2023 highlights and looking to 2024

00:08S1

Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from January the 2nd, 2024. Happy New Year. I'm Stephen Jolly, great to have you with us. Wherever you're listening, perhaps through Virgin Australia Radio, Associated Stations of Australia or the Community Radio Network, there is also the podcast. To catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and Dan. It can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask a Siri device or smart speaker to play Virgin Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast, Virgin Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast with me, someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vivian, Australia's national advisor on access technology, David Woodbridge happy New Year, David.

00:59S2

Thank you and same to you. And look, I'm really looking forward to 2024. So I don't often say that. But this year I think it's going to be really amazing.

01:08S1

So let's spend today looking at some of the technology that came to our attention last year and perhaps looking a little bit of what we'll get this year. Um, there's a lot to talk about. I'd like to start with the tactile graphics world, and a couple of interesting devices have sort of surfaced in the last year or so, even if they're not yet on the market.

01:29S2

That's right. So the two main ones are the dot pad from Dot incorporated and the monarch, which is a combined product between AP meaning printing house for the blind and human wear. And interestingly enough, the basic hardware that the monarch uses is actually the dot pad. It's just different software and different philosophies. It's really funny because everybody was scrambling in 2023 to try and work out what these graphics tablets are, which were effectively ten lines of, quote, Braille, unquote, and probably about I think it's about 30 characters across. But remember that there's also display graphics in lines and shapes and so on. This year, I think people are going to be still scrambling to work out how you implement these in education and that sort of stuff. So again, I'm looking forward to what happens in 2024 because we weren't really getting there in 2023.

02:23S1

Let's move now to media players is probably the best way to describe them. Human wear have continued their Vector Reader stream series with the Victor Reader stream three, and jumping out of the blocks early in the year was the sense player from Hims.

02:41S2

I'll have to say that out of those two devices. So the Victor stream three in the sense player OCR at the sense player absolutely beats the Victor reader stream three hands down, because it does so many things. You can use it as a keyboard to your smartphone. You can actually listen to things like your audible content, Netflix and other applications that are Android based and that more will be get added. And it's always one of my favorite things, particularly as that we're getting into again, the fire season, as we did last month in December, is it's got an FM radio. So for emergency and listen to, you know, your emergency broadcast, which here in Australia is the ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It's always really important to keep in contact with emergency alerts for floods and fires and so on. So for me that had a five star rating. If I have to get the victory to stream a star rating, I'd say it's a good, solid update. So three stars.

03:44S1

And staying with human wear the brilliant series, the B X series, the 20 and the 40. Some interesting updates in 2023 indeed.

03:55S2

So this is what I call a hybrid brow display. So it's not a brow display, it's not a note taker. It's an in-between thing because it has built in applications including Daisy. And of course, we had the update that allowed us not only to have speech output on the thing, but also to have speech output in Daisy boost, which is really amazing. And the fact that you can connect to multiple different devices around your house just with one brow system, it's pretty amazing. So whilst the human wear victory stream wasn't that overwhelming, uh, this one hit hit again the the ball out of the ballpark because it was really amazing stuff. So I'm very pleased to see that. And let's see what happens this year with the the brand as well.

04:40S1

Let's talk Apple now the iPhone 14 Pro. That was an interesting one.

04:45S2

Yes because they've replaced the like the silent ring switch such as the little switch that goes from, you know, major sound around muted on the side that flicks up and down. Well that's now been changed to a button. So you press the button and if you hold it in you can still do the, you know, the silent ring switch thingy. Uh, or you can attach a shortcut to it. To launch the application, so it's pretty amazing. I think this year it's going to be extended because at the moment you can sort of hack around a bit and do multiple presses to get to the different things. I can't see it right. It can't do all sorts of amazing things. If you press it once, twice, three times, hold it in. So again, to me, that's yet another thing that's going to be expanded upon in 2024. Uh, and let's just see how it goes. But again, to me, that was a really cool thing that came out of last year. Was this extra button or replacement button on the side of the iPhone 15 Pro.

05:46S1

The newest member of the Apple family, going through a long gestation at the moment. It should come to the surface later this year. The Vision Pro tell us all about that.

05:58S2

This got announced at Wwdc, uh, Worldwide Developers Conference, uh, in June last year. This is basically the AR virtual headset from Apple which will plug into your iPhone. It's also going to be, uh, synced up to your Apple Watch as well. And it's going to give you amazing visual, audio and haptic, uh, feedback about what's going on in your environment. So I've seen a few accessibility features of it because it does have built in gestures. Uh, so you wave your hands around in front of the system and it does have particular has voiceover gestures, it has large print and so on. So I'm looking forward now. The gossip is, Stephen, that it's going to come out in March this year. Um, I wouldn't be surprised if it probably gets announced at Wwdc for a June launch for developers, so who knows. But I wish I could have thought it for it because it's about 3500. Uh, us uh, but hopefully I might get a bit of an invite down to Apple Australia in Sydney and get my hands on one to let people know how it goes. And I'll certainly do a podcast on it as well.

07:08S1

So what are you hearing that it's actually going to do for the user?

07:12S2

It's basically replaced your computer. So you'll be able to do things like, um, watch videos, listen to music. This is more facade of people. So be able to stand in a room and do virtual reality type things. Or let's say, for example, you want to rearrange your house, you're looking at buy, you buy new furniture, then you'll be able to actually put furniture in your house that's been mapped out by a 3D mapping system and say, oh, look, you know, that lounge might look well over there and I can change the colour of it. I can change the size of it. Maybe I might put a bookshelf over there and change the lighting. That'll be all done by just you using the Vision Pro headset and of course, gaming with gestures and all sorts of cool stuff. So it's really hands free use in a way of your computer. And by the way, it will also interact with your computer as well. So not only just it will just work with your iPhone and more often not probably for Apple Watch, but you'll be able to also use it as a headset to your computer. I'm going to say computer. I'm in your Mac, so I think it's going to be something that's going to be very flexible, and I think it will just extend the computing power and access to stuff that you're using every day.

08:26S1

Do you think we're going to see advances in obstacle detection this year?

08:31S2

Look, I hope so because at the moment it's very hit and miss. Um, because it sort of depends on how big the object is and how hard it is and what sort of things bounce off it effectively, you know, is is it lidar or is it sonar or is it radar? Uh, all the types of stuff that self-driving cars have to put up with. Um, so I just hope we really end up with the type of system. And I'm sort of hoping that maybe the Vision Pro will do that, but certainly, um, other applications running on smartphones or that might be, um, stuff that are running on, you know, dedicated devices. And the other thing about object recognition is at the moment it still gets things wrong. So it still reckons that my red bin outside is a fire hydrant, and it still reckons the back of my wife's car, which is a red SUV, um, is the back of a bus. So, you know, this stuff's improving, but I think we've still got a way to go for proper and correct object recognition. Just a quick note. The guy that, uh, brought in voiceover on the Mac, uh, back in 2005, I want to say Mike semantic. He's now on the accessibility team at meta. So he's been talking about accessibility with the meta headset. So it's not just the Vision Pro from Apple that's getting into it. Matt is getting into it both from a mainstream point of view but an accessible point of view. So I think the more headsets we get in the market, the good old competition thing says the better it is for the whole industry.

09:58S1

It's still not easy to scan a document with your mobile device or take a photo. We can do it, but it's still not easy. Is that going to improve?

10:10S2

I hope so, because most things nowadays will tell you if it's a document in view and which way it's up and if it's skewed and everything else, but it's actually finding the text that's the problem. So people talk about these wearable things where you can just look at a sign or you can look at a bus. And that's the problem with them is it's all well and good to look in that direction. But the question is it doesn't give you any information at the moment about where you should be effectively looking or when the systems found the text, and it just needs you to stop moving. Um, so I think, you know, I think more head mounted wearable things or whatever else they might come up with is going to be really important. Because at the moment, if I try pointing my iPhone in particular at a sign or the bus doesn't work. Hmm.

10:57S1

What are you seeing ahead with our virtual assistants like we call a sometimes a lady or Google or Siri?

11:06S2

I think the answer to that is these large language models. So rather than just being able to say to all these virtual assistants, set the time, uh, what's the date? What's the weather? Uh, turn on and off my air conditioner. Um, you'll be able to use them for things like, uh, ChatGPT, copilot, slash, Bing, perplexity and other systems, uh, to really engage in a conversation. And what I really want to see is, is something like what jet GPT does, and that is having a two way conversation. So it's responding to you with speech. You're talking to it with speech. And you can have a conversation of I've had lengthy conversations with, uh, ChatGPT about computer AI, and it's been absolutely amazing. I actually talked to it for about 35 minutes, and at one stage I actually even found myself thinking it for the information.

11:57S1

Tell us about satellite communication. Apple have started to use it a bit for emergency stuff. Is there going to be more of that, do you think.

12:06S2

Last year you might have noticed a few places were talking about being able to use a standard mobile phone to access satellite information? And where this becomes particularly interesting is if you're in, particularly in Australia, in a remote part of Australia, you're not going to be near a cellular tower, so you won't get cellular information. You may not be near a Wi-Fi network which connected to, you know, uh, cabled or satellite information services. So this not only adds, you know, the emergency SOS that we've got in Australia with both Android and iOS, uh, for contacting systems for emergency, but being able to maybe, perhaps just initially, maybe just send text, normal text messages, or in the end of the day, hopefully by the end of I'd probably say 2025, I was going to have a guess for 2026, um, being able to make phone calls and send videos and that sort of cool stuff. But hopefully this year at least, to be able to send text messages, uh, to friends and family and so on.

13:04S1

You know what I would describe as a basic phone, low cost. What's going to happen there in the future? Are they going to get better?

13:11S2

They will get better. Because remember, in 2022, I think I talked about one of the basic phones that we saw primarily for low vision, and that was called the Oli tech flip phone. And that's coming back hopefully this year. So people might remember that when it was available it had it had talkback on it. So not only did the keyboard speak for low vision people, but you could turn the full talkback on and use it like a talkback Android phone. Maybe before midway through this year, uh will have a $200 accessible basic feature phone for not only low vision people to use, but for blind people to use as well. So that's something that I'm really, really, really looking forward to.

13:55S1

So that's our talking tech change of year pivot show. We'll do another one next year, hopefully before we go a reminder of where we can find a details. David, of the things you've been talking about in this and previous programs.

14:10S2

Indeed. So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David would be dot Podbean pad Ben comm.

14:17S1

David would be uh podbean Podbean. Com to write to the program, you.

14:23S2

Can email me at Vision Australia where I work which is David Woodbridge out sounds at Vision australia.org.

14:30S1

David Woodbridge at Vision Australia George this has been talking tech with me has been Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge. Stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.