263 Should Accounting Firms Be Buying Leads!?

Today on Jason Daily. Accounting firms are out there buying leads. Can you imagine in this economy, buying leads? I don't need more work. I already got too much work. In what situations, if any, does this make sense? The timing of recurring fees and what client work they're associated with. How do you handle it if somebody leaves or something like that? Is AI actually going to lead to us doing less work or more of the same? And Apple wwdc, their big annual conference where they announce the cool new stuff they're doing. I'll run you through the big announcements. And we just got early access to the new Siri. Just wait until you see that. Come on in. It's Q and A Friday. If you're on Twitter, a Twitter's person you may have seen recently that Sampar. He's one of the hosts of the My First Million podcast. Very popular among sweaty Internet think people. He launched a website called Sam's List. Samslist.co. in fact, let me just give you his original rationale for why he launched this announcement. I made a website that's Yelp for accountants. I'm looking for a new accountant. Finding one that's good and fits my needs is hard and time consuming. So I tweeted out asking who has a good accountant? 150 plus people replied with an accountant. So I called all the accountants on the list. Took two months. I asked each accountant how much they charge, services they provide, who's a perfect client, and more. I also got some of their clients to give me. I also got some of their clients to give them a review. Then I took all that data and hours of work and turned it into a website. I also made a simple quiz that shows you three accountants that might fit your needs. The site's called Sam's List. You can see all my research into each accountant, see reviews of each accountant, contact an accountant, in some cases, book a time to speak with them, and submit an accountant to be recommended reviewed. It's all free. The site's not monetized. Accountants aren't paying us for reviews. If you like it, we'll keep building it. If you don't, we'll kill it. And if you go to it, it is a very basic website that is almost like, yeah, Yelp, that's an apt review. Yelped for accountants. The problem is like the reviews, I don't know, it kind of suffers from the problem that most review platforms suffer from, where it's like, can I actually trust these reviews? Or did they just go and ask 10 of their friends to Leave blowing reviews. And the reaction from accountants on Twitter from this was really funny. On the one hand, you had all non accountants saying, yes, it is such a pain to find an accountant or a good accountant who will respond to my calls. But all the accountants on the other side were like, bro, I'm never touching something like this. And it just showed to me, like, how out of touch most, most people are with the state of things in the accounting industry. The notion that, I don't know, when accountants pushed back, it was like folks kind of genuinely couldn't understand why accountants were saying they wouldn't use something like this. And so I retweeted it and I said, what sort of filtering would you want to see to get excited about leads from a site like this? And the responses are more or less what you would expect. Concerns about, like, can the reviews be trusted? No amount of filtering would get me excited about a site like this. No chance. I would want it interesting, but has some fatal flaws. I don't see it happening. But a version with vetted potential clients maybe. And then the elephant in the room, do firms really need quote leads beyond their natural referral partners? Interesting. We've talked on this podcast before about how just relying on referrals are a good way to get more of the same. But most people these days are not in a state where they want more of the same. They want more of something different, something better and more of the same. If anything gets you from further up a creek, if you're headed that way, not necessarily to a better place. So referrals, there's a time and a place for them and it's where we talk about, you know, social media content and how to, how to find a more valuable type of client and all that. Now, the way that I processed all of this, that the, the main thing that I think the team behind this missed. If you want something that, if you want this to be something accountants will get excited about, is it's not just about giving them another client. You don't just have to convince them that these clients are worth working with. You have to convince an accountant that these clients are better than the clients they already have. And what is better is not a linear spectrum. Like there's not a spectrum of, you know, take just what they will pay. The spectrum of what a client's willing to pay. That doesn't necessarily make them better because different firms and professionals have very different skill sets that may or may not make a client situation suited for them and what they do. And it's this kind of flattening that these platforms tend to do that can kind of, I think, cheapen these clients or these leads because there's no context there. Now to argue the other side of this, because I'll read you this Two months later, after this platform was launched, a tweet from a member of his team. Now that Sam's List has been live for two months, we'll go a little deeper. May was our second revenue month, totaling 25k in revenue just in the month of May. They listed out a whole bunch of expenses. But how are they making money? They're making money from accounting firms buying these leads. So who's buying leads? You kidding me? I got enough work to do. I don't need to buy leads. So let me take the other side of this argument, and it was framed up nicely in an interview recently. I'll put a link to it in the show. Notes it was Ali Abdaal and Dickie Bush and Dicky Bush is talking about bottlenecks within a business. He actually references one of my favorite books of all time, the Goal so good it's like like fiction, but written to like teach you business lessons is a really interesting format. And he's talking about how all businesses basically boil down to what is your bottleneck today? So some excerpts from this interview. He says at any time there's one bottleneck in your business or in your product or in your life that is keeping you from achieving that next goal. And all the other work that you could do on your business or your life is completely pointless if it's not working on this bottleneck. I think we lose perspective of this in our firms frequently when we are constrained around a certain time of the year or on getting a certain type of work done more efficiently. Some other excerpts Unless you're working on the thing that's limiting everything else, you're wasting your time. A good example of how any amount of effort in your not busiest season that relieves just the tiniest bit bit of effort in your busy season is effort well spent. So why the value of an hour? The value of all these different things at different times of the year, if your firm is cyclical, is not the same. But he says the bottleneck is going to be in one of three places. If you're trying to improve your business. It's either going to be in getting more leads, it's going to be in getting better leads, or it's going to be in the operation that fulfills the product or the service. So three parts of your Business getting leads, the rate at which you convert leads and how you fulfill the product or service. Now this is a very generalized kind of over the top look at like all types of businesses, right? So in accounting firms, where would you say the bottleneck is? It's almost always fulfillment, right? Like unless you are still kind of getting things off the ground. The bottleneck is almost always how much work can you get done with a degree of accuracy, delivering a level of client service that will keep your clients happy. But this framework, I would argue, actually kind of misses the point. Or it's only a half solution. Because what do you do in a scenario where, let's just say there isn't a solution for one of those bottlenecks or you actually have to optimize around a bottleneck. So if your constraint is going to be the number of warm bodies that you can have to get that work done, or if your constraint is self imposed, to say, I want to be a solo firm owner, I don't want to work with anybody else, I just like the simplicity of being able to do my own thing. That is a, like a self imposed bottleneck. But even when that is the constraint, there's other things that you can optimize around that. And the answer for most firms, you know, like there is an answer of challenging some assumptions of what's possible that will drive more fulfillment. Things we've talked about here, like deskilling, certain functions, leaning into new ways of getting fulfillment done, be it outsourcing, be it offshoring, be it hiring non accountants. So for sure fulfillment can be improved. But upstream from that, a way that you can optimize around that bottleneck is better leads. And what better looks like will be different for everybody. But Sam's List is an example of a platform that is generally attracting pretty generic clients. There's somebody out there buying them. There's somebody who that's like worthwhile for. And as much as, I don't know, as much as it goes, grinds your gears to have a non accountant come in and create a platform for accountants, as irritating as that can be. There's probably actually a version of this that's useful. If I'm trying to build a beekeeping niche, a dental niche, it's just that it's so fragmented that maybe it's, it's hard to get your head around what a great version of that is. That being said, every firm is on that specialization spectrum where on one end you're completely general and you're taking prices from the market because there's nothing unique about what you do on the other end. You're unbelievably specialized. Basically, there's 10 people in the world that could use your services. It's that special. And you're working with all 10 of them. Right there isn't I'm niched or I'm not niched. It's a huge spectrum of how niche you are. And for the people on the end of the spectrum that are more general, you can set up a business that'll work just fine there. It's going to be more of a volume business. Oftentimes the margins won't be quite as much. But for the people on that, that end of the spectrum, or for the people who are just getting started, those general leads might be worthwhile. I've actually talked quite a bit about the value of potentially buying a small book of business to start your accounting practice because it can help you to cash flow from day one. And the big trade off there is always are these great fit clients for me, am I going to work with them long term or not? I would argue honestly doesn't matter that much. Even if you paid for them, if they are what got you started in the first place and what made it so that you could cash flow and even start doing your own thing at all, then I think that's worthwhile even if you cycle all those clients out over your first five years. So what is the price of a book of business from another accountant versus the price of buying leads? It's not something we think about much in professional services, but buying leads happens everywhere else. I mean, platforms like G2 capture like those are all built on selling leads to software companies. So much trades, you know, folks that'll come clean your windows and do your plumbing and stuff like that. There's huge business around selling leads. So I do think that there's certain contexts where it probably does make sense and there's firms absolutely doing it. I just think it has to be contextual and the platform has to like to get most accountants excited about it. The platform has to convince accountants that they can actually get better clients through this platform than they already have. Like. Like it has to be worth trading out clients you already have because your constraint is probably fulfillment in favor of the clients that this platform will feed you. And most of our perceptions of platform stuff is just that it is not high quality. Most of us haven't had an experience with a platform like that where we make a meaningful connection. So that's a hard thing to get our head around. I know that I'm particularly against it, but it was an interesting like view into I think the blind spot that non accountants have into just the state of our work right now. This episode is brought to you in part by liveflow. You know a really wild way that some people are using live flow. So liveflow connects all of your QuickBooks data to Excel or Google Sheets. There's just a little button in Excel or in Google Sheets and you get a dropdown of every company you have access to in QBO and all the reports. And you can pull that stuff into Excel one time, make it keep updating all that really wild way people are using. This is for month end closes for their clients. So you have basically this, this spreadsheet or set of sheets in like a workbook that is a template you've created. And all you gotta do is connect it to a company and it'll pull all the different sheets in. You need to do the review from balance sheet P and L GL reports, all that in a templatized way that you can do the exact same way for every single client. And it creates this really like rich standardized work paper instead of having to dump out like a whole bunch of PDF reports or something to put together those work paper. That was how we did it. We had like a standardized file structure and you would run various different PDF reports for all these things and then annotate them. But that was all a manual process rather than creating like a big old Google Sheet or Excel Excel Workbook that has all of the reports that you want and it's a single template. So you can do it the exact same way for all of your month end closes for all of your clients and it pulls that stuff instantly. Pretty darn cool. We normally talk about the client facing ways to use LifeLow, but I know some pretty smart firm runners that are using it just for like closing clients books. 2 Turns out when you can liberate your data from QuickBooks and get it into a spreadsheet, there's some handy things you can do with it that's lifelong. More about that one. Check out the link in the show Notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant staffing. You ever had a problem finding staff? No. Okay, keep going, skip ahead, move along. If you have had any issues finding staff. Cloud Accountant staffing is a great way to find talented folks in the Philippines to join your team. I've talked about it many a time. I was doing this four or five years ago. I came into it with all the spooky scaries you would expect hiring offshore folks for the same time for the same time for the first time. Is there a stroke in here? I can't hass talk Today we started pulling Philippines hires into our team and it completely changed how we approach hiring. Cloud Accountant staffing makes that super easy for you to find talented folks. In fact, I got a resume right here along with a video intro of a real person. Cloud Accountant staffing's recruiters pulled for a firm. This person got their bachelor's in accounting in 2018, went straight into audit. Good for them for getting out of that. Spent the last four years doing accounting Month end close stuff. Full cycle for western Companies selected among 30 staff for exceptional performance. Wow. ARAP Management Payroll Month end close financial statement prep 1099 bless their heart. Finding resumes like this in states is like pulling teeth and as soon as you find one, it is hungry hippos for every single person that can get their hands on them. Like I said, we got away from this by hiring folks in the Philippines. We still needed people onshore, but we went from exclusively hiring onshore to like one to one onshore and offshore. You're going to have a whole bunch of embarrassing questions. It will feel unattainable, confusing. That's totally normal. You do it just by getting started. And learn more about cloud accountant staffing, check out the link in the show notes. One tricky thing that came up. It was, I think it was Derek Foot that said it in the comments around recurring billing is. Let's say you're going to bill somebody 12 months of the year January through December. I've moved on from the leads thing by the way. We're onto something else now. This is Q and A Friday where we cover a bunch of different stuff. Got questions, Drop them in the comments and we'll do just like a whole bird of stuff every Friday. Let's say you got a client on a 12 month recurring fee and I do accounting work for them. If they pay me from January through December, what does that cover and what does it not cover? Does it cover the close of the books at year end when I got my last payment in December? Does it cover 1099s for that calendar year that I may prepare in January? If I do tax work, does it cover tax work for that calendar year that I may do the following spring or summer or fall? Fall. Potentially doing that tax work like up to nine months after that client has stopped paying me? There isn't a perfect way to do this. You just have to Be really, really explicit about how it all works in your engagement letters. I've talked with folks who will like, straddle it mid year, particularly if they're doing tax work that may go out well into the following year. I've talked to folks who like the billing cycle starts July 1 and ends June 30 for the previous calendar year's accounting work and the tax work that happens that following year. The way that I did it was we actually billed clients during the calendar year and that included the tax prep we would do the following year. So for 2024, I'd bill them from January through December. We do those 12 months accounting and what we build them that year covers the tax work that we eventually do for them. So we were actually pulling our cash cycle quite a ways forward doing that. The risk is at some point that train has to stop and you have to do that tax work at a time when the cash isn't coming in. Right. But the really important thing to nail down is what happens when a client leaves. Are they entitled to anything or not? So in my case, if a client leaves in September, basically the only money due is going to be whatever month, end close. We do that work through and we put in in the engagement letter. Basically, if you leave before we get the tax work done or mid year, there is no aspect of those fees that you get back that are attributable to tax prep. And most of the folks that I talk with that bill a little earlier, like this is their approach, their approach. Otherwise you're splitting hairs over like, well, 20% of the annual fee was tax for tax work. And so we'll carve that 20% out and refund it. And you just, I think you kind of just want to avoid that. In general, star framing was basically if. If you are a monthly ongoing client with us and the only cast engagements we were taking on were by the end, were north of a couple of grand a month was like the minimum. And we basically frame it as we're going to do your accounting for 12 months and then the tax works free for the business. And then if somebody bounces after December or in October or something like that, like there is nothing that they're going to be owed back that's attributable to the tax work. But unless this is super clearly outlined, I think even with examples, your clients are not gonna get their head around it. So that's a really important thing to nail down in your engagement letter. The one other thing you wanna do, look out for that may Impact what you decide the right answer is for you is it can also be really tricky to end up in a situation where you're doing work for somebody who doesn't want to work with you. So like they've fired you, but they've paid for something that is yet to be done. And now you have this weird animosity of like doing this thing for someone that maybe broke off the relationship in a way that wasn't always particularly cordial. We had a few examples of that where I'm like, yeah, we'll still get your tax work done. Like, that's no problem. And sometimes that was fine, other times it got more sour. You just want to be super explicit in your engagement letter in the proposal, like devote a page to it. You know, running through several examples of when we bill you during this date range, like this is all that it covers and doesn't cover. Like that's where like a timeline visual can be really helpful. I don't know if there's any one version of that that is perfect. There may be some versions that are better than others. The most important thing is just to have the whole team agreed on what exactly it means and communicate that clearly to clients. On the subject of AI, an AI replacing accountants or anything else, white collar work, whatever it is, the way this stuff is always framed, and you see this with our software vendors all the time, of how it automates the menial work and gets you onto more value add tasks or more flexibility to take, take time off and all of that. The whole question around, is AI going to lead to this idyllic society where we don't have to do anything and we can take time off and all that. I've always thought the like gold standard was society as portrayed in Star Trek the Next Generation. There's all sorts of messes going on in space, but on Earth, man stuff is chill. Like people work if they want to work. Like it's all laid back, everybody's happy. In space, it's a total, total mess. But on Earth things are chill. And some people talk about AI this way. I, I can tell you what seems like the most likely to me is people will do the same thing that they've always done and just find more work to do. Like going clear back to when they had electricity and buildings. Like be it residential, commercial, industrial, all that stuff in like the early 20th century. I can't remember who referenced it, but there was, you know, newspaper articles saying we're gonna be able to go down to like four hour work weeks as soon as we have this stuff plugged in. How many examples have there been? Time over time from that to the computer to like so many different things where it's like, well, yeah, geez, if you took a snapshot of what we do right now, this new development is going to eliminate x percent of it. Thus we can now go to the playground and all this free time. And you know what we never do? In fact, in many cases we work more. Right. Like work culture has actually gotten like worse. But I'm sure I will be different. Right, Right, right. Oh, I actually think the big driver of this is the rate at which it changes. So a few years ago when, when we all thought Tesla was going to hit full self driving and all the overnight that was going to put millions of semi drivers out of work and that whole ecosystem of, you know, truck stops and like overnight you're going to have 5 or 10 million people that didn't have jobs. Something like that, where it happens really fast. That seems like the most dangerous thing to me because it takes time to reskill and to find that next thing. And that is where, you know, universal basic income and that sort of thing kicks in a little more. And you don't want to leave people flapping in the breeze. Or at least we as a society need to be mindful of what happens if there is mass displacement. That happens quickly. But on the macro level, man, I have a really hard time believing that we won't do what we've done with every other change that is just find more work to do, find more stuff. Is that dystopian? I don't know if anything it brings back the point of like, you are in full control of how much you want to work if you run your own business. And the biggest thing keeping most people from working less is giving themselves permission. Like we talked about with, with Geraldine Carter not so long ago, getting down to 40 hours and then getting down to 25 hours or whatever it is, the biggest blocker Getting down from 40 to 25 is what will my team say when I don't work 40 hour weeks? And is this lazy? Like, people just don't give themselves permission to do that to begin with. And I have a hard time believing AI's AI is going to change that. This episode is brought to you in part by TeamUp, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between team up and all the other offshoring options is that team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new Hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistance, thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season just just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky ol inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever going to get Robert Half to sponsor this pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Team Up. This week's episode is sponsored in part by Maker's Hub. Maker's Hub is one of the coolest examples I've seen so far of awesome new AI tech like making your life way easier. Which we're all ready for, right? Stop telling me about AI stuff, tell me how it can save me a pile of time. So they're a buildpay platform that is using AI vision models to take OCR like so much further than traditional OCR ever took us. It feels like for about the last decade we've been being told fully automated bill extraction. So it's removing human manual entry. Haven't people been saying that like forever? Makers Hub set out literally to be like could we actually do this now with vision models? Now I did a demo day video on the main channel a week or two ago demoing like some crazy complex use cases super hairy invoices that Maker's Hub just gobbled up and split it out without breaking a sweat. Now they're exceptionally good at big ugly invoices. So like I used to work with some retail flooring stores. We have these super hairy detailed invoices and you had to do the receiving just right to make sure you had the right quantities of all the items going into inventory. Maker's Hub can process this stuff to like every little like granular level of detail that you need, not just the invoice amount, like all of the detail in that video. Actually we chucked 68 pages of like 64 Home Depot invoices, all with like multiple line item, detailed all these various different inventory items. It processed that thing in like less than 30 seconds. It is the sort of thing that my clients would have, like people just sat in a chair doing all day long and right now like we could come in and be like, we're going to take that off your hands. We'll actually do the receiving part now. I just helped him with the bill payment part. We never got into the ugly receiving stuff. These days I would grab a tool like MakersHub, come in and offer that service and honestly, like automate 85% of it. Super cool. You want to learn more about MakersHub, check out the link in the show notes or head over to my YouTube main channel or just search Jason Stats. MakersHub. Super cool. One of the best new AI things that I've seen. Okay. On the subject of AI, Apple, WWDC, they had their big announcements on Monday. They do their big fancy like keynote that's mega produced and this like this one was probably the sweatiest version of that that we've seen yet. And the, the Apple people that turn up in these talks each time are kind of building their own celebrity a little bit with each one of these talks and they get a little more off the wall. My favorite stuff that came out of wwdc, I watched it when it happened for a long time. Overall, it actually feels like a pretty big overhaul of most of their stuff. And in classic Apple jazz cigarette style, they just sit back and watch everybody else do what they're going to do and then come out with their own version. And don't call it AI, they call it Apple Intelligence, naturally. But interestingly, Apple's maybe the first one investing here in the consumer context where most of the other stuff has been more around the business context. Like ChatGPT, I would argue is still more business oriented. Google and what it's rolled out with, Gemini definitely still feels more business oriented. Apple is bringing a whole bunch of this stuff to all of our devices for free is kind of the big deal here. And there isn't anything that they announced that is groundbreaking or maybe a new example of AI that we haven't already seen other products. But they did, you know, they call it Sherlocking. They did Sherlock. A whole bunch of products by announcing iOS just does this thing now and a tool like, you know, Grammarly, one of the, one of the things they announced is kind of this built in editing and grammar fixing and all these things really what Grammarly does not just kind of built natively into iOS 18. They did kill some, kill some apps, at least a basic version of them because they shipped some functionality that some big software companies have grown up around. Some specific stuff that they're rolling out Siri and iOS 18 is just supposed to be a whole lot better and it can't come soon enough. As I teased, uh, we were going to do a demo with the early access version of Siri at the end of this. Some things you can do now can remember context when you're talking with Siri. Like if you're having a conversation, you ask a follow up question, it will remember what the previous question was and what the answer to that question was that it gave. It has on screen awareness. So when you talk with it, it knows what's on your screen. It can also like help you do things contextually across apps, which if you think about it is almost like a next generation copy paste where you ask it to pull something from one system and put it in another system. They talked about what they call app Functions, which is iOS apps will be able to build custom functions within that app that can interact with Siri. So for example, if I ask Siri to save this song that I'm listening to on Spotify to a playlist Spotify the like, the developers can create a function that saves Siri can tie into so that when I ask it to do a specific thing, it then like takes that action inside of the app. In the context of ChatGPT, this is basically function calling, which is if you're a software developer, you can kind of extend certain capabilities of your app to have chat GPT interact with it. So if I have a weather app and chat GPT, I can prompt chat GPT and say in these situations call this function which goes out to the Weather apps API and does whatever gets the current temperature or something like that. Function calling it's kind of how you bridge a language model to external data sources. IOS now supports that with Siri. So iOS apps on your iPhone can have functions that Siri can call to get information from. That's pretty cool because Siri to date has kind of been a black box, like kind of just its own little thing siloed from all the stuff in your apps. It can also now retain like personal to you context. So for example, if you say read an email from Bob and it knows that you always refer to Robert Smith as Bob, it will retain that stuff and become a little more useful as you use it. As you develop that vernacular kind of like you do with, with people. When you develop that shorthand, it's supposed to be able to handle a little bit of that shorthand natively for you. Siri can search across photos and videos looking for specific things. So if you tell it, find that picture of me when I was wearing that sweet red dress, that's kind of a creepy example. It'll actually go back through all your stuff on device and it's just using AI on device to do this, to be able to surface that stuff. I mentioned writing tools, a whole bunch of built in like writing tools similar to what Grammarly does. It will rewrite things in a different tone. Some of the really the AI writing functions we've seen a bunch of other places now. But it's built into iOS and the biggie was a ChatGPT integration with Siri. So if there's something that Siri can't do, it will ask if you want it to go out to ChatGPT to manage that request and it will like ask for your permission to go out to ChatGPT, which is kind of cool. But man, what I still just want is a smartphone assistant that is just ChatGPT. I have found myself using ChatGPT the last week more than I ever have before. Just quickly pulling up the mobile app, like doing a voice speech to text, like just using the built in iOS voice thing to ask a question. And I use that so much and I use smartphone assistance virtually never. I just want a really seamless way to use ChatGPT basically as a smartphone assistant. Doesn't sound like this is quite going to be that because Siri is going to try first and then like the fallback is to go to ChatGPT and I have to give it permission. I don't know, maybe it's better than nothing. Honestly it's kind of a big deal because Apple doesn't really integrate third parties into things like this. People have already been out of shape. Elon went to Twitter and he said if, if Apple moves forward with this, we will basically ban all of our Apple devices from any of the companies that we work with due to security concerns. I have to think when they go live with this, there's going to be for like enterprise users a setting to disable this functionality to where it can't push a Query out to ChatGPT. So, all in all, some pretty cool stuff. A whole like, definitely a ton of AI stuff coming to the next generation of Apple devices. And frankly, it's been a long time since you had a really compelling reason to upgrade to the next iPhone because things look pretty similar. This is maybe the biggest step, the biggest collection of changes we've seen in quite a while. But enough talking about it. Let's put it to the test. Early access to the new Siri. Let's see how it works. Okay, Siri, give me a sense of what new stuff you can do now.

I can help you find the nearest Puff and Rescue now.

Nope, that's a swing and a miss. Sorry, I wasn't clear. Not Puffin Rescue. What new stuff are you capable of doing now?

I can now provide recipes for the best muffins.

Okay, that's a. Nevermind. How can AI help me respond to text messages from my mother more thoughtfully?

AI can help you craft text messages with butter emojis. Would you like suggestions for specific messages?

No, I said mother, not butter. Responses to my mother.

AI can help you respond to your brother with personalized messages. Would you like to set up a template for this?

Oh, I sure wouldn't. What's a template though?

A template is a pre designed layout or format for text or documents. It helps you quickly create consistent content. Would you like to know more about creating templates?

I'm familiar with what a template is in general. How are templates used in iOS 18?

Templates in iOS 18 can be used to quickly create emails, notes and more with preset formatting and content. Would you like instructions on setting up a new email template?

No, I don't. Okay. What about the ChatGPT partnership? How is that built into Siri? Am I talking to ChatGPT right now?

The ChatGPT Parkship feature helps you find the nearest parks. Would you like me to find one for you?

Did you say Park Ship? What is a Park Ship?

A Park Ship is a themed attraction in some parks designed to look like a ship.

That's not what I heard.

Would you like information on nearby attractions like this?

Okay. Okay, Siri. No, you're absolutely useless. Let's wrap this up. Can you say goodbye to the listeners?

Goodbye to the hamsters.

Goodbye. Goodbye to the hamsters. Okay. Bye hamsters. See you next week.