Welcome to the thirty-eighth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
- Register for our boutique on shopping innovations 0:00
- Envision announces new Ally Glasses in partnership with Solos 1:53
- You can pre-order the new Envision Solos smart glasses here
- Trouble registering with the Envision Ally app 42:10
- Troubles with Adobe Reader, and which laptop? 45:27
- Can't control BARD from my Shokz 48:36
- More on JAWS pricing changes and their communication 49:05
- TechTip, helping Alexa play radio stations whose name it has trouble with 56:21
- Closing and contact info 57:35
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Live the life you want.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the Technology Podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. Envision fights back. New attractive Envision Ally Glasses sell for 399 dollars. Envision co-founder Karthik Kannan talks about their partnership with Solos and what's new with Ally. More listener feedback on Jaws pricing changes and the way they've been communicated to customers. And in our tech tip, how to give an alternative name to a radio station Alexa finds hard to get right.
It's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland welcoming you to episode 38 of the podcast. Before we get into our breaking news, let me remind you that we do have another webinar coming up from our center of Excellence in Non-Visual Accessibility, and this is about innovations in online shopping. It's on August 26th at two pm Eastern. Join us to explore the latest innovations in accessible online shopping.
Learn how Innosearch makes it easier than ever to shop, both by phone and on the web. We'll also showcase powerful accessibility tools, including artificial intelligence, AI driven solutions that help you find exactly what you need. Plus we'll demonstrate how AI can provide additional information and enhance your shopping experience.
So why not register now for the Innovations in online shopping boutique? Again, it's on August the 26th and you can register by going to nfb.org/Cena. That's nfb.org/ C-E-N-A, and when you go there, you'll find the events and training link. You'll be able to register from there.
I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast Karthik Kannan, who is one of the co-founders of Envision. Envision has long been known for their AI powered technology, including the well-known Envision Smart Glasses. But today marks the beginning of a new chapter. Envision is preparing to launch a new product built on stylish next generation smart glasses hardware from Solos paired with the Envision Ally platform.
Today we'll go deep into what this new hardware and software experience offers, how it stacks up against competitors and what Envision is doing to keep blind users at the center of their innovation. So Karthik, a big day for you. Welcome back to Access On.
Karthik Kannan:
It's great to be back again, Jon. I really appreciate you having me here.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's get right into the big announcement. Why partner with Solos? What drew Envision to their Smart Glasses platform is the successor to the Google Glass?
Karthik Kannan:
Yeah, so I think one of the things that we really wanted to do from the time we launched the Envision glasses in 2020 was to constantly keep an out on what the next generation of glasses might be. So in a way, this partnership, it can be told that it's five years in the making.
That's really how long we've been scouting for glasses. And in 2023 of course there was this whole Chat GPT revolution that happened and simultaneously we started seeing a revolution happen with smart glasses, right? So we started seeing mainstream folks like Meta and all of these guys start building smart glasses for the mainstream.
In fact, last year we partnered with a research team at Meta to build a pair of Ally on their next generation of research glasses called Aria. So there's a lot of activity happening in the smart glasses space and we started seeing that smart glasses were getting more mainstream.
They started looking more mainstream, they started looking more natural, they started reducing or dropping in price. They started becoming more powerful and they just became more versatile over a period of time. And so that's what triggered us to say, "Hey, you know what, we've got this great tool with Ally," which I'll talk about in a bit.
And we thought the perfect place to put Ally would be on one of these next generation smart glasses that are out there. And so we started scouting for partners and we came across Solos who's been building smart glasses for quite some time. They've been putting out glasses for a while. And this new Solos device that we encountered perfectly fit the build for a lot of different reasons.
It was lightweight, it comes in at 42 grams, which is the same weight as a regular pair of prescription glasses. If I were to wear these glasses, you won't even notice that they're smart glasses, but hidden in the frames are two HD cameras, not one but two HD cameras and it's got two batteries stacked in them. So you get all day battery life with these glasses, they just connect with your phone easily.
You can just pair them in under 30 seconds, like how you would pair a regular pair of headphones. And the best part is we could run Ally on it and we could charge customers three 399 dollars, which is a massive improvement in the price of smart glasses in the assistive technology space in general. So when we launched the Emission glasses, they were like at 2,500 dollars and we've been able to now bring this to a much wider audience for just 399 dollars.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. That's a significant saving. What's the model of Solos that you've gone with?
Karthik Kannan:
So we're going with the Ergo V model of Solos and like I said, it offers, it also has speakers on it. It's also got mics and it's got two HD cameras that can capture up to 4K in image resolution.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, let's talk a bit more about that all day battery life. Can you quantify that a bit more for me? What kind of typical usage can people expect?
Karthik Kannan:
I would say when you're using it with Ally, you can expect anywhere between six to eight hours of battery life, and this is on continuous usage. You can get up to 10 hours of battery life if you were to also put it on standby. 10 to 14 hours of battery life if you put the glasses also on standby and it takes about 20 to 30 minutes to charge the glasses up to full capacity because they support fast charging.
Jonathan Mosen:
And how do you charge it? Is it similar to the Ray-Ban Meta where there's a case or is there a USB port built directly into the glasses?
Karthik Kannan:
So the way it works is this, these side stems of these glasses are detachable. The ear pieces of these glasses, those are detachable. So you can actually detach them and then just plug them into a USB-C cable and then let them be. So that's basically how you would charge these glasses.
Jonathan Mosen:
And when you get the Envision version of these glasses, are they going to behave very differently from if you just bought them off the shelf? So there's some sort of special firmware that you have built into the glasses that you are selling?
Karthik Kannan:
Yes. When you buy a pair of the Ally Solos glasses, there are minor tweaks to the firmware that is specifically done for Envision. So it would be different from the pairs that you might just get off the shelves from the Solos folks as well. You could do that, but to make it work really well with the Ally functionality, you would just need to get them from us because the firmware is tweaked a bit in order to make it more accessible for the audience.
Jonathan Mosen:
So if you've already bought these glasses and you want to use them with Envision, are you out of luck? Do you have to buy another pair that's Envision specific?
Karthik Kannan:
No, no. If you already own a pair, you could just go ahead and make it work with your existing pair just fine. What we have done, for example, with tweaking the firmware, making the audio cues slightly different and being able to change the name of the Bluetooth device and so on, and we will have further customizations made to the firmware in the coming months.
But for an average user, if they already own a pair of Ally Solos glasses, they can, or sorry Solos Ergo V, they can just simply go ahead and pair them with their Ally app and get working. So the tweaks are minor for now. So the first, the initial few months of using it for the first batch of customers shouldn't make much of a difference, but over the course of time we will want to have certain changes made to the firmware that will make it more tailored for our use case.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. I recall reading in the tech press that the Solos glasses have done pretty well with Chat GPT integration. So is that functionality users will have access to through the Envision version?
Karthik Kannan:
So one of the cool things about the Solos glasses is that you can actually pair them with your phone as a regular pair of headphones. So you can just simply, so if you're using something like Chat GPT with a pair of headphones, that's exactly how it would be with the Ally Solos glasses. But there are few key differences.
For example, Chat GPT won't be able to access the camera that's on these glasses, so you will be able to have these audio conversations, but if you ask something like, "Hey, can you tell me what's in front of me?" Chat GPT won't have access to the camera on these glasses, whereas when you go ahead and connect them with the Ally app, the moment you finish connecting it, Ally will have access to all the onboard sensors of these glasses.
So these glasses also come with an accelerometer, they come with a gyroscope, they come with these cameras as well. So Ally has a deeper integration with these Solos glasses than what other AI systems have.
Jonathan Mosen:
One of the nice features for DeafBlind or hearing impaired users of the current iteration of Google Glass that you've been using is that you can pair those with other audio devices. In other words, Bluetooth hearing aids or something that might just make the audio a little clearer. Is that a feature that's available with these Solos smart glasses?
Karthik Kannan:
That's not going to be possible with these glasses because like I said, these glasses have a pair of headphones but the cameras in them and other specific parts of it which we can access through a special SDK. So because of that and because of its nature as headphones already, it's not possible to connect another pair of Bluetooth devices to this particular Bluetooth device at the moment. This is something that we are kind of working with the Solos people for the time being.
So yeah, we had to make a trade off. For example, in the case of Envision glasses users, let's say you're going to a new environment or a new space with its own Wi-Fi and all of those things, usually you have to go through the process of connecting to the Wi-Fi of that place all over again.
But the good thing with these Solos Glasses is that because it's connected to your phone, you don't have to worry about losing internet connectivity as long as your phone has internet connectivity, either in terms of iG or in terms of Wi-Fi, you should be totally fine with using these Solos glasses. It's pretty seamless that way.
So we have to make some trade-offs between certain aspects of the glasses becoming easier, whereas certain aspects of it becoming impossible or hard to do in the beginning. So this is one of the trade-offs that we had to make with the Bluetooth devices
Jonathan Mosen:
And what physical controls are on the glasses themselves?
Karthik Kannan:
Glasses feature a simple tactile button located on the right-hand side to turn off and turn on the glasses and put the glasses into pairing mode. And you also have a slider which you can use for both volume but also for the walkie-talkie mode in the Ally app.
So you could just go ahead and tap and hold the slider area to turn on the mic and have talk to Ally and then you can take your hands off where you can just simply put Ally on mute and listen to it so it doesn't respond to the other audio in your environment. So that's basically what we have. These are the only two controls on the glasses. Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
And can you just go ahead and take a picture, a regular photo with these glasses?
Karthik Kannan:
Yes, you can. So you can take a picture with the glasses. We are working on building a bit of an AI camera that allows you to take pictures and store these pictures on the Ally app or in your photo gallery directly and you can simply use them later on if you want to say you can get really cool crisp first-person POV shots and save those to your gallery. That's something that we're rolling out soon.
Jonathan Mosen:
So if we compare what's available on these new Solos glasses with Envision, with what's available in the Envision smart glasses, is it some sort of trimmed-down, more bare-bones experience compared with the Envision glasses?
Karthik Kannan:
Yes and no. So let me explain. These glasses run Ally, they're specifically designed for Ally, which is Envision's new conversational AI assistant, specially designed for blind and low vision people. So essentially what happens is people can wear the Ally Solos glasses. At the moment, they put the glasses on, Ally comes on and you can have a conversation with Ally back and forth, which is very different from the Envision glasses experience where you put on the glasses or you present it with a menu.
You pick certain functions for certain tasks, so you specifically go into instant text to read short pieces of text or you specifically go into scan text to read your documents. Whereas with the Ally Solos glasses, it's very straightforward. You just put them on, there's no menu. You simply ask a question, "Hey, can you read this menu for me and tell me what vegan options are there in it?" Right?
And the glasses knows that it needs to use, scan text to scan the documents for you and then give you a response based on what you asked. Or if you're outside, you don't have to specifically go into find objects or you don't have to go into a describe scene and then tap on that and then get a description and then ask a follow-up question and so on.
You can very simply go ahead put on the glasses and say, "Hey, tell me what's in front of me." Or, "Tell me when a train is approaching." So those are things that the glasses can do for you out of the box, which makes it an extremely simple yet powerful version of what is available on the Envision glasses.
So it's not meant to have these menus, it's not meant to have these buttons and stuff like that. So what might take 20 to 30 seconds for you to do on the Envision glasses, you can do in basically a half a second with the Ally Solos glasses. So that's the main difference between the two.
So in a way, yes, it's a trimmed down version of the UI, but in this case it's like it's still retains what the glasses can do, but it's wrapped in this really nice conversational layer which you can have a conversation with back and forth.
Jonathan Mosen:
So although the experience is more conversational, is it still possible for me to ask the AI to scan a document, do complete OCR rather than just give me a summary of the document?
Karthik Kannan:
That is correct. I think that's where the Ally Solos glasses differs very much from your Ray-Ban Metas or other kinds of glasses, right? Other smart glasses where they simply use a Chat GPT model or a Meta [inaudible 00:15:13] model to simply scan the text for you and give you only access to certain bits of information.
In some instances, these AI's might outright refuse to give that information saying, "Oh, I can't identify. I can't provide personally identifiable information." Or, "Reading this document is against my policies," and so on. Because this is designed for blind and low vision people, this is trained not to refuse things like being able to read something.
So you could literally go ahead and say, "Read this document for me," and it'll read that document from start to finish without skipping. You could just simply then say, "Hey, okay, tell me about this part of the document," right?
Or if you're reading your bank statement, it'll read the bank statement of yours from start to finish and then you could basically say, "Okay, tell me specifically about what is the amount that I have to pay," or, "What does it say about this aspect of the statement?" And you can export the text that you scanned with these glasses to the Ally app on your phone and there is a reader based into the Ally app and you can read the text on your phone later on as well.
So there is a library that's built in, you can just pick, simply pick documents that you have scanned with the glasses in that library, open it in the reader and then read it with the Ally app pretty much like what you were able to do with the Envsion app.
Jonathan Mosen:
And when I have my complete document, can I save it somewhere?
Karthik Kannan:
Yes, you can. So you can go ahead and save it directly onto your device, right onto your phone. So because these glasses are paired with the Ally app, whatever documents you might scan with these glasses, you can simply ask Ally to save it for you and Ally will save it onto your library and you can just later on open the Ally app on your phone and then refer to it from the library. That is possible.
Jonathan Mosen:
So in terms of pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of the options that we now have, I guess it's fair to say that if you are heavily steeped in social media and you're using smart glasses to instantly post your pics to Facebook or Instagram or send photos via WhatsApp, doing a lot of those social things, then clearly the Ray-Ban Metas will continue to have a significant advantage there.
Karthik Kannan:
If your aim is to take pictures and put them onto social media or use it for streaming, I would say the Meta Ray-Bans offer a decent... They're a great option for that, right? Whereas the Ally Solos glasses is for anybody who really wants to use AI in their day-to-day lives to get things done without having to worry about the accessibility part of it.
So you could just simply buy these glasses for 399, you could still take pictures with them, but then they don't have this direct integration where you're streaming stuff to Instagram or posting pictures on Facebook directly from the glasses and so on.
You can still take pictures with them, you can still post them from your phone. But essentially this is a tool to help people read text, to recognize faces, recognize objects, help them with navigation, those kinds of tasks which they want reliable AI tool for, the Ally Solos is basically aimed at those people.
Jonathan Mosen:
I want to ask you about latency in a live travel situation. So Meta recently added their live AI feature and if conditions are good and things are behaving and there's not too much server load, you can have a conversation with the glasses as you walk along and that can potentially be quite helpful. Are Ally and these glasses equipped to do something similar?
Karthik Kannan:
Definitely. Ally is all about real-time assistance, especially the Ally Solos version is designed to respond in under half a second and we have been perfecting that for quite some time. I think anyone who's used the Ally app on their phones to have a conversation with Ally back and forth know that it's a snappy thing and what we've done with the Ally Solos glasses is try and make it even more snappier.
We've taken some of the extra bells and whistles that we use in the Ally app on the phone, we've taken them out because they're not really needed in the case of Ally Solos, which has made it a lot faster and you can have back and forth conversations very easily with the Solos glasses. They're designed for real time assistance. They're designed for conversation and conversation usually means that you have to be as snappy as you can.
We have tested this on 5G and 4G networks and they have a pretty decent latency. So I'd say somewhere around like 500 to 600 milliseconds latency, but when we are talking about 3G networks, especially if they're trying to take a picture of a document where we usually use more high risk versions, then it can get quite slow, then it can get around three to six seconds in terms of latency of having back and forth conversations with it, but most likely set out and about within in a 5G, 4G environment [inaudible 00:20:02], it should be really, really snappy. It's designed for giving you fast feedback.
Jonathan Mosen:
So you're coming in at 399 with these glasses, which is a pretty aggressive price point and it's a competitive one. Is that an introductory offer or is that the permanent price?
Karthik Kannan:
It is an introductory offer. This is a pre-order campaign that we're running right now, so we are offering this at a much lower price than we normally would. We have to settle on what a final pricing for this would look like, but that is something that we announce post the pre-order campaign.
Right now our primary focus is to get this technology out into the hands of people and so our pricing is designed to be in such a way, but having said that, you won't see a dramatic increase in price after the pre-order campaign. We are all going to say, "Oh, we're going from 399 dollars all the way to like thousand dollars." That's not how it's going to be. It's always going to remain at the price point of, we'll try to keep the price point under 700 dollars in total. That's what they're aiming for.
Jonathan Mosen:
You're taking pre-orders right now. When are you going to start shipping product and are orders placed right across the globe from the Envision website?
Karthik Kannan:
We are starting pre-order campaigns today, August 14th, and we expect to ship by the end of September and we will be shipping worldwide through the Envision website itself so people from across the world can basically go ahead and order these glasses for now. Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now there is a premium tier for Ally. There's a free tier, but there's also a premium subscription that will presumably become more capable over time. So I take it that when you're thinking about buying these glasses, you need not only think about what they're going to cost you with the initial outlay but also the ongoing subscription to make the most of them.
Karthik Kannan:
We'll offer a trial of the pro version of these glasses with the pre-order campaign. So we'll offer people up to a year to be able to use the Ally Pro and once the pre-order campaign is over, or rather what would happen then is we'll offer people a bundle where they can buy the Ally Solos glasses and they can get up to a year of Ally Pro for free and after the first year they can go ahead and pay a subscription for the app for Ally Pro.
And even if they don't pay for the pro version of Ally, they will still get all the free functions of Ally. So it's not that they will be cut off from using Ally entirely, they can just simply make a purchase of the pro version or not, but they still be able to pair their Ally Solos glasses with the Ally app and use it effectively.
Jonathan Mosen:
So what value do you get for your subscription at this stage?
Karthik Kannan:
So with the Ally Pro version, there are a few things. One is the amount of minutes per conversation. So with Ally Pro you can have unlimited number of minutes per conversation and with the Ally free edition we offer up to 10 minutes of free conversations. There's no cap on the number of conversations you can have with Ally. You can have as many conversations as you want, but one continuous conversation is capped at 10 minutes overall.
Another thing is we are constantly adding a lot of pro features. For example, conversation history is a pro feature we added. We also are adding shortcuts to the app. So for example, you're somebody who likes to, when you first start your day, you'd like to go ahead and get a daily briefings of what's happening around you for a specific topic, for example, inaccessibility, you could simply create a shortcut for that within Ally and then hit a button and Ally would just fix that information for you before you started it. So you could go ahead and build shortcuts with Ally.
We're also introducing live video very soon. So live video is again very different from having to constantly keep asking Ally to take pictures for you. You could simply turn on live video, walk through a space and Ally doesn't need to be prompted, it constantly understands new information that's coming in and talks to you about it so you can have a conversation over a video stream rather than discrete pictures.
So that's something that we're introducing in the pro version, but also introducing an option to upload an unlimited number of files. So importing files and reading files is something that people do a lot on the Envision app, they like the Envision glasses for that. We also have that on Ally and the best part is you can import files from anywhere.
You could simply just forward your attachment over to Ally and Ally will read your documents for you on the glasses. So there are a lot of these pro features that we have in the works and we're going to be introducing all of them and that's also going to be a key difference between the free version of Ally and the pro version of Ally.
Jonathan Mosen:
There was talk at one point of calendar integration, is that already up and running?
Karthik Kannan:
We have access to calendar already so you can basically tell Ally, "Hey, can you tell me what's my agenda for today?" And Ally will be able to do that for you. Will be able to fetch your calendar information. We're also going to be soon adding the option to put information into your calendar as well.
So you could ask Ally to set up a meeting with so-and-so at two o'clock in the afternoon, and Ally will create an invite and send the invite also to that person and so on. So we want to be adding a lot more integrations to the calendar going forward.
Jonathan Mosen:
And is that also a pro feature?
Karthik Kannan:
It's a little undecided, so I think we will make certain aspects of it free just so that more people can have access to it and [inaudible 00:25:36], but that's a little undecided at the moment.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah.
Karthik Kannan:
Most likely it's going to be on the free version as well, but with some minor limitations.
Jonathan Mosen:
I want to explore this live video feature with you that you've got coming because there is a limitation of all the currently publicly available live video features, which is that you cannot ask these AIs to scan for something constantly and alert you when it finds what you are looking for.
For example, you might be walking down the street and you want to find a particular business and you could ask it to look for a sign. It won't do that and nor will it help you locate something that you have lost by constantly scanning for it. Is that something that your live video feature is going to be able to do?
Karthik Kannan:
Definitely. This is one of the key use cases that we have cracked with live video. One of the things that people want live video to do for example is look for specific bits of information, like you said, shop names. You could be walking down an airport aisle and you could be saying, "Hey, can you look for gate number five for me?" Or, "Tell me when there's gate number five A or five B."
And for the longest time we thought this kind of technology was not really there yet, but we started to do a lot more research and try to figure out how best can we put this together. And yeah, I think we've cracked it. We're still doing rounds of internal testing with this feature right now, but it's there for people to test and they're perfecting it and we'll soon launch this for everybody to use.
So it's not going to be a feature that we announced and hasn't shipped yet or it's not going to be only for certain number of users or for internal users only. It's something that we'll be shipping to everybody who's using Ally pretty soon.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, you mentioned briefly earlier identifying faces, so let's talk about that because this is an area where many people are saying, "Look, as a blind person, I'm being deprived of information that everybody else just has, everybody else takes for granted." What's your thoughts on finding a way to allow blind people to identify somebody that they know?
Karthik Kannan:
I think it's definitely something that should be part of these AI tools. Being able to teach faces of friends and family members and having glasses recognize them for you. And that's something that we have on the Envision app, we have on the Envision glasses and we'll also be bringing to Ally Solos glasses very soon.
Just being able to teach faces of friends and family members and then have Ally Solos recognize them for you when you're having a conversation with it.
So that's an important feature to have and I think like you said, if you're a sighted person, you don't need this most of the times, but if you are blind or low vision, this is a very crucial aspect of being able to recognize what's around you. And that's something that I believe in as well. If you didn't need it, there's no point in having it, but if you really need it, you should be having access to it.
Again, our stance about this is very different from the big tech stance that is usually like, "Oh, we don't want to recognize people because it's against our policies." But I think since we are a device that's aimed at the global vision community and we are built for accessibility, it's important to have this and we will start this feature.
Jonathan Mosen:
What sort of user feedback are you receiving about Ally at this point?
Karthik Kannan:
It's been a whirlwind ever since we launched the Ally app and ever since we started doing internal testing of the Ally Solos glasses, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, which is why we wanted to kind of have this out sooner. The idea was to scout for glasses and then try to put something towards the end of the year and have something early next year and so on. But when we started doing internal testing, we just realized that our assumptions were wrong.
This technology is already here, it's making an impact. I think people find it very simple to use. I was doing this test with an 85-year-old, but come to our office to test all these glasses and I just gave her the glasses and just told her basically how to pair it with your phone and stuff like that. So she was doing it by herself and I was constantly explaining to her that, "This is how you do it and this is how you actually pair the glasses," and so on.
But 30 seconds into it she's like, "Stop. I already finished pairing the glasses and I've started my Ally call." So, like, what are you droning about? Right? So we knew that was a key moment for us that okay, this idea of building something simple so that people who are not so tech-savvy can use it, still use it was like it was a green signal for that.
I think a lot of people found it pretty powerful to use because you could ask it to read things for you or you could ask it to recognize people, recognize objects and you could personalize Ally as well. So you could give information about yourselves, your dietary restrictions, your favorite sports, all of that stuff could go into Ally. And as you have a conversation with Ally Solos, that's something that people really enjoyed.
And also people like reading capabilities off the glasses, which to be honest, for me doesn't come as a surprise because we've been perfecting that since the early days of Envision. So Envision AI, the Envision glasses, they're all great reading tools, so we just taking that exact same technology, putting them into the Ally Solos glasses so people sounded pretty accurate when it comes to reading printed text or handwritten written text and so on. So those are the key bits of feedback that we've had so far from people. We just thought, "Okay, if people feel overwhelmingly positive about it, we should just put it out there already."
Jonathan Mosen:
Are you still going to be selling the Google Enterprise glasses or is this the end of the line for them? And for those who've already invested some considerable amount of money in those glasses, what does it mean for those people going forward?
Karthik Kannan:
They will be supported going forward. We've got over 5,000 people across the world who own a pair of Envision Glasses and those glasses are perfectly fine for Ally today, for Ally that will come a year from now. So I don't think that's going to change at all. So anyone who has a pair of Envision Glasses can definitely keep their pair of Envision Glasses.
If they want the Ally Solos glasses, which are lighter, which have better cameras, they're free to purchase them. But the Envision glasses still has a lot to offer, especially when it comes to offline functionality. So being able to use instant text offline, being able to scan documents offline, those are very important features that people like about the Envision glasses that are still unique to it.
And Envision glasses also support Ally and whatever features we build for the Ally Solos, it'll also come onto the Envision glasses. It's a perfectly good piece of hardware, no need to go ahead and worry about support for it, we'll continue to provide support, just pushed out an update to the glasses even today. So we are committed to working on that as we speak.
With regards to selling the glasses, we eventually not sell this hardware because the Ally Solos hardware is just as good if not better in some aspects. So you've got these HD cameras, you've got all the battery life, you've got a much longer battery life than the Envision glasses, you've got great speakers and it connects to your phone easily.
So keeping that in mind and keeping the general nature of smart glasses and how they're evolving very quickly will not be selling Envision glasses, the current hardware beyond the point, but still there is still some way to go for us before we get to that point where we stop selling these glasses. But whether we sell them or not in the near future, we will continue to support glasses for the time being.
We will continue to support everyone who has bought a pair of Envision glasses and we'll continue to support them through regular updates. And we'll also keep adding more features to Ally, which will then reflect on the Envision glasses the Ally feature within the Envision glasses as well.
Jonathan Mosen:
There has been some chatter on social media about Envision notifying people that they are going to discontinue the Envision AI app, which has been very popular and I'm sure there must be difficulties for the team in maintaining two separate code bases, but does that mean that blind people will be losing out on some functionality as a result of the deprecation of that app?
Karthik Kannan:
We're not going to be phasing out the Envision AI app anytime soon. It's still supported by Envision. We are still working on it. Again, we just had an update go out for the app last week. The main reason for us to send push notifications to users of the Envision app and notify them is to tell them that, "Hey, you know what? Whatever features you guys like within the Envision AI app are made better in the Ally app."
So if you're looking to describe a scene with the Envision app, it takes you about 20 to 30 seconds to get a description and then you need to hit another button to ask a follow-up question. And it's a very slow back and forth that you'll be having with that model.
Whereas with the Ally app, you could simply hit a button and then get much richer descriptions, you could get better and the speed of conversation is very quick. It's under half a second. You can just simply go back and forth with the Ally app.
So in many ways the Ally app is much better than the Envision AI app, but I know that there are certain aspects of the Envision AI app, for example, in stream text, which runs completely offline, which people really love. Sky text, which is again something that people really love being able to share images with the Envision AI app or to get you to read it or to get you a description of it.
These are features people really like and we'll eventually build all of them into Ally as well. So we will bring all of the offline features of the Envision AI app, bring it to 101st percent feature parity, and then we slowly discontinue the Envision AI app, which will happen anytime soon. It'll definitely not happen this year or early next year.
Our aim is to slowly put the features people love over to Ally and then discontinue the Envision app entirely. So that's still some ways to go. So the Envision app, AI app is not going anywhere. People can still use them, but my suggestion for anyone liking the Envision AI app is to also give Ally a shot because we have a much better AI in Ally than we have at Envision.
Jonathan Mosen:
Right. Because one of the pieces of feedback I saw coming up a lot on social media was there were people who were saying, "Look, I haven't seen any app that reads screens as well as Envision AI does." And obviously that's happening offline, low latency, you just point the camera at a screen and it just works.
Karthik Kannan:
I totally agree and I think that's the reason why we want to continue to keep the Envision AI. That particular feature of low latency, really fast reading of everything that's on a screen, that will definitely come to Ally very soon. We are working on a version of instant text where people can simply trigger that with the press of a button and Ally will just open up the video feed and then just start reading everything that is all and that's in front of you completely offline.
So we are going to have that feature coming on to Ally very soon, but for now, people are more than happy to use the Envision app and we are more than happy to support the community by continuing to support the app. We just wanted people to try out Ally to say, "Hey, you know what? Whatever feature you have right now that like that you really like at Envision, it's better with Ally, so please go ahead and give it a shot." But yes, I'm aware of some features that were completely offline that people really like and will definitely bring them on as well.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I see the sound business strategy that you're putting in place here because really these new glasses are a gateway to people using Envision Ally as a service. So you're pivoting to being a services company, subscription revenue will be the primary sustainable revenue source, and I understand what you're trying to do there. Can we talk about the immediate future of Ally? What can people expect in the near future as this evolves?
Karthik Kannan:
Ally is going to get faster. Ally is going to definitely work with video and real time video as well, so you don't have to keep taking pictures for Ally to be able to see what's in front of you, to be able to guide you and stuff. So that's definitely coming. Ally is going to be available in more places, right? So glasses, the phone, the desktop, those are just one aspect of Ally being everywhere.
So we are going to give Ally a phone number so you could text Ally on WhatsApp or Telegram or iMessage or you can even call Ally on it through a regular phone call. And Ally will be present in more and more places as we speak. And Ally is also going to work offline.
So we know a lot of people like offline functionality of the Envision app and I think that's important step. To make a product truly accessible, it has to work offline. So we're definitely going to bring Ally offline as well. So these are the things you can expect from Ally over the next six months.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I think when we were last talking, we talked about how you have access to multiple large language models and that Ally is making a call based on algorithms that you have about which large language model to use to give the best outcome in any particular situation.
Karthik Kannan:
Yes, that is Ally's biggest strength. Ally is not tied down to just one single model provider. Our vision from the very beginning, even when we started eight years ago, was use the best AI that is available today and whether there are gaps, fill it in with your own AI, right?
So that's the approach that we have always taken. So yes, we are using some of the most powerful large language models today where whatever is the state of the art in each aspect. Some models are really good at picking the right tool to help you. Some models are really good at giving you very nice accurate visual descriptions.
Some models are great at reading tables, so we just keep having dozens of models in our pipeline that do small, small tasks really, really well and we keep picking and choosing the best models. So since we are not one big tech company building smart glasses and we are forced to only use our models to power our products, we can just use any and every bit imaginable. Yeah.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well we certainly look forward to purchasing a pair of these Envision Solos for the International Braille and Technology Centre and letting people know what we find and if people would like to find out more, where can they go?
Karthik Kannan:
People can order a pair of glasses from Ally.me/glasses, so that's A-L-L-Y.me slash glasses and people can go ahead and purchase a pair today and we will be shipping them the end of the year, sorry, end of September, not the end of the year, much sooner than that. And we will be having weekly webinars.
We'll be showing the glasses more and more online so people can go ahead and sign up to be notified about these webinars on the pre-order page as well. And apart from that, I would strongly encourage people to go ahead and tie out the Ally app, which is a free app.
It's available on iOS, available Android, just search for Ally in your app store, play store or go to Ally.me, which is A-L-L-Y dot M-E, and you can use that version of Ally as well.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well we look forward to hearing from listeners who are going to take the plunge on this. You've obviously been working very hard on it. It must feel very good to finally be able to spill the beans and tell the world, and we really appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Karthik Kannan:
Oh, definitely. I'm super excited for this
Jonathan Mosen:
And if you have any thoughts on that announcement, be in touch. [email protected]. Are you going to be ordering these glasses? [email protected]. We'll take a break and then we come back. Some listener comments.
Speaker 4:
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 deafblind people to reach. Help the American Action Fund by contributing today at ActionFund.org/donate. Thank you for your support.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, since we've been talking about the Envision Glasses, it seems like a good idea to start with this email from Kathy Blackburn and she says, "Hello, Jonathan. I bought the Envision Glasses and received them last Tuesday, July 29th. The rep from the company that sold them to me helped set up my account with Envision AI and showed me the gestures to use on the glasses touchpad.
So far so good, I thought. Imagine my chagrin when I received a push notification on my phone last Friday saying that Envision AI will be phased out soon in favor of the Ally app. Had I known this sooner, I probably would not have bought the glasses. I had already downloaded Ally to my phone, but the interface to set it up is somehow not standard. I enter my phone number and the system texts me the verification code.
Even though I know I'm in the edit field and have tried to type in the code, I hear several bonks as though the system is not accepting my input. Even when I finally think I have the code entered, I get the message that what I have entered is invalid. I emailed support at LetsEnvision.com almost a week ago. I finally got an answer back today.
I tried again to complete the authentication process with the same results. I'll continue my correspondence with support at LetsEnvision.com. Have you or NFB heard about the phase out of the Envision AI app?"
Thanks, Cathy. We certainly saw the buzz on social media and that's why we raised it with Karthik today who seems to be telling us that while they're trying to encourage people to use Ally, they don't intend to take the Envision AI app anytime soon.
I actually recently completed this process with Ally that you've been going through because I wanted to use it a little more and I wanted to use it on the web. And I found interestingly that when I started using Ally quite some time ago, I registered using my Apple account and I found that because I'd done that, I didn't seem to be able to log in on the web, which is curious that Envision is offering a way that's supported in their app but not supported on the website.
So if you go to the website, you can sign in with Google or you can sign in with email, but even though they allow sign in with Apple on the app, they don't seem to allow that on the website. So I ended up having to delete my old Envision account and start all over again with my email address. And this did require me to authenticate with my phone number and I found it very easy.
This is a process that often works this way. When you are in an app that texts you an authentication code, what you'll often find is that just above the keyboard there's a button you can double tap that takes the code from the last message that was received and paste it into the right place. So all you have to do is double tap the code and you're done. And I found that when I did that with the Envision app, it was a snap for me to go through that phone number authentication process.
So I hope that does help you, Cathy. If you haven't tried that yet, just wait for the code, look for the little button above your keyboard, double tap it, and you should find that the code is all completed in the right place and you can hit the submit button to proceed.
Let's go to another email. Now this one comes from Sarah and she says, "Hi, Jonathan. I have two questions. First, I have been having a lot of trouble with Adobe in accessing PDFs, access any of the settings or make any changes to the accessibility settings for use with JAWS and Windows.
PDFs won't display properly at times or they will for a while and then show a blank message or there are times when it takes forever for the screen reader options dialog box to come up, and then I can't permanently set these options so I don't have this repeat every time I open a PDF. I'm concerned as I need this for work. Others have the same problem as I do. Any advice would be appreciated."
I know Sarah, that for very large PDF documents, if you have loading the whole document selected, it can take a while, but it sounds like your problems are much broader than that and not something I can immediately reproduce.
I find that if I go into the preferences, I can configure them, including the reading preferences and the accessibility preferences the way that I need to and they do seem to stick. But if anybody else has seen this and worked around it, then please help Sarah out. Drop us an email at Access On, all joined together, at Nfb.org.
What we are also hearing though is that increasingly people are finding using Google Chrome and their accessible PDF implementation a very good alternative for at least reading PDF documents.
And I understand that Chrome is now doing OCR on inaccessible PDF documents, so that might also be something worth trying. See how you get on with PDF files and Google Chrome. And Sarah continues, "On a different note, since you use technology so much, I was wondering which laptop you use. Thank you and keep up the good work." Well, my personal laptop Sarah is a Lenovo ThinkPad X-One Carbon.
I have used various laptops over the years and there are plenty of good ones out there, but for my particular use case, I just like how light and sturdy the X-One Carbon is. It's got a great keyboard to type on and I do a lot of typing. The battery life is pretty good and if it breaks, the service tends to be okay as well. I bought Bonnie, my wife, a ThinkPad a couple of years ago and it just suddenly stopped working one night, just not a thing going on with it.
And I tried all the usual reset tricks and things like that and Lenovo came over because of the contract that we have and serviced it at the apartment and we were up and running again.
So that was pretty impressive service and we've had good luck when we have required it, but there are plenty of other good brands and actually it's a good topic, so if people are particularly pleased with the laptop that they have at the moment, maybe share what laptop you recommend and why.
Good topic. [email protected] if you have laptop recommendations. And of course these days there are these AI PCs that you can get that do all sorts of clever things.
Now let's hear from Francis who says, "I'm a long time BARD user. While listening to books with my Shokz. I'm unable to pause, start or stop a book with my Shokz. Am I missing a setting or does anyone have any information as to why it won't work?" I wonder whether something has to be enabled in the BARD app for this to happen, Francis, but let's see if anybody has any thoughts on this, [email protected] if you want to be in touch.
Stefen Hudson has been in touch and he says, "First I want to say congratulations on the first ever live episode of Access On. That seems to work pretty well as far as I heard, although I don't know how much needed to be edited out to make it flow as smoothly as it did." Ah, the wonders of the editing room, Stefen.
"Regarding the JAWS licensing and pricing changes, I'm still rather disappointed when it comes to the lack of official communication from Vispero. Aside from the blog post that was written in June, there has been no new information aside from the mention of support for time-based software maintenance agreements in the release notes of the July update.
I wonder why this change was necessary when the old system worked just fine. Software is changing so rapidly now that it would be foolish to willingly allow a perpetual license to expire for too long and with the old system people were guaranteed two major upgrades along with major updates to those upgrades. The only justifiable reason I can think of is that they're trying to match the functionality of the perpetual licenses to the subscription licenses as much as possible.
What I find most concerning is that people may have to purchase an entire new license if their SMA expires. Previously, people with existing licenses could pay a discounted price to get their SMA up to date. The price depended on how long ago the SMA expired and there was a cap so that people didn't have to pay the full price of a new license. That was always the nice thing about a perpetual license."
"There was no rush to renew an SMA as long as someone didn't wait too long, and there can be many reasons why someone may not be able to keep their license from expiring in time. Power or internet outages, natural disasters, medical or family emergencies, unexpected financial problems, computer issues, etc.
Unless there's a grace period before someone has to pay full price, this new system sounds like it punishes people for not keeping up for any reason, and because software is constantly changing, the version licensed to use can quickly become obsolete. This would force them to either pay a ridiculous amount of money just to get back up to date or switch to a subscription.
If they can't renew the subscription, the software reverts to demo mode. Some of this is of course speculation on my part, which wouldn't be necessary if Vispero would just be clear about what they're doing."
"As for the subscriptions and SMA renewals, the SMA status page is a bit misleading. According to the blog post, the standard home subscription that's over 600 dollars annually is more for state rehabilitation agencies to purchase for clients, however it appears as a purchase option along with the option to renew the SMA and the home annual program isn't mentioned as an option there.
Someone who isn't aware could think they would need to pay over 600 dollars a year to use their computer unless they called sales and asked what was going on.
Unless they really wanted to use the portal to manage their license, it would be highly illogical for someone to pay over 600 dollars annually for that subscription instead of renewing their SMA. And if they had to pay full price for a new license, they'd be better off with the home annual subscription if they qualify for it."
"Also, the page says that I can renew my traditional SMA, which will give me two feature releases, but the actual product page says it gives two years of updates from the date of purchase. I also had to call sales to make sure my current SMA is still good because the SMA status page only says that I'm licensed for the current version and gives me purchase options as if it were to expire soon, making it seem as if the SMA I purchased last year wasn't being honored.
I was told that I'm good until Vision 2027. I'm sure all of this is unintentional, but it feels very deceptive and like it's designed to exploit people. That's not a reputation any company needs and trust can be difficult to earn. Again, I truly don't understand why there can't be more transparency when it comes to sales. These are products that people depend on every day and they need to know when and how terms are changing.
Why they're changing would also be nice to know. Also, changes like these shouldn't be implemented until everything has been worked out. That just seems like common sense, but there seems to be a shortage of that these days."
Thanks, Stefen. And Vispero has recently announced another change, which is that come September they will only be providing technical support to people who have a current JAWS license.
So your SMA is current or you're owning a current version of JAWS or you've paid one of the new subscription fees. So if for example, you are running JAWS in 40-minute mode, you haven't paid for the product, then you will no longer be able to receive technical support from Vispero.
Bryant:
Hello, Jonathan and everyone else. This is Bryant from Idaho. First of all, I want to thank you for a great podcast. I'm glad to see that you're undertaking this podcast and it's been a great resource. I wanted to send this contribution in because I'm seeking some clarification on some confusion I have with the JAWS pricing structure changes.
I've been using an SMA agreement since 2015 and I recently renewed it in October of 2024, right after JAWS 2025 was released. And according to my JAWS version information, it claims that I have two upgrades left, which would mean that I'm good through up until the release of JAWS 2028, and then I would have to renew.
However, I was under the impression that these SMA agreements are now timed and are good for 20 months, so either I'm misunderstanding something or these changes aren't put into effect yet. If anyone could give me some clarification as to what exactly is going on here, I'd appreciate that.
Jonathan Mosen:
Thank you, Bryant. Good to hear from you in Idaho. The definitive word on this would of course come from Vispero, but my understanding is that these changes are not retroactive. So if you've purchased your SMA back before these changes were made, then the contracts that you have with the company will be honored for the period of the SMA that you currently have.
Once you get to purchasing either a new subscription or a perpetual license, then any new terms would take effect at that point.
We are going to Hungary for our tech tip this week from Peter, and he says, "I may not be the only one who struggles with Alexa from time to time trying to make her do what I ask of her. For an unknown reason, she doesn't understand some commands when normally she does. For example, nine attempts out of 10, she does not understand, 'Play RTVS R Patria from Tune in.'
This is a Slovak public service radio station that broadcasts in Hungarian during daytime hours. A solution can be if one sets a new routine for the particular function that should work, but does not. In this case, I configure a new routine in which when I say, 'Start radio,' she begins to play RTVS R Patria.
I think this method can be especially practical for those of us who don't use Alexa in an English language environment and often ask her to play podcasts and radio stations that have non-English names. I hope this tip can come in handy for some of your listeners."
Thank you very much, Peter. That's an ingenious idea. 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 announcement 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.