Welcome to the seventh episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
Listen to the seventh episode of the Access On podcast (Browser).
Or listen on your preferred podcast platform.
Timestamps
The show is segmented by chapter, making it easy to move between segments of the podcast if you have an app or player that supports chapters. Below is what's on the show this week, and when you can hear it.
- Introduction 0:00
- Register for our document accessibility boutique on January 28 1:09
- Review and demonstration of the Plaud NotePin 2:38
- Microsoft office on mobile devices, and Microsoft Bookings 36:59
- The most accessible way to learn a new language, and getting familiar with Microsoft Teams 40:28
- The future of the Envision glasses 43:49
- Amazon Alexa 52:39
- Problems with the voice rotor in watchOS 11 53:52
- Tech tip for Victor Reader Stream users 55:30
- Closing and contact info 59:17
Transcript
Song: Live the life you want. Access On.
Jonathan Mosen: Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. The PLAUD NotePin promises easy note-taking and meeting summaries, but accessibility needs some work. Listener feedback on some Microsoft applications, including Office for Mobile and Teams. Following our previous episode, in which we featured Envision's new Ally, we have some listener feedback. And we have a tech tip from a listener this week, which could help you if you're a Victor Reader Stream user.
Happy New Year to you from the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. I don't think it's too late to say Happy New Year yet, it's getting there but not quite, especially since this is the first episode of Access On for 2025. We're really looking forward to bringing you some exciting content over this coming year, including much more from our Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility, we've got some cool plans in store for you. And speaking of CENA, our Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility at the National Federation of the Blind, I want to tell you about the next boutique that we have in store for you, in case you want to register for it. It is happening on January the 28th and it begins at 2:00 PM Eastern Time. It runs for 90 minutes, it happens via Zoom. This boutique is all about document accessibility, Word, Google Docs and PDF, and here's a little bit about what you can expect if you choose to register for this.
From students to professionals to friends in our community, digital documents are shared daily and it is important for accessibility to be incorporated into the documents we create. Learn some of the basic but powerful techniques experts use every day to build accessibility into their documents. Join the National Federation of the Blind Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Accessibility on January the 28th, 2025 from 2:00 PM til 3:30 Eastern, via Zoom, to learn how to make your documents accessible for all. We'll cover the basics of document accessibility, using these tools with a screen reader, how to check your documents for accessibility. I'm sure that you'll find it informative. Why not register now while you remember to do it? Time gets away from us so quickly, doesn't it? Nfb.org/CENA is where you find the landing page for CENA here. Nfb.org/CENA, and we look forward to you attending.
There are days when we all feel like we are constantly being held back by accessibility challenges, and the National Federation of the Blind will of course continue to work on those. But we can find an encouraging example of the accessibility progress that we've made over the decades, when we consider how note-taking has changed for blind people. While some people were proficient and extremely rapid with a slate and stylus, before the age of portable computing, it was common for blind people to record meetings or lectures, then listen to them later in private, when noisy devices like a Perkins Brailler might be used to take notes. Those contraptions were just too noisy to use in environments like lectures or business meetings. Blind people were at the cutting edge in the 1980s when we were using note-taker devices like the Brail'n Speak or Keynote Excel, long before the PDA craze kicked off among sighted people. And over the years, everyone has started using laptops, tablets, and phones with note-taking apps.
Now, imagine a tiny device where you can have it all. You can refer to audio recordings of meetings or lectures, or voice notes that you might make yourself. You can refer to full transcripts of those recordings without having to write anything down yourself. And if you prefer getting a summary of your in-person meetings, very much like those that so many of us are now used to with Zoom or Teams, you can do that too, and this is all on a tiny device you can wear in several convenient ways.
This is the promise of a little device called the PLAUD NotePin, and PLAUD is spelt P-L-A-U-D. But as we'll see, while impressive in principle, the accessibility of the app that gives the device its features leaves a lot to be desired, and you may conclude that it's not worth the cost. That you can do what the PLAUD NotePin does with technology you already own. The PLAUD NotePin is an AI-powered wearable voice recorder, and it's designed to streamline the process of capturing and transcribing conversations. It comes with all the attachments to wear it in various ways, including on your wrist, as a necklace, or clipped to an item of clothing. You can easily clip it to your collar, for example.
Now, I'm about to leave Wellington, New Zealand's capital, which is known in this part of the world as the Windy City. I usually wear a tie when I'm working professionally and to keep it straight, you really have to wear a tie clip in Wellington. Since I started evaluating the PLAUD NotePin, I've been using it as my tie clip. It's always there, it's within easy reach, and that means that I'm more likely to use it. So, it's a versatile tool for professionals, students and journalists. If you're interested in this product, be aware that PLAUD offers another one like it, which is simply called PLAUD Note. That is a larger device and it's designed to clip on the back of your smartphone. That does have some additional features, like the ability to record phone calls and other conference calls. The NotePin, much smaller, will not do those things.
The PLAUD NotePin is priced at 169 dollars. Just by buying the PLAUD NotePin, you get 300 minutes of transcription every month. If that's not enough for you, the Pro plan is available at 79 dollars annually, or you can pay monthly for a little more, and that offers 1,200 minutes of transcription per month and it has additional features, such as custom templates. We'll talk about templates a little later. This device is very small, which is unquestionably part of its charm. It's pill shaped and it measures 51 millimeters or two inches in length, 21 millimeters or 0.83 inches in width, and 11 millimeters or 0.43 inches in thickness. It weighs about 25 grams, 0.88 ounces.
When I unpacked the PLAUD NotePin, it was completely flat, both in terms of how the device feels and the state of its battery. To charge it, there is no USB port on the little device itself. Instead, you need to clip a little charging accessory, which is magnetic, to the back of the pin, and then plug the included USB-C cable into the port on the device. Once it's charged though, PLAUD says you'll get around 40 days of typical use out of it before you have to charge it again, and it'll record continuously on its 64 gigabytes of built-in storage for 20 hours before it goes flat. With that kind of dependability, that's a great incentive to keep using the device because it just keeps going for days and it's easy to find a way of wearing it that just makes it a part of your life. That clothing pin or a tie clip that I mentioned before is just another magnetic accessory, like the charger which you attach to the back of it. Other options involve attaching a lanyard type of device, such as if you want to wear it as a necklace.
When I unpacked the device, my heart sank and I thought I had made a purchase that was a complete dud from a blindness perspective, because there are no buttons on the device at all. But in fact, operating it is incredibly simple. If the PLAUD NotePin has charge in it, all you have to do is press and hold on the main surface of the device. You'll feel a single vibration and that tells you that you are recording. If you press and hold again in the same place, you'll feel a double vibration and that tells you that you are no longer recording. 64 gigabytes provides a lot of space for storage of mono audio, and you can keep recording for days without having to offload your recordings.
But when you load the PLAUD app on your iPhone or Android device, it's a little bit like the meta glasses experience that so many of us are now used to. It will detect that there are new recordings on the device that haven't been uploaded yet, and the upload process will start. By default, that process will occur via Bluetooth and that's going to be very slow, but the PLAUD NotePin is wifi capable as well. So with a little bit of setup, you can connect your phone to the PLAUD NotePin directly, and the transfer will take place over wifi. The transfer speed goes up at least 10 times the speed that it occurs via Bluetooth, so it's worth setting up and it's worth doing.
I have not had experience with the PLAUD app for Android at this stage, but I have had an extensive look at the iOS app. I use an iPhone daily myself. And I've also enabled the PLAUD cloud, which allows you to engage with your files via the web. The iOS app is usable and probably tolerable, but it can hardly be said to be exemplary when it comes to accessibility, and there are a lot of quick wins that could make this app far better from a voiceover point of view than it is.
Unfortunately, my initial assessment suggests that the web user experience is even worse. You may find that the convenience of the PLAUD NotePin outweigh the problems with the app, but I do think that the app is a better way to go than trying to grapple with the website.
I am in that app now on my iPhone and will go on a bit of a tour of it. We will start at the top of the screen.
Speaker 3: PLAUD_NotePin.
Jonathan Mosen: This is showing up because I am wearing my PLAUD NotePin now. In fact, I'm finding that I just wear it all the time. It's just so handy to have around. So it has found that device, it is connected to it. And if I double tap, I can configure it. I'll do that.
Speaker 3: PLAUD_NotePin. Button, image, possibly, back.
Jonathan Mosen: It has found an image in voiceover is suggesting that it may be a back button. That is what it is, and you can also perform the scrub gesture in this particular screen to go back if you wish. I'll flick right through the screen.
Speaker 3: Button, image.
Jonathan Mosen: As far as I can tell, this takes us into a smaller screen which gives you information such as your serial number and other configuration options, but many of those options we can get to by continuing to explore this screen.
Speaker 3: PLAUD_NotePin. Battery level, charge required. Name. PLAUD_NotePin. Image, possible text. Name. PLAUD_NotePin greater than. Serial number.
Jonathan Mosen: And it has the serial number there.
Speaker 3: Storage, 256.0 kilobytes of 64 gigabytes used. Image.
Jonathan Mosen: Since I'm wearing my PLAUD NotePin, it has uploaded the contents of material that I've recorded. So the storage is essentially vacant.
Speaker 3: Firmware update V0139. Image, possible text. Firmware update V0139.
Jonathan Mosen: When I got this device, a firmware update was available. There hasn't been one since, but I imagine they do come through from time to time, and updating the firmware was not difficult to do with voiceover.
Speaker 3: Transfer to plot APP. Image, possible text. Transfer to plot APP.
Jonathan Mosen: My understanding is that this will initiate a transfer if for some reason there is material on your device that you want to get into the app, and it will give you the option to do it via wifi or Bluetooth low energy.
Speaker 3: Disconnect. General.
Jonathan Mosen: We have a range of settings here which I won't go through in the interest of time, but one of the interesting settings for me and I think for many listeners, will be the ability to adjust the sensitivity of the microphone. As we will hear when I play you a recording that's been made on the PLAUD NotePin, it is using a lot of dynamic audio compression, justifiably so for the use case we are talking about, which is recording meetings and speakers who may be some distance away. So it's not designed to be super accurate, high fidelity audio, it's designed to pick up as many speakers as clearly as possible so the audio can be transcribed. But you can also see it, how sensitive the microphone is. I'm going to back out of this screen for the NotePin, by performing a scrub gesture
Speaker 3: PLAUD_NotePin.
Jonathan Mosen: And we'll flick right and continue to explore the main screen of the app.
Speaker 3: Image.
Jonathan Mosen: Voiceover was not able to give us a guess as to what that does. Now, not only is it saying image, but it's not actually saying that the control is actionable, but it is a button, and once you tap this you'll get into the help and feedback section of the PLAUD app. When you do that, you'll find some handy articles that'll help you make the most of the device.
Since we're talking about help, this is an opportune time for me to mention that when you get your device and you look at the files in the app, which we certainly will soon, there are some files included by default that give you some examples of how to use the device. And with these files you can practice transcribing them, doing all of the things that you can do with the device, before you implement it for real. Here's an example of one of those files.
Speaker 1: Welcome to this informative guide on how to harness the power of PLAUD notes transcription feature. With our cutting edge AI technology, transcribing your audio files has never been easier. Here's how to do it with precision.
First, connect your PLAUD NOTE to the PLAUD app to sync your audio file. Second, select the audio files you want to transcribe directly within the app. Third, tap generate, and choose your transcript preference and summary preference to start the AI transcription, which typically takes a few minutes depending on the length of the audio files. Fourth, open the transcript and make any necessary edits or corrections. Fifth, export the finalized transcript as a text file or effortlessly share it with your colleagues or friends. Let PLAUD AI service do the heavy lifting of transcription while you focus on more important tasks. Say goodbye to manual busy work and embrace productivity like never before. Ready to save time and enhance your workflow? Get started with PLAUD NOTE today.
Jonathan Mosen: That file was clearly recorded originally for the PLAUD NOTE, but all the instructions do apply to the PLAUD NotePin, and we'll go through that workflow in just a moment.
Speaker 3: Image.
Jonathan Mosen: Another enabled control here, and unfortunately this one will take you into a kind of a file explorer environment, where you can have a look at files that are on your PLAUD device at the moment. If I were to do that, you'd find that there's nothing there because all of my content has been transferred from the PLAUD NotePin into the app, and therefore into the PLAUD cloud, which I have activated because I had hoped that the website might be a little more accessible. It turns out that is not the case. Things do get a little better from here though.
Speaker 3: All files. 7/11/21 interview. PLAUD NotePin, technology instructor insights 2024. 11/21, 18 hours 40 minutes and 13 seconds, two meters, 34s. Note.
Jonathan Mosen: That'll all make a bit more sense as we go through this process and I will come back to that audio file a bit later because we recorded that specifically for access on. But I'm going to go to the next file that I have in the app now, and this will give you a practical example of where this is useful.
Speaker 3: 11/21 seminar meeting. Inventory management, customs paperwork, accessibility issues. 2024 11/21, 15 hours zero minutes and 26 seconds. One hour 18 minutes, 32s. Note.
Jonathan Mosen: This is a real world practical benefit of the PLAUD NotePin. Let me explain the context. We are packing up and moving at the moment. There is a lot going on, we have a house to sell. We have a whole house full of contents to get from one side of the world to the other and we were met with a mountain of inaccessible PDF documents that needed to be completed for customs and various other things in order to make that move possible.
So we had a very nice gentleman from the moving company we have chosen, come over to do an appraisal and assist us with some of this inaccessible paperwork. They wanted the business, we were glad of the help. In earlier times, I would probably have sat there with my Mantis or some other note-taking device and made a list of tasks that I needed to perform. But I thought, well this is a great chance to put the PLAUD NotePin to work. Why don't I just continue to wear it? I'm wearing it anyway, have it do its recording and transcribing and summarizing. So let's see what we have, I'll double tap.
Speaker 3: 11/21, seminar meeting. Inventory management, customs paper-
Jonathan Mosen: I'll just flick right through this.
Speaker 3: Button. Image, possibly, back. Heading, image, possibly, play.
Jonathan Mosen: Now I'm not going to play the audio because I don't have permission from the other party to play the audio, but we will come back to playing audio so you can hear what it's like.
Speaker 3: Button, image, possibly, share.
Jonathan Mosen: There are a lot of very useful options under share, so let's quickly explore them.
Speaker 3: 11/21 seminar meeting. Invent-
Jonathan Mosen: I'll flick right.
Speaker 3: Image, possibly, close. Share link. Image, possible, text. Share link.
Jonathan Mosen: Because I have opted to use the PLAUD cloud, all of this data is stored in the cloud. That means for example, that if I want my wife to have access to all of this data, then I can send the link to her.
Speaker 3: Copy transcript, image, possible text, e-circumflex, copy, copy summary, image. Possible-
Jonathan Mosen: We'll come back to the transcript and the summary.
Speaker 3: Export audio. Image, possible, text. Export audio.
Jonathan Mosen: So you can imagine how useful this is. If you want to record a lecture, you would just run your PLAUD app at the end of the day, having been wearing your PLAUD all day, if you really wanted to get a good recording and you got the lecturer's permission, you could always put the PLAUD NotePin on the lectern, I guess. Don't forget to retrieve it later. And then when you get home, at the end of the day you run the app, it'll transfer the lectures that you've recorded. You can then have full transcripts of the lecture. You can have it summarize the lecture for you, and you can get it the original audio of the lecture as well. So you have the best of all worlds.
Speaker 3: Export transcript. Image, possible, text. Export summary. Image. Export mind map.
Jonathan Mosen: Yes, that's another thing it does. It also makes mind maps. So, those are the things that you can share from this source. I'll go back, we'll try a scrub gesture. That did work.
Speaker 3: Button, image, button, image.
Jonathan Mosen: This is a more options feature, so if I double tap this, we will actually use this because I want to show you how this process is done.
Speaker 3: Edit file name, move to folder.
Jonathan Mosen: If you want to keep things organized, you can have quite an elaborate folder system in the PLAUD app. Let's say that you have a day job and you also serve in some capacity in the National Federation of the Blind. As a volunteer, you might want to keep those recordings in separate folders for ease of reference.
Speaker 3: Smart audio trimming.
Jonathan Mosen: Sometimes you're recording because you never know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen. So smart audio trimming can take care of that and get rid of lots of extraneous silences.
Speaker 3: Find and replace. Re-transcribe. Re-summarize. Move to trash. Dismiss.
Jonathan Mosen: Let's go and have a look at Re-summarize.
Speaker 3: Move to trash. Re-summarize.
Jonathan Mosen: I'll double tap.
Speaker 3: Select summary template.
Jonathan Mosen: I should say that for the purposes of this demo, I have upgraded to the premium product, so there are some features in the premium that costs about 79 dollars a year that are not available if you just have the PLAUD NotePin with the standard plan of 300 minutes a month. Templates will influence the kind of summarization that you receive. In my experience, I find that setting it to auto is sufficient most of the time. It tends to analyze the recording and work out the template that is best suited. If you want to go and choose the kind of template yourself you can, and let's have a look at what you could do.
Speaker 3: Image, possibly, close. All.
Jonathan Mosen: If we flicked right we'd get various categories, but I'm going to double tap all so you can hear the variety of templates that exist in the app.
Speaker 3: All. General, meeting, speech, call, interview, medical, sales, education, custom, general, autopilot, adaptive structure, all seen adaptation, image, possible text.
Jonathan Mosen: I have found that this works very well.
Speaker 3: Image, meeting note, topic, arrangements, conclusions, image, possible text, image, call note, topic, arrangements, conclusions, image. Image, speech note, summary, key points, questions, image. Possible image, interview note, Q&A, viewpoints, conclusion, image. Image, dictation note, diary and journal, inspiration memo, image. Possible text, image, key points, bullet points, keywords, details, image.
Jonathan Mosen: And we could go on, but this influences the way that the AI is going to behave. I'm happy to accept-
Speaker 3: Autopilot, adaptive structure.
Jonathan Mosen: So I'll double tap.
Speaker 3: Autopilot, adaptive structure, all seen adaptation.
Jonathan Mosen: And what you'll notice is that the app is not giving any feedback that what I double tapped is actually selected. We just have to trust that it is. I'll go to the bottom of the screen having double tapped it.
Speaker 3: Dismiss.
Jonathan Mosen: And flick left.
Speaker 3: Generate now button.
Jonathan Mosen: And we're going to do that.
Speaker 3: Button, image.
Jonathan Mosen: If I go to the bottom of the screen again.
Speaker 3: Summary generation takes a few seconds to proceed. Generating summary, ellipsis.
Jonathan Mosen: And we'll just let it do its thing. It doesn't take too long, and this audio is a long one though. It's about an hour and eight minutes of audio with the man from the moving company.
Speaker 3: Summary generation takes a few seconds.
Jonathan Mosen: So we'll forgive it for taking a wee while to generate a summary for something of this length. We'll just see if it's going to do it soon or I will have to pause the recording.
Speaker 3: Generating summary. Summary generation takes a few seconds to proceed.
Jonathan Mosen: When you consider though how long it would take to actually sit and listen to audio of one hour and eight minutes in length, it's a good investment.
Speaker 3: Button, image, possibly, back. Button, image, ask AI, beta.
Jonathan Mosen: It's done. So I'm going to let you hear some of this summary and you can hear how useful this is.
Speaker 3: Date and time, 2024, 11/21, 15 hours zero minutes and 26 seconds. Location, insert location. Attendees, insert names. Overview. This document outlines the logistics and preparations for a move, including inventory management, packing strategies, and customs documentation. It also covers personal logistics, travel itineraries and employment details related to a relocation. Additionally, it discusses accessibility issues within the federal government and technology advocacy, as well as personal anecdotes about pets.
Action items are consolidated at the end for clarity. Items for moving, living room and kitchen. Black circle. Living room. Large circle. All furniture is staying. Large circle. Wall decorations are to be removed. Black circle. Kitchen, large circle. Only glasses, mugs and ceramics are to be packed. Large circle. Some kitchen items may be discarded before moving. Large circle. Two boxes are planned for kitchen items. Bedrooms and hallway. Black circle. Bedrooms. Large circle. Pictures and some decorative items will be packed. Large circle.
Bed and bedside tables are not going. Large circle. A filing cabinet will be moved. Black circle. Hallway. Large circle. Minimal linens and towels will be packed, possibly one large box. Large circle. Bar stools, two will be packed later. Office and miscellaneous. Black circle. Office. Large circle. Chair and computer will be moved but not the desk. Large circle. Miscellaneous items on the desk, including fragile ornaments will be packed. Large circle. Audio equipment and networking gear will be packed. Black circle. Miscellaneous. Large circle. Two chairs and a desk from another-
Jonathan Mosen: So that goes on. I mean, it does go on and it's detailed and it's accurate. I will just scroll through for you to get to the action points at the bottom of this.
Speaker 3: Action items. Image. Pack two boxes for kitchen items. Image. Confirm the final inventory list with the original for accuracy. Image. Complete customs forms with the necessary information. Image. Complete the application for a social security number. Image. Confirm temporary accommodation details and provide apartment number if necessary. Image. Ensure all travel documents and forms are correctly filled and submitted. Image. Transfer inventory details to the B job for comparison.
AI suggestion. AI has identified the following issues that were not concluded in the meeting or lack clear action items. Please pay attention. One, challenges with federal government accessibility implementation persists due to bureaucratic hurdles, particularly the reliance on paper documents and inaccessible PDFs, which need to be addressed to improve advocacy efforts. Two, there is a discrepancy in volume estimation for the move, which could lead to logistical issues. It is crucial to ensure all important items in the correct number of boxes are accounted for. Three, difficulties in completing forms arise from unclear instructions regarding personal versus goods information. Necessitating clarification to avoid errors in documentation.
Jonathan Mosen: So that is the summary, and there is also a transcript available of the whole one hour and eight minutes if we wanted, and as I say, there's the audio as well. But I find that summarization accurate and incredibly helpful, because what I can then do is take some of those action points where they belong to me and move them into Todoist, which is the task management app I use. I think this is particularly valuable if you only use speech and you're trying to be present in the meeting while also take copious notes and listen to your computer speaking back. We'll get used to these things, but it does take the cognitive load off a little bit.
Clearly, it would be nice if some of these accessibility issues were tidied up, but we can get there. We can generate the summary and now that we have it, we could double tap the share button and send it to anywhere that the iOS share sheet will allow us to send it to. So I could put it in an email message to someone, if I wanted to share this with Bonnie so that she has a record of that meeting. We could put it in a word processor, we could store it on a cloud service like Dropbox or OneDrive or Google Drive or iCloud, and then the accessibility doesn't matter so much because we'll just bring it up in the app that we like using. I'm going to back out of this particular recording.
Speaker 3: 11, 20.
Jonathan Mosen: And a scrub gesture did work. I'm going to go back to the previous one.
Speaker 3: 11/21 interview. PLAUD NotePin. Technology instructor insight.
Jonathan Mosen: My wife and I were forced to have dinner with my nephew. I mean, I'm not saying that it's onerous for us to do that, but we had to leave the house because there was an open home and the real estate agents don't like us around when there's an open home. So off we went, and I thought that I would make a recording that we can use here for Access On, so you can hear what the recordings sound like. I thought I'd play this and then we'll go through the summary so you can make a determination about how accurate the summary is. I'll flick right.
Speaker 3: Button. Image. Possibly, back heading. Image, possibly, play.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm going to play this recording. When you hear it, bear in mind that because I'm an audio geek myself, Access On is quite processed in a particular way that I want for the sort of podcast. So you may not hear an exact replication if you're an audiophile, of what this recording really sounds like, but let's have a listen.
Speaker 3: Image. PLAUD.
Jonathan Mosen: It vibrated now. Welcome, this is a quick demonstration of the PLAUD NotePin for the Access On podcast, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. I'm Jonathan Mosen, and on my right is Bonnie Mosen, and on my left is Anthony Horvath.
Anthony Horvath: Hello.
Jonathan Mosen: And we are at Anthony's house. What do you call your house?
Anthony Horvath: My house.
Jonathan Mosen: Oh, you don't have a cool name for it?
Anthony Horvath: No.
Jonathan Mosen: The Horvath Hilton?
Bonnie Mosen: Horvath Hall.
Anthony Horvath: Well, that certainly makes it flasher than it sounds.
Bonnie Mosen: Horvath Hall.
Jonathan Mosen: That sounds like it. Horvath Hall.
Anthony Horvath: Yeah, [inaudible 00:29:10].
Jonathan Mosen: Yes, let let it be known, we've taken a decision and it will be known as Horvath Hall from now on. What do you think of the PLAUD NotePin, Anthony?
Anthony Horvath: I want one. It's really good. The transcription and the summary function is incredible. As someone who goes to a lot of meetings, well, I certainly find it very useful.
Jonathan Mosen: What would you use it for?
Anthony Horvath: I would use it to, well, for assessments for one.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, that is true.
Anthony Horvath: I would use it in our staff meetings and when I'm meeting with families or clients to form plans. And it has a lot of uses, to be honest.
Jonathan Mosen: Because you are a technology instructor, so rather than have to focus on notes, you could just have this going and it would do the notes for you so you could be fully focused on interacting with people.
Anthony Horvath: Correct.
Jonathan Mosen: What do you think of it, Bonnie?
Bonnie Mosen: It's cool. I think it'd be a great tool for writers or journalists.
Jonathan Mosen: Well that's another angle, right? Because you could be in a cafe or whatever, you could have a quick idea and it's the equivalent of jotting it down verbally, and yet you have the audio.
I'll just stop it there, but you have the recording there now. I was sitting in the middle. Anthony was on my left, Bonnie was on my right. I thought Bonnie was a little quiet in the recording, but it didn't seem to have any trouble picking her up when it comes to the summary. So let's have a look at the summary of that discussion. I used the autopilot option, and it decided that I was a journalist interviewing Bonnie and Anthony, which in the context of this discussion is a perfectly reasonable assumption.
Speaker 3: PLAUD NotePin transcription journalists. Bullet. Interview information. Bullet. Date and time, 2024, 11/21, 18 hours 40 minutes and 13 seconds. Bullet. Location, insert location. Bullet. Interviewer, insert name. Bullet. Interviewee, insert name. Viewpoints. Bullet. PLAUD NotePin. The PLAUD NotePin is praised for its transcription and summary functions, which are useful for meetings and assessments. Anthony Horvath expresses a desire to own one, highlighting its utility in his role as a technology instructor. Bullet. Used for writers and journalists. Beta. Bonnie Mosen [inaudible 00:31:29] PLAUD NotePin would [inaudible 00:31:29] and journalists. Conclusion. The interview highlighted the PLAUD NotePin's utility in transcription and summarization, with potential benefits for technology instructors, writers, and journalists.
17. Next Arrangements insert more. Switch button. Off. AL suggestion. Based on your recording transcript, there are some interview questions that can be optimized. Here are some suggestions from the AL for your reference. The original question could be more specific by focusing on particular features or aspects such as asking how the PLAUD NotePin enhances workflow and identifying specific beneficial features. Additionally, consider exploring opportunities for follow-up questions to delve deeper into the interviewees' insights and experiences.
Jonathan Mosen: Well, that's me castigated by the AI. It said I should have done the interview better. Fair enough, I can take it. Let's have a look at another feature that is available, I believe only on the premium product.
Speaker 3: Image. Possible text. Ask AL. Beta.
Jonathan Mosen: Ask AI. We'll double tap.
Speaker 3: Ask AI. Conclusion.
Jonathan Mosen: All right, we should have an edit field somewhere here.
Speaker 3: Ask AL something. Ellipsis. Up Arrow button.
Jonathan Mosen: Does that invoke the edit field?
Speaker 3: Ask AL some space?
Jonathan Mosen: Yes. So I will now type, what did we agree to call Anthony's house? Because that didn't come up in the summary. Now, I'll flick right
Speaker 3: Image, possibly, up arrow.
Jonathan Mosen: And I believe that will submit it. Let's see if we can find the answer. I'll go to the bottom.
Speaker 3: Share, share. Image. Copy, image, discard, insert image. This answer generated from transcript and summary from the text. We agreed to call Anthony's house, Horvath Hall.
Jonathan Mosen: Okay, and there it is. We agreed to call it Horvath Hall, which is what we did. You do have several large language models to choose from when generating your transcripts. It defaults to ChatGPT4.0, but you can also use Anthropic I believe, and some other large language models as well. So you can take your pick, in terms of the one that you find most accurate.
It's also worth noting that you can use the PLAUD app to transcribe material that was not generated with the PLAUD NotePin or any other PLAUD product. At the bottom of the files list, there is an add file button. You can add audio of up to five hours in length, and it will go ahead and use this same technology to transcribe for you. So, I believe that means that you could download the app from the app store or from Google Play. You could transcribe your own audio that was recorded say on your phone or your smart watch or your Victor Reader Stream or SensePlayer. If you can get it into the app and upload the content, then you can use this technology to do the transcription if you wish.
So, for all of the trouble with the accessibility, I am still intrigued by this PLAUD NotePin. It can be a bit frustrating to use at times, but it's one of those things where you can work around its idiosyncrasies because of the value that it adds. But we shouldn't have to do that of course, and I think the blind community is a market that PLAUD should be cultivating. I wrote to PLAUD and made that point and said that we would be keen to work with them to optimize the performance of the app. Sadly, I have not had any response to my email at all, not even an acknowledge of receipt, and that is very unfortunate. I'd like to hope that that will change in future.
Even if we were dealing with a 100% accessible app, is it worth having a dedicated device? Well, we are often confronted with these questions over the years that I've been podcasting. We've discussed, for example, the value that many people find in owning a Victor Reader Stream or SensePlayer or similar device, even if they have a smartphone that does the same thing. And it is true, you could use your phone or a smartwatch to make recordings of your meetings, and use the Otter.ai app for example, which is one service of many that specializes in this sort of work, where you can upload recordings and it will transcribe them.
And those services have improved over time. So, do you need the PLAUD NotePin in order to do this sort of thing that we've just demonstrated? No, you don't, but there may be a little bit more friction in getting it done. Of course, we have friction of a different kind because as you hear, the app is not the best from an accessibility point of view. So, many people may find that while this has promise, they might prefer to use existing solutions that are fully accessible without this hassle.
If you'd like to learn more about PLAUD and its products, you can go to PLAUD.ai, that's PLAUD.ai. If you own one of the PLAUD devices, be it a NotePin or a PLAUD NOTE, let me know how you're finding it. And if you have some other solution for generating automated transcripts and summaries of lectures and other meetings, let me know about that too. Are you a frequent user of Otter.ai, for example, or are you using something else? Be in touch with an audio attachment or write it down to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. And remember, if you're a member of a National Federation of the Blind chapter, be sure to tell us which one, so we can give a shout-out to the chapter.
I'm delighted to say we have a huge number of listener responses to get through, so we'll get through as many as we can in the remaining minutes of this episode. This one says, "Hello, Jonathan, my name is Asia from Ohio. I am a part of the Lorraine County chapter of the NFB." Well, hi Asia, and hi to the Lorraine County chapter.
"I am blind and use voiceover in JAWS. I'm very much enjoying your podcast and I'm glad to see that you have started up another good podcast." Well, thank you. "I'm emailing you to ask about if you know if Microsoft is going to work on their mobile side of Office. They're working on good features with AI, but they're leaving behind other items. I use Outlook and Teams very frequently on my iPad, but I'm unable to use any other office products on my mobile devices. I would love to move more away from using my computer for documents and things, but have no choice but to, so I can use Word especially. I have an iPad and a Mantis and like to use that as a portable computer, but cannot when I need to use Word and Excel. I have used Google products for several years and just find that some of the items I want to do are easier on Microsoft Word and Excel. Do you know if they will be improving these products on the mobile side?"
Asia, we don't have any information on this at the moment, but it's a useful discussion point and if people want to let us know about pain points that they're experiencing with Microsoft Office on iOS or iPad OS, we'd be delighted to pass that feedback on to Microsoft. We meet with them regularly, our relationship with Microsoft is cordial and constructive, so we'd be glad to pass on any specific feedback that people have.
I know that in past experience trying to do this myself, one of the frustrations I've experienced is that each page in a document is kind of like its own item on the screen, and that can make it a little bit difficult. What I've taken to doing when I want to do this kind of work on a mobile device is to use a tool called Ulysses, which is a third-party tool that will save in Microsoft Word format. So that's an option, but it doesn't at all detract from what you were saying, that you'd like to see improved accessibility in the official Microsoft Office apps. So if anyone wants to comment further on what they're experiencing, what they'd like to improve, maybe we can put together a little list and send that along to Microsoft. So, anyone's welcome to contribute to this one. [email protected], is how you can get in touch with us.
Asia continues another question. "I need to use Microsoft bookings for work and have the worst time on mobile and the computer. I have integrated it with my Outlook on my laptop, but it is still very difficult to use.
This is a very important part of my job and I currently cannot do it since it is horribly inaccessible. Do you know anything about this product and if they are going to work on the accessibility of it?" Asia, I don't know anything about this product, but I have made a note to follow up and we'll see what we can find out, in terms of the accessibility of this product. I appreciate you bringing that to our attention and I know from your posts on Mastodon that that job you have is fairly new, so congratulations on winning the job. And obviously, it is frustrating when you've managed to land a job and you find that the tools are letting you down in that way. So, let's see what we can find out. If I can find anything out, I will report back here.
And Nancy Feldman has a few conundrums, at least that's what she says in the subject line. "Hi, Jonathan. Congratulations on your new position." Thank you, Nancy. "I'm glad you're still podcasting. I've learned a lot from living blindfully, and Access On appears to hold the same promise of new techie adventures. Well, I have compiled a few questions that perhaps you or your listeners can help me answer. I would like to study two languages, Hindi and Danish. One for work and one because my daughter and son-in-law keep asking me to join them in Copenhagen." Well, that sounds very onerous indeed, Nancy, that sounds great. "Are there accessible, user-friendly language apps out there?
I often struggle to figure out what Duolingo wants me to learn, particularly when trying to figure out Hindi's alphabet. And if not apps. Does anyone have other recommendations? For instance, does anyone have braille language instruction books for either language?"
I've not tried to learn a new language recently Nancy, but I have heard that there are some people using Duolingo. I think the iPhone app is reasonably accessible last I heard about it, but let's just put it out there. [email protected], if anyone can comment on learning a language these days, and the most accessible way of doing that, is a great subject.
Nancy continues, "On a completely different note, at work I have to use Teams. I'm told that I need to add my upcoming leave to a Team's calendar, but I can't seem to figure out how I'm supposed to do that. Any suggestions on making friends with Teams and JAWS? Thanks for any help you can offer, and happy holidays to everyone," because Nancy sent this just before the holiday season. Thank you very much, Nancy. I hope they were good for you.
There are some resources out there, in terms of learning Microsoft Teams. Vispero has put together in their training section freedomscientific.com/training, some information on Microsoft Teams. That's also available as a podcast. And Brian Hartgen of Hartgen Consultancy has a tutorial, I believe, that's still pretty current called, Winning Teams. And he also has some scripts for yours that offer some additional support and perhaps some enhanced functionality that you may find helpful. So, there are a couple of resources.
What I'd say about Teams is, it's one of those applications that you can use. It doesn't particularly feel intuitive to me because it's not your traditional Windows application that many of us who have been using Windows a long time have come to get to know and love. It doesn't have a standard menu bar. You've got a series of controls, so you start with control one, control two, control three, that work you through the different tabs in Teams, the different sections. There are lots of hotkeys but there's also potentially quite a bit of tabbing around. But it is doable, it's usable without necessarily being particularly efficient. This is feedback that we've passed on to Microsoft, that there is actually a difference between accessibility and usability, and we'd certainly like to see Microsoft Teams remain accessible but perhaps improve a little in the usability and efficiency department.
Let's talk about the Envision glasses because of course we have been talking in recent episodes about the Envision Ally, which is now available. And Piper is writing in on this subject. She says, "Hello, Jonathan and podcast team. I hope you're all doing well so far this holiday season. I've begun to download all of the Access On podcast episodes ever since the day that the trailer came out, and I must say it's brilliant so far. Keep up the great work and I hope to hear more exciting tech updates and future shows." Thank you very much, Piper.
She continues, "I do have a question of my own. I recently listened to the last episode discussing the updates to the Envision glasses and honestly, ever since first heard about them, I always wanted to get one for myself. Now that Ally, the personal assistant, is part of its features, I'm ecstatic to use it even more. I feel like it would certainly come in handy with my work. My question is this. When you ask Ally a question or activate the device with the touch of a button, is there a way to set how short or long responses will be? The reason I ask is because if I'm in a meeting or class for instance, and I press a button for it to read text to me, I might like further details about images, graphs or anything else that might be helpful for anything I'm doing at the moment."
"However, at the same time, I definitely wouldn't want to keep speaking to Ally or constantly activating the device in a way that will be distracting to others around me during class, meetings, or whatever else I'm doing. I would prefer that it continue to talk to me and provide details without stopping while I coo, read, or hold my sleeping child in my arms without distractions." Oh, that sounds adorable. "Also, will the Envision Glasses be able to recognize facial expressions in the future? That will certainly be handy for daily interactions. Good luck, and enjoy the podcast production." Thank you so much, Piper.
Envision will give you the definitive answer to these questions of course, but here's my answer based on the knowledge that we have here. Ally is multimodal, so you can use it on the Envision glasses, but you can also use it on your smartphone, on your desktop, or laptop computer. The idea with this is that it can be everywhere. So you may want to use Ally when you're walking around and it's appropriate to be speaking to your glasses and asking it questions. But in those situations where it may not be appropriate to use speech as your primary modality of interaction, you can type to Ally if you use it on a device like a smartphone, tablet, or a laptop. You can certainly customize your personality, you can build your own Ally, if you will, and you can tell it to be verbose or not so verbose. You can give it a little bit of personality or you can tell it to be very straight with you and just give you the facts.
So, I would definitely encourage you, even if you don't have the Envision glasses at the moment, to sign up for the beta and take it for a spin on whatever device you have at the moment, and that will give you a feel for how you can use it on the glasses. If you can talk to it on your smartphone or your computer, you'll get a feel for how it will talk back and whether that will be something that you can live with on the Envision smart glasses.
Roy: Jonathan, Roy the rat here, from Little Rock, Arkansas. It's so good to hear you back on the air again, so to speak. I thought I'd lost you. I heard your podcast last week and I was fascinated by the discussion with the Envision person about the Ally app. And I have gone on the web and have signed up for it. I have not heard from them yet, but I assume that I will soon. I have the Meta glasses and I also have the Envision glasses.
Now, the information that I would like to obtain from these technologies are one, the ability to read documents. Both of them have that ability. I'd like to read short text. You can do that with the Envision and the Meta smart glasses too. The other thing that I would like to get is recognition of people, and that would be very valuable to me because I do not see well enough to recognize people. And so that's a piece of technology that I really would like to see developed.
Do you think it might be possible in the future to combine the Meta glasses with the Ally app and get that type of information? Do you have any opinions about that? Because that's what I really would like to see in a piece of technology. Thanks for your help, and I really do like to listen to your podcasts, and I enjoy your information, and I enjoy your humor as well.
Jonathan Mosen: Thank you, Roy, it's good to hear from you. Hope you're doing all right in sunny Little Rock. Maybe it's been snowy Little Rock, it sure has been snowy Baltimore over the last couple of days as I put this podcast together. Oh my word, baptism of fire. I tell you. No baptism of snow, actually.
There are a couple of aspects to your question, and the first is that at the moment the Meta smart glasses aren't an open platform as such. As Mike Buckley has said on this podcast in the past, there was a lot of specific work that went on between the Meta engineers and the Be My Eyes engineers, to make Be My Eyes integrated into the Meta smart glasses in the way that it is, and it is a pretty impressive integration once it's up and running. On the other hand, Ira has done a little bit of clever work so that you can use WhatsApp on the Meta smart glasses to use Ira if you wish to do that. There are a few non blindness applications that have integration with the Meta smart glasses, but at the moment there's no software development kit as such.
So, there really has to be an agreement between Meta and whoever it is, that deep integration occur. So, will that happen with Envision? Well, it was interesting to just pick up the little utterances, the little clues that suggests that there may be something coming, but we don't know what that is at this point.
The second and I think bigger issue though, because I think the platform will evolve in time, is this question of facial recognition and the nervousness around it. There have been some historical troubles for Meta in this regard, so I think they're a little bit nervous about it. And this is something that the National Federation of the Blind continues to talk to providers of this technology about.
There's a big difference between consulting a database so that you can get the name of someone that you don't know that you've never met. Obviously, that's creepy, few people would want that. And what a sighted person does every day, which is okay, I'm friends with someone say on Facebook, or I know them in real life, I have their picture. I just want to know when that person's in the room so I can say hello to them. A sighted person has that kind of access now and we have to find a way for blind people to have a similar degree of access. So that if you have someone in your life and you've taken a picture of them, that you can identify them when they're in the room with you, because that's what seeing allows you to do. So essentially, it's an alternative technique, it's an accommodation. How do we make that happen while safeguarding privacy? There is a lot of nervousness about describing people.
I do note, by the way, I was using the Meta smart glasses the other day, and it did describe a person for me. I said, what do they look like? And it told me what they looked like, what they were wearing. I've never had the Meta smart glasses do that before. So, maybe it is evolving a little bit and I don't know whether that is a general feature or whether it's doing what we have suggested that they do, and find a way of determining that actually it's a blind person using the Meta smart glasses. There are a couple of ways that they might be able to do that, but certainly I was very pleasantly surprised that it did give me a brief description of someone when I asked for it.
That's still not quite what you are asking for, which is to say, okay, I'm in a room, can you please tell me where this person is if they come into the view of the glasses? And I think that as a blind person, it's reasonable to ask for that, but there are a lot of ethical questions to overcome and we'll continue to play a part in those discussions.
Now let's go to Louisville. Louisville, Kentucky, where Rick Roderick is writing in. He says, "Hi, Jonathan. I use Amazon Alexa quite a bit. Most of the time it works quite well. Every so often it'll ask me to do something in the Alexa app. I find that all to be accessible but often not very usable. When I'm using it, I get lost. When I swipe right, I find myself going back and forth between items instead of advancing. I decided I wanted to edit the 10 numbers I could store on my phone list. I couldn't find it. I also don't like the fact that when Alexa sends me something, such as a recipe, it insists on doing it through the Alexa app, when I would rather get it by email."
Thanks, Rick. We do meet with Amazon from time to time and the team there is very receptive to feedback so we will add this to the list and pass on the feedback. I know that the Alexa team is very interested in finding out what people are experiencing. If you would like to pass on any feedback about the accessibility of the Alexa app, then by all means, be in touch. [email protected] is the email to write to. That's Access On, all joined together, at Nfb.org.
David Harvey: Hi, Jonathan. David Harvey and this is my first contribution to Access On. I've come across a very serious issue with Watch OS 11.0.2, where Siri stopped working. I also did a watch reset to see if that would fix it. No, it has not fixed it, and I've lost the voice rotor option, even though after doing the restore with the backup, I added Daniel back in using the iPhone app and the Apple Watch app in the settings. But it still didn't put Daniel back in the voices rotor.
Jonathan Mosen: Thanks for bringing this up, David. I have seen reference to this on Mastodon and other places as well. By the way, I haven't mentioned how you can follow Access On on Mastodon this episode. So for people who are on there, you can go to [email protected], and follow us there and engage with us on Mastodon. [email protected]. But this seems to be one of those issues where it is happening for some people but it's not happening for everybody. So that's frustrating and I'm sure that makes the bug a little harder to reproduce, but it is undoubtedly real. There are people who have done all the right things, they've added the voices to the Apple Watch, but then the voices rotor doesn't show up so that they can select from those voices. Hopefully this one will be addressed soon.
Rich Yamamoto: Well, hello, everyone. Rich Yamamoto here with a tech tip for those who use the Victor Reader Stream third generation. So if you are a Stream owner, then you are probably aware that there is a suspend mode and a full power off shutdown mode, on the stream as of 1.2 or three, I do not recall. And what you can do with the suspend mode is just put the Stream to sleep and it runs on very low power and when you turn it back on, it just pops you right back to what you were doing. Life is all good and dandy, and the world is happy.
When you power off the Stream, it takes about 30-ish seconds to come back up, and sometimes the bookshelves need to refresh.
So, I'm going show you how to shut down from suspend mode, because it took me a long time to figure out how to do this. And I did this when I was going to be gone traveling for my winter break and wasn't going to have access to my Stream. So I'm currently powered up right now, I'm in an Audible book, and if I just press and hold the power button right now with my current settings, you're going to hear the following.
Speaker 10: Suspending.
Rich Yamamoto: And it's suspended. It's as simple as that. It's sleeping now, kind of like your iOS device or your Android device. Now when you turn it back on, you get the following.
Speaker 10: Welcome back. Audible.
Rich Yamamoto: So now, we're right back to where we were. So if we need to shut down the Stream three for whatever reason, all we have to do is go to the menu with key seven.
Speaker 10: Menu. No local settings. General settings.
Rich Yamamoto: Press four to get to the very end of the menu.
Speaker 10: Shut down now.
Rich Yamamoto: And press pound.
Speaker 10: Shut down now. Press pound key to confirm or any other key to cancel.
Rich Yamamoto: And we'll just press confirm.
Speaker 10: Shutting down. Please wait.
Rich Yamamoto: And about 10 seconds later it powers off, and now it's fully off. No battery is going to be drained, in theory, and you can store it somewhere if you need to do that. So that's how you shut down when in suspend mode. In a future tech tip, maybe I can show how to go between the power button operations, if anybody is interested.
Jonathan Mosen: Thank you very much, Rich, for sending that in. I really appreciate that. And if anybody else has any tech tips on anything, whether it be your smartphone, your computer, a device like the Victor Reader Stream, it's great to get them. Send them in to Access On, that's all joined together, [email protected], and you can put tech tip in the subject line so that it grabs our attention for this feature of the podcast.
A reminder that we also have an email list to which you can subscribe to get information about what's on the next episode of Access On. And if you want to subscribe to that, you can do it now. [email protected], or you can go to the nfbnet.org website and check it out from there. A lot of great email lists on there, by the way. So if you haven't visited nfbnet.org, I recommend you check it out. There are several very good technology lists to which you can subscribe from there, but for announcements about this podcast, [email protected].
That concludes this episode of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip, or just write it down and send it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon, [email protected], that's [email protected] on Mastodon. To subscribe to an announcements only email list about upcoming episodes, send a blank message to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, nfb.org or phone us. (410) 659-9314. That's (410) 659-9314, and be sure to check out the Nation's Blind Podcast, right from where you heard this podcast.