive as the Echo (it looks kind of like an air freshener!), it has some features Alexa doesn’t, like weather features like wind speed and humidity. I’m sure Alexa will catch up before long. One disadvantage is that the Home doesn’t read Audible books or play music without a 3rd-party music source.
The addition of all these smart devices are exciting, and a great promise for future developments. I can’t wait to see what Google and Amazon roll out over time.
Now for Writing progress…
Well, I didn’t do any of the things in my 2016 Hopes and Dreams post. Political dramas and life tragedies shoved all those intentions out of the way. I intend to take them all up in 2018 though, so check back.