Welcome to the seventy-first episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
On this week's episode of Access On:
- Our next Access On webinar on document formatting 0:00
- Smart home defined 2:13
- Google Assistant/Gemini and Apple Home 11:54
- Amazon Alexa 21:58
- Lighting and environmental control 44:33
- Closing and contact info 1:05:55
Speaker 1
Live life you want.
Speaker 2
Access On.
Jonathan Mosen
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week we begin our series bringing you highlights from our webinar about creating a smart home. It's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, welcoming you to episode 71 of Access On. And before we get onto the main event, let me remind you of our next Access On webinar.
This is going to be happening on April 28, which is a Tuesday from 2:00 until 3:30 Eastern time, and it's called Enhanced Document Accessibility. And in this Access On webinar, we're going to be taking a look at how you create documents that look good.
Aesthetically pleasing documents, well-structured, well-formatted documents, benefit everybody. They help make your documents stand out and look professional, but if they're semantically well-structured, they can also help screen-ready users navigate the content as well. So, what's involved in creating a good-looking document and how do you verify that that is what you've done?
That's what we're covering in this April 28 Access On webinar. You can register by going to nfb.org/cena. That's nfb.org/cena, and you'll find the events and training link on that page. And for this Access On episode, we're going back to one of our seminars actually from September of last year, discussing the smart home.
Now, this was one of our four-hour seminars and we'll be playing highlights of it over the next little while on Access On. Just to note though that as we know, technology changes very quickly, and we produced this webinar just before an event that Amazon put together, unveiling a new series of echo devices.
And of course, Amazon's Alexa Plus has now become a lot more prominent than it was back in September. But I think it is largely still relevant because it discusses the things that you can do with a smart home and what the benefits might be. So, let's get into part one of this webinar highlight package. First, let's set the scene. What do we mean when we talk about the smart home?
For those who have embraced this world of smart homes, our homes have undergone a dramatic transformation. We can now accomplish things that would have been thought of as science fiction just a couple of decades ago. So, let me paint a pretty common scenario that happens for those of us who are in this world.
You walk into your home after a long day and you're carrying your smartphone with you and your smartphone has been instructed to take a series of actions when it detects that you've arrived home in the evening. Without you having to do anything other than walk through the door, your house responds.
The lights come on to the perfect brightness, your favorite playlist from Apple or Spotify music or whatever it is that you use play softly in the background. The thermostat adjusts to your ideal temperature and maybe even the coffee maker starts brewing your evening cup.
Hopefully that evening cup is decaf. Well, you're going to have trouble sleeping and then you'll be able to measure that with some sort of smart gadget as well. So, there's no fumbling for light switches. There's no walking to different rooms to adjust thermostats. There's no searching for remote controls. For blind people, smart home technology isn't just convenient and cool.
There are real accessibility benefits allowing us to take control of tasks and devices that would otherwise be inaccessible. So, what is it that makes a home smart? Well, at its heart, a smart home is simply a home where you can control your environment through technology.
And that control might happen through an app or the technology may talk and listen to you, but you might also use a popular voice assistant as well. So, some technology has built in voice functions. It's more common to have a smart assistant that helps you. Think about it this way. Every traditional home control requires you to go somewhere, find something, and manipulate something physical.
If you want to dim the living room lights, you've got to walk to the wall, locate the dimmer switch, and then adjust it. And if you want to make the temperature a little hotter or colder, you find the thermostat, you navigate its buttons or increasingly sadly a touchscreen.
And if it is a touchscreen, good luck with that. You may be able to get there with the help of a visual interpreter service, but it is laborious. If you want to play music in multiple rooms, well, that might involve several devices and remotes and playing the same thing in sync across multiple rooms used to be a big challenge. But it goes even deeper than that because it's not just about control, it's also about confirmation.
Smart homes can provide feedback in the ways that work for us. When you adjust that smart thermostat through an app, it can announce the temperature change to you. I don't have any light perception. So, coming back to that dimming the lights example, when I dim the lights using a traditional dimmer switch, I've got no verification of the effects that that dimming has had.
In other words, just how much less bright are the lights now that I've turned that knob. In the past, I might've carried a light probe with me to get some sort of information about that. When you're setting up lighting scenes, your phone can describe what you're creating.
When someone rings your doorbell, it can announce who's there through your speakers, throughout the house, and it can let you know if it detects a package left at the front door. This technology also creates independence in ways that might not be immediately obvious. So, imagine being able to check if you left any lights on before leaving the house just by asking.
Or when you are nearly home and you're trying to help the ride-share driver find your house, turning on your front porch light while you're in the vehicle, make sure that the entrance is well lit. And if you're coming home late at night, yours may be the only house that has the front port light on, so that can really help.
These small conveniences add up to big improvements in daily living. And here is the really beautiful thing about this whole smart home business. You don't need to transform your whole home overnight. You can start small and build up your home's intelligence one device at a time, learning as you go and adding features that make the most difference in your daily life.
You'll find that you will grow in confidence and ambition as you embark on this journey. Like any technology, smart home technology is improving all the time with new devices and capabilities coming up regularly, and it's also becoming easier to get into, easier to set up.
Voice assistants are becoming better at understanding natural speech and context, so that helps as well. Smart devices are becoming more affordable. They're becoming easier to use. The ecosystem is expanding as well to include everything from smart ovens that can announce when your food is ready and do a great job of monitoring how well cooked the food is to smart medication dispensers that can remind you when it's time to take your pills. So, that's the overview. And during the rest of this webinar, we're going to explore many of the exciting attractions that you will find on this journey.
And we're going to begin with, I think, a very good place to start because it can form the basis of your smart home, and that's all about smart speakers and voice control. Voice control is a convenient way to interact with your smart home. And some devices that offer voice control can also act as a home hub, which can be useful for when you want to take actions pertaining to your smart home when you're not at home. So, here's Kennedy to start this part of the seminar.
Kennedy
I just wanted to go over a few commonly used vocabulary words in smart home technology, very common words that you'll hear come up that you might not know and they might not mean what they usually mean. So, just wanted to get the context across.
So, something really important that allows different companies technologies to speak to one another, like a Google and an Apple device working in Pair is the Matter Standard, M-A-T-T-E-R. So, the Matter Standard is a universal smart home protocol developed by major companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, or Samsung to make devices work together more reliably.
Instead of each brand having their own language, "Matter" creates one common way for lights, locks, sensors, and other devices to connect securely over WiFi, ethernet, or Thread. Thread is another vocabulary word I'll get to you in a second. For now, you just have to know it's a low power mesh network.
The goal is that if a device has the Matter logo, or if you go on the website and the website says this is part of the Matter standard or this device works with a lot of different hubs or devices, you can set it up with whichever ecosystem you prefer, Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, or SmartThings, for example.
Without worrying about compatibility, it reduces the need for multiple apps and bridges and makes smart home technology simpler and more accessible for everyone. So, quickly, a Thread is a wireless network technology designed specifically for smart home devices.
Unlike wifi, which can get crowded or Bluetooth, which has limited range, Thread creates a low power mesh network where each device, like a bulb or sensor, can relay messages to the next. So, this gets rid of the need for WiFi or Bluetooth with this new network called Thread. It's very low power and like I said, it doesn't require WiFi or Bluetooth. Something else that Jonathan just mentioned, a scene.
So, in smart home technology, a scene is a saved collection of settings for multiple devices that you can activate all at once with a singular voice command, button press or automation. Instead of telling each light, plug, or thermostat what to do individually, a scene bundles those instructions together.
So, for example, a sleep scene or a good night scene might turn off all the living room lights, dim the bedroom lamp to a 20% warm white color, lock the front door, and set the thermostat to a certain temperature. So, it's called running a scene by saying, for example, "Hey Siri, goodnight," or, "Hey Siri, sleep." Something like that. And all of these actions happen in sync.
And one last vocabulary topic, word. In smart home tech, a bridge is a small device that acts as a middleman between your smart accessories and your home network. Okay. Those were just some vocabulary words I wanted to get out of the way before we get started. The first piece of tech I'm talking about is Google Assistant or Gemini.
So, Google Assistant is Google's voice assistant that's built in to most Android devices, including cell phones. Nowadays, it's being phased out from Google Assistant and just to Gemini, Google's AI. So, if it's not on your device, you can usually download it from the Play Store.
But most of the time, Google or Android devices come with Google Assistant or Gemini built in already. So, for this segment, I'm going to be talking about Google Assistant. It is being turned to Gemini on newer devices. You can think of it as a voice helper that can control your home and run routines to reduce time spent on separate apps. Short and specific is best. For example, kitchen lights 30%.
Turn on hallway. What I just used, goodnight could be the word that's set to scene. And this allows you to talk to Google Assistant and have these phrases do something pretty simply. Something that I found in my research that I thought was interesting is called voice match.
So, something you can do with Google Assistant is voice match. So, voice match lets the speaker know it's you or whatever device know it's you. That means your, for example, calendars and reminders are private, but anybody can still say turn on the lamp.
So, this allows you to specifically set certain processes that only happen when your voice talks to whatever device, kind of like a security feature that not everybody can get into your calendar or read your messages, for example, but everybody can say something basic like turn on the lamp. One scene that I have laid out here or routine is imagine like a movie time routine.
The starter or how the scene starts, you could set it to a certain time of day or you can have a voice phrase like movie time. So, it could be 7:30 PM this automatically starts, or you have a short phrase that you say like movie time.
And what happens then you can set it. So, the living room lamp goes to 20%. The floor light, if you have floor lights, turn on, you can turn on do not disturb or silence, whatever notifications, start a playlist, for example, et cetera, et cetera. Pretty much whatever you can think of, you can set through one of these apps, Google Home, which I'll get to in a second, is actually how you interface with all this technology.
You might prefer scenes to individual light bulbs, for example. So, instead of having to go through and flip on and off each light bulb, you can set a scene to dim or change the color of whatever bulbs you have. So, you can have cooking mode that turned everything up, brightness and changes the color, or a wind down mode.
I know I'm talking a lot about scenes and kind of reiterating the point, but this is where a lot of the smart home technology comes to life and is actually really cool with how much it automates and it's really kind of futuristic. And for accessibility, it lets you interact with your voice.
And like Jonathan was saying, you don't have to go find a light switch or you don't have to maybe use a not so accessible app to control something. You can have it connected through the Matter standard. If it is one of these devices that meets the standard through a hub that you control easily that is accessible, like Google Home or Apple Home.
Some common devices that use Gemini, the Nest Mini, this is a small speaker for voice commands. It's about 50 dollars. The Nest Hub has a 7-inch screen and can be a Thread border router for some Matter devices. So, Thread again is that low power network and then Matter is the standard.
So, this is saying that this Nest Hub can work with any device that meets the Matter standard, even if it's not a Google device, especially if it's not a Google device. Nest audio, this is a larger speaker. If you're into listening to music a lot, you might get into this, it's about a hundred bucks.
And then the Google Home app. So, this is the app that you actually create all these scenes with. So, it's a completely free app that you can actually get on iOS or Android, so you can put it on your iPhone. And this is where you build automations or scenes.
A lot of what I said applies to Siri or Apple products, but there are some little differences, how you talk to Siri, what exactly Siri can do, and some of the technologies that you can buy with Siri enabled. But like I said, most of the processes will be very similar, if not the same.
Siri works best when you live in Apple's ecosystem, like if you own an iPhone, an Apple Watch, or a HomePod, and you use the Apple Home app. This is an app that comes pre-installed on all iPhones. So, if you have an iPhone, you should have the home app already. And I should have mentioned, of course, the Google Home App and Apple home app are very accessible, and the Matter standard is cool.
I'll talk more about this later, but this allows you to know that if you do connect one of your devices to Google Home or Apple Home, you are already in a better accessibility spot than if you had to rely on that third party vendor's application. So, you already know that if it does connect through this Matter standard, that you'll be able to use it on one of these apps, which is accessible.
The HomePod would be acting as a home hub. Some phrases, very similar to what I just went over for Google, the command is, "Hey, Siri," and then whatever you want to happen. So, "Hey Siri, set living room 25%." "Hey, Siri, goodnight."
And that could be a scene that turns off most lights, leaves a nightlight, locks one of your smart locks, whatever. "Hey, Siri, what's the temperature in here?" If there is a room temperature sensor available, or if you have a thermostat connected, you can also ask the temperature then. You can also, like Jonathan was mentioning, if you have lights connected, you can ask, "Are the lights on? Are the lights off?"
Apple HomePod can recognize different voices, what I was kind of describing before, so you can have personal requests. So, that's what they're called. You can enable personal requests. Only your voice can send messages or read yours back. Everybody can still control shared devices.
So, this is just a privacy or security feature that allows you to only do certain things. You said it to your voice and it only happens if your voice is saying that thing. You can set it so if something hears a smoke alarm or carbon monoxide alarm go off, it can notify you to that. And it can also notify you to security system, which I'll talk a little bit about later. Anything that is on this Matter standard and if you have it connected through this Apple Home app, you can set it to notify you when it does things.
So, just another really important piece, especially for security or privacy, you want to know as soon as it happens and you can set it up with your phone to actually have it read back to you when it does happen. Some technologies and prices, the HomePod mini, it's a compact Siri speaker and home hub with Thread. So, that means it can be a part of that low power network is about 99 bucks.
The HomePod second generation has a bigger sound and is also a home hub. So, it does whatever the HomePod mini does, but it's just a bigger speaker in general. That's around 300 dollars. And you also have the home app, which is completely free, and it's where you build scenes and automations and do everything that I'm describing.
This is also where you add different devices. So, you add different devices through either a QR code or because that's not very accessible, you can find its code either on the box, which you'll still need OCR or cited help for that. But once you do have the code, you can just paste that code into your Apple Home app and then have it connected and then everything's great.
Jonathan Mosen
And just one addition to make. In recent versions of iOS, you can set up your iPhone so that it just responds to Series. You don't need to say, "Hey, Siri, if you don't want to." But sometimes, people find that the shorter the phrase, the more it is prone to false activation. So, some people still keep it on Hey Siri for that reason as well. Okay...
Kennedy
Also, I wanted to mention, Jonathan, sorry, type to Siri. So, instead of using your voice to communicate with Siri, you can also set up an accessibility settings type to Siri where you can type on your keyboard and communicate with Siri. So, I just wanted to mention that.
Jonathan Mosen
And that's fantastic. There are a couple of things there that really do help deaf blind people, the smoke detector alarm type thing. And in iOS 26, it can now listen for name recognition as well. So, all those things help those who can't hear the device as well. So, that's great. Let us talk about Amazon Alexa.
Now, Amazon currently offers 12 Echo devices and their family ranging from the 39.99 dollar device to 399 dollar. The Echo Pop is your most affordable entrant into the Alexa ecosystem, and that's the one that costs 39.99, and it offers basic Alexa functionality. It's quite compact. It's a little semi-circular thing. The sound quality reflects that price though.
The speaker fires in one direction rather than in 360 degrees. So, that can be quite limiting for a room if you want to try to cover the whole room. For 10 dollars more though, you can get the Echo Dot. That's the fifth generation of the dot now. And it includes a temperature sensor and a motion detector as well.
The pop doesn't have that, but the echo dot does. So, you can get the inside temperature really easily and the sound quality is quite a bit better with the dot. You've got that 360-degree audio. There's also a clock version of the dot that costs a bit more.
It's 69.99 dollars and it's got an LED display and that might be worth considering if you have sighted people in your family who'd like to see the time and the weather at a glance. Some smaller devices work well for these basic commands and smart home control like the dot and the pop, but don't expect impressive audio quality out of those for music listening.
Now the standard echo is still at the fourth generation and it costs 99. It offers significantly better sound than the dot models. That device, the fourth generation echo, has been around since 2020 now. And I do note that Amazon has announced a hardware event for September the 30th.
So, it's possible that they will announce a new echo then and possibly others in the family as well. So, if you're interested in getting into the space or updating what you have, check the tech press. We will certainly talk about this on Access On, which is the National Federation of the Blinds Technology Podcast.
The event is held on September the 30th. Amazon tends not to stream these events live, but various tech publications will report on them. Particularly relevant to our discussion today, which is focused on the smart home, is that the Echo, the 99 dollar one, does include a built-in smart home hub that supports Zigbee devices, and the smaller models don't do that. So, that hub functionality may be attractive.
The built-in hub is convenient for sure, but it also means that if your echo fails, you lose both your ability to control your environment with your voice and the whole smart home hub as well. And that's why some people prefer a separate hub device so that if one thing breaks, it doesn't take the whole thing down.
The Echo Studio comes in at 199.99 dollars, and it is Amazon's high-end audio device. It includes Dolby Atmos support, which means that you get surround sound, it's got spatial audio processing, and it has five speakers in that device. The sound quality is genuinely impressive. It's probably right up there with some of the Sonos devices. It does a very nice job. It is quite large and heavy.
Some users have reported occasional connectivity issues that seem more common with the studio than the simpler models. So, you'll want to make a call about whether you perceive getting involved in the Amazon ecosystem is the way that you want to handle seriously high-end audio, and we're going to talk about serious high-end audio a little bit later.
The advanced audio features work best with Amazon Music's high quality streams, and that will require a subscription. So, you kind of got to be steeped in the Amazon world to really make the most of this. Let's turn now to Amazon Echo devices that have a smart display.
Out of the three devices, the cheapest is the Echo Show 5, that is 89.99, and as the name implies, it has a 5.5 inch display. The Echo Show 8 at 149.99 has an 8-inch screen, and the Echo Show 21 at 399 dollar features are whopping, 21.5 inch display. For blind users, these devices offer some unique features, but also raise questions about value.
The show and tell feature can identify packaged foods and household items when you hold them up to the camera, and that is genuinely useful for distinguishing similar products. You got people coming over, you want to know which is the baked beans and which is the dog food in those cans. Well, they're going to thank you for that.
The voice view screen reader provides audio feedback for visual elements when you need that. Now, the downside, of course, is that you are paying for screen technology you might not use very often. The show and tell feature works well when the packages are clearly labeled, but it has been known to struggle with items that have been damaged or the text is obscured in some way. I
n voice view, the screen reader adds another layer of complexity for functions that work perfectly well with voice alone. You can also find Alexa on devices other than the Amazon Echo. Many manufacturers now build Alexa into their products.
Sonos, Bose, and other audio companies, which I'll talk more about later, offer speakers with Alexa built right into them, and they often have superior sound quality to the Amazon devices with the possible exception of the studio, which is right up there. If you go with a third party, you get better sound quality, you get premium build materials, and sometimes additional features specific to that manufacturer's ecosystem, but you lose things as well. Amazon's accessibility features like voice view and show and tell are exclusive to Echo devices, and you also can't group third party devices with echo devices for multi-room audio. They operate as separate systems.
Some third party implementations have slower response times or they don't support all the Alexa features, so be mindful of that. When you're shopping, it helps to understand terminology that's commonly used in the Alexa ecosystem. If something is certified as having Alexa built in, it has full voice control.
While if you read somewhere in a description of a product that something works with Alexa, it might just mean that you can control the device through Alexa, not that it has Alexa inside it. Alexa handles basic information requests reliably, and we'll give you a bit of a demo here since I have one. I'm just going to reach over and find it on my cluttered desk and unmute it.
There you go. We've been making sure it doesn't listen to me so we can say things like, "Alexa, what's the temperature outside?"
Alexa
Right now, it's 19 degrees Celsius. Tonight, expect a low of 17 degrees.
Jonathan Mosen
This is all part of my evolution. I'm doing this from my home office where I have my mixer and every other device using this ecosystem in our apartment now talks Fahrenheit. This is my one little bastion of familiarity. I keep the one in my office, which is typically only I use this on Celsius so that I can kind of have a reference point when I'm trying to learn how to speak in Fahrenheit.
So, we Have normal things like that, weather, time, simple calculations, unit conversions. There is a flash briefing feature, which I really like, and that can provide news updates from a range of sources that you choose. You've got to set that up initially, and you do that through the app.
It works well with Amazon Music as you would expect, but it also has support for Spotify and Apple Music and other major services. You can do that for music and also for podcasts. You can create speaker groups for multi-room audio, though this requires using the smartphone app initially.
It sometimes misinterprets similar sounding commands, so just be mindful of that. Set a timer for 15 minutes, sometimes gets misheard as set a timer for 15 minutes. So, just make sure that you monitor how it's responding so that you get the timer you think you set. The wake word detection isn't perfect like all of these sorts of devices. It will occasionally activate from TV, audio, or conversation.
And you might remember that it was a very controversial ad. I think I remember who it was for, but I won't name the company in case I've got it wrong. But there was an ad that came on the TV two or three years ago that actually deliberately did this. The ad at the end said, "Hey, Google, open," whatever it was.
And everybody who had a Google Assistant device close by was forcibly taken to that vendor's website. Quite genius, but it actually annoyed people and then therefore it backfired. Many people use Alexa for their basic purposes, for these basic purposes, but it's capable of so much more. It can discover and control thousands of smart home devices.
And as standards converge, this is likely to be less of a benefit. But in the past, I found that many things work with Alexa when they may not always work, say, with Apple Home. Most modern smart bulbs, outlets, and switches work well with voice commands once they are properly set up.
And even something simple like a smart plug can be so revolutionary. We had a slow cooker in New Zealand. It wasn't anything particularly fancy like the instant pot that we've got now. It was just a slow cooker and we had it connected to a smart switch connected to the wall. And we could say, "Turn on the Crock-Pot." That's what we named that device.
And we would turn it on at about 11:30 and have a lovely meal and the smells wafting through the house by the time we came home from work. What's nice is that natural language works surprisingly well. So, turn off the living room lights is easier to remember than specific device names. Routines are amazing. They allow you to automate multiple actions with single commands.
For example, in New Zealand, Bonnie and I had a large house and we had two heat pumps upstairs and one heat pump downstairs. The heat pumps were Alexa compatible, but they weren't Apple home compatible. So, the only thing we could do from our iPhones was control them with an iPhone app, but that didn't give us control via Siri.
But using Alexa routines, I enabled commands like heat the upstairs, heat the house, stop heating the upstairs and stop heating the whole house. We could also tell it to change modes, for example, set studio heat pump to call and we could make those routines active at a specific time of day.
Bonnie and I are early risers, so I set the heat the upstairs routine to activate automatically every weekday at 4:15 AM. So, the house was warm by the time our alarm went off at 5:00 AM. Now, initially setting these things up almost always requires the smartphone app. Device names need to be distinctive. Having two lamps called lamp and the same room creates all sorts of confusion.
And when devices go offline, of course, you do lose connectivity. Voice control fails without obvious error messages that will happen from time to time. And you've got to try and track that down. You sometimes don't know, is the Alexa ecosystem having a moment? And sometimes, that happens when everybody's Alex is around the world or in a certain part of the world go down at once.
And sometimes you need to go on the web and do some searching and find out whether it's some sort of outage like that or whether you have a problem that's local. So, that can be frustrating. The skills store for Alexa contains over 140,000 skills and the quality varies quite a lot.
Some skills designed for blind users that are really great to check out. Of course, I will put the NFB-NEWSLINE right up front. This gives you free access to newspapers and magazines if you're registered for NEWSLINE. And it's great because you can set this up in the morning when you're having your morning coffee and go through your newspaper that way while you're getting on with other things.
We also have the nation's blind skill, and if you activate that, you can listen to the National Federation of the Blind Radio Network whenever you want. And we've also, of course, heard of the Bookshare Reader Skill.
You do have to link your Bookshare account with that, and that is something I'll come back to because that does happen from time to time that is required. If you have a device with a display, there's also the Be My Eyes Alexa skill.
Many skills are, as I say, poorly designed or they've been abandoned by their developers. Voice-based navigation can be clunky sometimes compared to dedicated apps. So, it's about choosing the right tool for the particular task in hand, right? Some skills, as I say, do require linking accounts through the smartphone app. That can be a little bit frustrating sometimes, but it's usually a one-off process.
Occasionally, you will find a skill that misbehaves and forgets it's linking from time to time. That can be annoying as well. Major brands like Philips Hue and Ring and Samsung SmartThings work well. Lesson-on brands may have unreliable skills or the skills have limited functionality.
The Alexa app works well with voiceover, though it's a bit hit-and-miss because sometimes you get an update and something's happened to the app that can be quite inconvenient. We report those issues. I know that NFB members do as well, and usually they get fixed in time. So, sometimes it breaks. Some screens are more optimized than others, I find.
Initial device set up when you buy one of these devices will require the Amazon Alexa app, but daily use, once you've got all this going, is voice-based. You can download the Alexa app for Google Play and for iOS. Create an Amazon account if you don't have one already and just follow the setup wizard.
You will need your wifi password handy to set one of these up and the app will guide you through connecting each device. The app is also necessary for organizing your device into rooms, creating routines, and managing skills. You can configure most settings through voice commands after you've set it up.
Now looking to the future, which is here for an increasing number of people, Amazon announced Alexa Plus in early 2025. I wonder if we can ask it. Alexa, what can you tell me about Alexa Plus?
Alexa
Hi. I'm thrilled you asked. The new me is a better listener, easier to talk to and available anywhere, including the Alexa app and soon on most browsers. I'll also be able to get much more done for you. To experience it for yourself, just say, "Notify me when Alexa Plus is available."
Jonathan Mosen
Oh mate, Alexa. Notify me when Alexa Plus is available.
Alexa
Amazon Alexa was released on November 6th, 2014.
Jonathan Mosen
Okay, well there you go. So, sometimes that happens. Anyway, they tell us that it is a significant upgrade that aims to make Alexa more conversational and contextually aware. It is designed to maintain context throughout the conversations. So, I'll give you an example of where that's handy. Alexa, what's the temperature outside?
Alexa
Right now, it's 18 degrees Celsius. Tonight, expect a low of 17 degrees.
Jonathan Mosen
Alexa, watch that in Fahrenheit?
Alexa
From Wikipedia.org. Fahrenheit, known as Indigo Prophecy in North America is an action.
Jonathan Mosen
Alexa stop. So, what it did there was it was not tracking my context. Clearly, we were talking about the weather because that's what we do most of the time. Talk about the weather. And when I got the temperature back in Celsius, I wanted it in Fahrenheit. It didn't keep track of the conversation. Alexa Plus will do that. It understands natural speech patterns better and it handles more complex multi-step requests. So, you might be able to tell it, turn off the lights in the living room and turn on the lights in the master bedroom in one go.
This is AI, of course, like everything these days. It is powered by Amazon's Nova AI models, and it includes technology from Anthropic's Claude, which is a very credible AI partner to go with. It is available in limited beta. There are over one million users. I know that sounds like a lot, but really in the context of how many devices are out there, it's not.
That figure is current as of this month. And it does right now require you to have an Echo Show device, so a device with a screen, and it does work on other Alexa devices once you've activated it on an echo show. So, that's interesting. It costs 19.99 dollars per month.
So, there is a subscription for this, but the good news is that if you've got admins on Prime already, it is free. It's included with it. I've read a few reviews of Alexa Plus and it seems very much like a work in progress. We don't yet know about its long-term reliability, how well it handles privacy concerns with more conversational AI and when it'll be widely available.
The early reports are mixed. Some reviews I've read say that there is still need for significant improvements and others really like it. Others think as great as it is. All Echo devices listen for the Wake Word constantly, though Amazon states that they only transmit audio after hearing the Wake Word.
And you can change the device's Wake Word if you want to. Your options are Amazon, Echo, Computer, or Ziggy, and you can actually do that by voice command if you want or from the app. You can review and delete voice recordings through the app or by voice command. There is a physical mute button on all Echo devices, though that eliminates all functionality.
And Echo devices generally work well day to day, but they depend entirely on internet connectivity. So, with Siri, for example, there's a lot that's now stored on device. And if your internet goes down, some of Siri will still do its thing. But when your internet is down, you can pretty much count out Alexa at that point.
That is a brief overview of Amazon Alexa. I haven't covered some of the things, including the original purpose of creating this, which was actually shopping because that doesn't really fit into the smart home discussion we're having today. But you can shop with Alexa. You can say, for example, order my melatonin.
It will remember the last melatonin you ordered and ask you to confirm, and that's a pretty slick way to do shopping. And particularly since living in the United States, I've found I've used that a lot more. And just before I hand it back, there are some Easter X in Amazon Alex. So, that generally means just little fun things that developers put in there and leave you to discover.
So, as we finish the section, I'm going to leave you with one and say, "Alexa, sing the technology song."
Speaker 6
Oh, technology. Oh, technology. Where would I be without technology? Without the wifi, I couldn't say hi. As for music, I couldn't choose it. Shopping list would see Sue exist and time would be on your wrist. I think my lucky stars that I'm here today, I hope that you'll agree. Give me one, two, three shots alive for tactic, tack, tag, technology. Technology.
Speaker 7
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Speaker 2
For over 100 years, the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults has provided programs and services to the blind and deafblind, mostly without cost and always with an emphasis on Braille. Thousands of Braille books and Braille calendars sent and thousands more blind and deaf blind people to reach. Help the American Action Fund by contributing today at actionfund.org/donate. Thank you for your support.
Kennedy
For the next 20 minutes here, we are going to discuss lighting and environmental controls. I like to think of smart lights as kind of the gateway to smart homes. I don't know if they were one of the first smart home technologies, but to me, they were the first ones that were introduced to me. These are a good, relatively cheap way to get into smart home technologies.
They are voice and app controlled for brightness and color adjustment. So, you can have however many colors you want. You have the option to select that and it's brightness, et cetera, et cetera. You can also have automated lighting schedules and connect your lights to motion sensors.
So, when you walk into a room, the lights automatically turn on to 60% soft white or something like that. Or if you have a display case, it could light up blue lights when you walk in or something like that. So, there are a few options you have here and a few that I've outlined in this presentation. A lot of different smart lights and hubs and bridges that you can purchase.
These are some of the most popular ones though. The Philips Q-Line of lights, you can get a Philips Hue bridge, which again, thinking back to the beginning, the bridge is kind of the middle man between you and your wifi network that talks to the lights, "is about 66 bucks."
The Hugh Bridge Pro, which unlocks higher capacity and features is about 99 dollars. The Hue Bulbs, H-U-E, that's how you spell Hue. The white in color bulbs are about 45 to 50 dollars each. You can get multi-packs, it can be cheaper. They're actually new Hue essential bulbs and multi-packs that can be about 15 to 25 dollars for each bulb.
A couple more options you have here. Nanoleaf Essentials. This is under the Matter standard and these are enabled using Thread. So, these are bulbs that don't need to be connected to a bridge. They can connect straight to your phone. Again, they're called Nanoleaf Essentials. You can get a three pack of color bulbs for about 49.99, so about 17 bucks each.
And those are standalone and you don't need a hub. Another really interesting company that I found was Lutron, and they have their Caséta line of smart lighting and smart controllers. You can get this for about 90 dollars. And what's cool about this Caséta line is it offers a line of remotes or dimmer switches on the wall that are tactile.
So, you have remotes that have tactile up or down buttons, select buttons, whatever you want to set it to. They're kind of generic remotes. And then you can select, you can make the buttons do whatever you want in terms of whatever technology you're interacting with. So, I just wanted to mention those and I'll get into those a little bit more detail about those in a second.
But I just wanted to mention this because they do have tactile buttons and remotes. And I know that that is kind of a fleeting thing these days in technology. Everything is smart screens and a lot of the time, sorry, touch screens aren't always accessible and most of the time, they aren't accessible. Another type of light or smart light is LIFX or LIFX, L-I-F-X.
I'm sure Jonathan knows how to pronounce it. These are hub-free Wi-Fi smart bulbs and light strips. You screw them in and connect over 2.4 gigahertz wifi, so over Wi-Fi. You don't need a separate bridge. Kind of like what I was talking about, the Nanoleaf essentials, you don't need a separate bridge. Many are very bright.
For example, the A19 color bulb is 1100 lumens. These type of bulbs also work with Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, and the SmartThings Hub. So, once paired, you can live in Apple/Google apps and use voice. And also these are part of the Matter standard, which is what we were talking about before. So, they ship with Matter out of the box.
Some non-bulb devices like the light strip or the neon string can be updated to Matter, but older bulbs won't get a Matter upgrade due to hardware limits. So, the Lutron Caséta switches, and they're called Pico remotes, P-I-C-O. They are reliable and they have tactile buttons.
They're great for households that want physical control plus voice, or you could go with the Philips Hue. So, you would need to purchase the Hugh bulbs and the Hue bridge. So, again, the bridge allows the person to connect with the bulbs as kind of like the middleman between your wifi network and the bulbs themselves.
These both rich color schemes and fast local control, you can set different scenes. So, you don't have to micromanage bulbs, which is really what you'd want to do for these type of bulbs. That's kind of why they're so cool.
You don't have to go through and select... If you want a mix of different colors to set a certain mood or scene, then you can do that automatically and you don't have to go through and set a blue one, a red one, and a white one to get the scene you're looking for, for example. Or another option is Matter/Thread bulbs or switches like Nanoleaf, TP-Link, Eve.
These are all bulbs that can work alone with no bridge, and they're designed to work with Apple, Google, or Alexa devices. For example, you could give your home three scenes. It could be morning, evening, and nighttime. So, in the morning, you might have, depending on if you're a morning person or not, brighter lights or dimmer lights.
You can set them to change throughout the day. So, if it reaches seven o'clock, maybe the intensity goes up 10% or whatever. For the evening scene, you could have certain colors come on when you get home at a certain time, or you could have it set to some sort of voice command, like S word, A word, don't want to say the names right now, set to morning or set to evening.
And then you have a night setting. So, that could turn off all the lights, for example. Another piece of lighting that I wanted to talk about, wall switches without having to actually go up to them and touch them. You usually want to keep the switch on and then just have the on and off controlled through one of these apps or smart hubs.
So, you usually don't want to just keep it off because then it won't have power to turn on. So, usually you just want to keep the power on and then you can turn it on or off or change the scenes as you go through and you don't have to go and touch the physical switch.
If you're having issues setting up these light bulbs or any of these smart devices, something that I kept reading when I was doing my research is 2.4 gigahertz wifi versus five gigahertz wifi. Many of these devices use the 2.4 gigahertz network. So, if you're having issues connecting one of these devices in your initial setup with your wifi, you might be on five gigahertz wifi because that's what a lot of wifi is these days.
You want to select a 2.4 gigahertz network and then connect it to whatever you're connected to. Just a little bit of troubleshooting that I wanted to mention. If you want quick and reliable with tactile buttons, you might look into the Lutron plus Pico pathway. That's the first one I mentioned.
If you want scenes and a ton of different colors and lots of different modes on the lights, then maybe think about the Philips Q plus the Philips bridge. If you want the simplest start with little to no setup required, then look for a Matter/Thread enabled device. So, all three work with voice. So, pick the path or technology that actually matches how you live.
If you don't mind opening your phone and selecting every time you want to turn something on or off and selecting the color manually, then maybe you just go with one of these Matter enabled Thread devices that just connect to your phone with no other hub.
If you want something a little bit more in depth and you can set scenes and have a lot more automation, then maybe go with one of these other options that I laid out here. I think that's all I wanted to talk about for lighting. Jonathan, did you want to talk about thermostats?
Jonathan Mosen
Sure. Thanks, Kennedy. And like they always say, let there be light. Tremendous. Let's talk about smart home technology in another context. There would be some people who say that the smart technology is really cool and there will be others who say that there are aspects of smart technology that's super hot.
Either way, it might be how they've got their thermostat set. So, smart thermostats offer significant accessibility advantages through voice control and smartphone apps, but of course accessibility can vary dramatically by brand and it can be challenging to get the accessibility set up. Some of them can just be completely inaccessible.
I'm going to take a look at the Ecobee system because it happens to be what we have access to in our apartment. So, I have become familiar with it in recent months. The physical touchscreen interface, of course, remains completely inaccessible to blind users.
It lacks any tactile feedback of any kind or buttons. There's no audio queues on the device itself. And there are some critical functions that can only be accessed through the physical thermostat. So, that creates some accessibility barriers that the excellent smartphone app can't help with.
I have had some painstaking, but ultimately successful sessions with Ira who have helped me work through the settings menu of the thermostats just swipe by swipe. It's taken a while without just move your finger fractionally up. No, that's too far.
And we've finally got there and that's been particularly important for initially connecting the app to the thermostat and then getting to the place in the setting screen where the QR code is on the display so that you can integrate the thermostats with Apple Home, which gives you a lot of convenience, as we'll see in a moment.
Ecobee's built in Alexa support on newer models anyway, and we have one of those, is comprehensive and it's compatible as well with Siri and Google Assistance once you get all that set up. So, it is good from that point of view. I'll show you a bit about this. Let's go back to our old friend, Alexa. What's the bedroom temperature?
Alexa
The bedroom temperature is 23.9 degrees.
Jonathan Mosen
Yeah, I'm in Celsius land here. I wouldn't have with that freezing in Fahrenheit. That'd be inhumane. So, that's useful. You can have some control. You can change modes via the Alexa skill once that is set up. And of course, if you've got an echo.5th generation, you can do that anyway because it does have a temperature sensor in it, but this is probably going to give you more reliable data and more importantly, it's about what the thermostat is set to. In iPhone land, I have the Ecobee app open.
Alexa
Button.
Jonathan Mosen
And if I go right to the top of the screen there, we get an inaccessible button, but its text label is next to it.
Alexa
My home button. Pop button. Pop butt button. Office.
Jonathan Mosen
I'm going to swipe through and we have two Ecobee thermostats in this apartment, the office where I am now, and there's also one in the master bedroom. And if I flick through, you'll hear how things are set right now.
Alexa
Humidity, 47%. Current mode off button. Pop, button.
Jonathan Mosen
The reason why it's off is I'm doing you a favor. The Ecobee thermostat is super noisy, at least the one that we have, and I don't want you to hear all that background noise. So, it's a pretty nice day here in Baltimore. We're heading into fall. It's not that warm at all, so it's fine.
Alexa
75 degrees.
Jonathan Mosen
Yeah, you know, that's all right.
Alexa
Reminders and alerts.
Jonathan Mosen
We've got a couple of those because it's time to change the filter in the thermostat.
Alexa
One, bedroom, humidity bedroom.
Jonathan Mosen
Now we're onto the bedroom. So, you can't navigate.
Alexa
Heading knots, heading knots.
Jonathan Mosen
No, you can't navigate by heading with this, but now we're onto the next one, which is the bedroom thermostat, and that one is still on.
Alexa
Humidity, 50%. Cooling. Button. Pop up button.
Jonathan Mosen
We've got a pop-up button and we can change modes there. So, if I double tap the button...
Alexa
Heat. Ecobee. Cool. Button. Select it. Heat/cool auto.
Jonathan Mosen
So, it's telling me very clearly that heat/cool auto is selected.
Alexa
Selected. Heat/cool. Auto off button.
Jonathan Mosen
And we can switch it off.
Alexa
This missed context menu button.
Jonathan Mosen
And I think if I go left...
Alexa
Select cool, heat button.
Jonathan Mosen
We can switch it to heat as well.
Alexa
Heat.
Jonathan Mosen
Those are the options that we have. So, we'll go down.
Alexa
This miscontext menu button.
Jonathan Mosen
And dismiss that context menu. So, it's really easy to change modes. You can also go into settings and set up some of the scheduling features. We do run it in a different way when we're out of the house and also at nighttime when we're sleeping.
Alexa
But 75 degrees. Keep warmer than... Keep cooler than 74 degrees. Reminders and alerts. Two. Tab bar. Selected. Home tab. One of three.
Jonathan Mosen
And at the bottom of the screen, we've got a very accessible tab bar. We're on the home. Tab at the moment.
Alexa
Reports tab, two of three. Discover tab. Three of three.
Jonathan Mosen
And because I went through that painstaking process of connecting it to Siri where you have to get to the mode on the touchscreen thermostat where the barcode is being displayed, and then you can add the device to your Apple home. We can do things like, "Hey, Siri, turn on the office thermostat." And Siri made a confirmation noise.
And if I just give it a second, yes, I can hear that. And it may be that Zoom's noise cancellation is filtering it out for you, but it's like a very quiet freight train running in the background now and the thermostat is on and I can do the same thing. We can just say, "Siri, turn off the office thermostat." And it made a little confirmation noise.
It used to say okay, which I preferred, but now it just makes that little noise. There are one or two unlabeled buttons, but there's nothing that I would say As a showstopper, the one thing I would comment on is a good strategy is that if you find a particular part of the app where you're getting a bit stuck, and this applies to any app, be it a smartphone app or otherwise, sometimes turning on the screen recognition feature long enough to get you out of that particular bind is a very good accessibility troubleshooting strategy.
You might want to think about where you put that because I have seen people putting the screen recognition mode on their rotor and without realizing it, they've inadvertently rotated to the screen recognition feature and switched it on and then they don't know why the app has suddenly started misbehaving and it seems inaccessible.
There are times when it's handy, but there were also times when having that mode on can really degrade the user experience. So, what I suggest you do is put it on your iPhone quick settings, which are just a little bit harder to get to, but still within easy reach, but they're not on the rotor.
So, I think that's the optimal place to put it just so that you don't inadvertently get the app into a mode that degrades performance and you're wondering why it has suddenly got so bad. So, that's a practical example of the temperature control that you can achieve in a smart home.
I want to talk about some other offerings that we've gathered some data on. I haven't had any personal experience of this myself, but Google Nest thermostats receive a lot of praise from blind people for their accessibility.
People seem to appreciate their accessible app, but also the tactile feedback through a click physical dial that provides audio confirmation when you're manually adjusting the temperature settings. The Nest app also gets consistently positive reviews from people who talk to us. We have people describing it as a completely accessible experience with voiceover at least on iOS.
And while there are some unlabeled controls in the advanced settings, apparently the core functionality is reliable and accessible as you would hope and expect since this is a Google product, there is excellent Google Assistant support for Nest.
It is important to mention just what I remember to talk about Google Assistance, that there are big changes going on in that Google ecosystem as Gemini starts to replace Google Assistance across all of Google's properties. So, that will be interesting. In theory, it should provide a lot more intelligence, a lot more contextual awareness.
It enables more natural language processing apparently with Google Nest, even with the current Google assistance than other platforms offer. Nest's self-learning capability is interesting as well, and it apparently reduces the need for these complex scheduling routines that I've had to set up with our Ecobee thermostat, so that can be handy as well.
It's just convenient. Some features like the Leaf Energy Saving Indicator apparently are still visual only and set up will still require that initial cited assistance. So, it's not a pain-free experience, but like a lot of these things, once it's set up, it typically stays set up.
I got to tell you, I was so demoralized because we had some feature problem and the apartment maintenance people came over to try and troubleshoot this for us. And they decided, and reasonably, as an IT guy, I would do this myself. They decided that the first thing to do is just switch the whole thing off and back on again.
So, they reset the Ecobee thermostat, which meant that when I got home, I had to go through the whole process of trying to get into the menu again to make it talk to the app and talk to Siri again. I was not a happy camper at the time, particularly since it didn't solve the bug that we were finding. Now let's talk about Honeywell.
They do some smart thermostats as well. We're getting mixed reaction to these. We have heard that some of the models at least have some accessibility challenges, but we've also heard some people who've had some good luck with newer models, so it might be changing.
And if you listen to the Access On that has now just gone out, that's the National Federation of the Blinds Technology podcast. You'll hear a review of a Honeywell thermostat in this week's edition, which confirms that some of them are apparently doing quite well these days.
There's another model called Emerson Sensi, and they receive praise for hardware accessibility because they've got physical buttons and they provide tactile controls. So, that is the preference of many people who just like to have buttons that you can feel, but the scheduling features remain completely inaccessible in the app and temperature target setting proves a bit problematic apparently for some.
The model's excellent home kit integration is a bit of a saving grace though. And if you can get that working, if you can get it working with Apple Home, it does apparently allow comprehensive Siri voice control, and that to some degree compensates for the app limitations, but it doesn't excuse it. We obviously believe that every app should be accessible to everyone.
You can still, it's getting harder, I believe, but you can still get some specialized talking thermostats like the VIP 3000, which whenever I hear it, I always think it sounds like something out of Harry Potter, flying around at my VIP 3000, but it's a thermostat and there's also Kelvin models which continue to receive high accessibility ratings from blind people as well.
Stay tuned for future episodes of Access On, where we will continue to delve into the amazing world of the smart home. That concludes this episode of Access On, the Technology Podcast of the National Federation of the Blind.
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