ATIA Conference and more

00:08S1

Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from February 6th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us. Wherever you're listening, perhaps through Virgin Australia Radio, Associated Stations of Australia, or maybe 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 then it can all come, usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio talking tech podcast, Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast. 

With me, someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's national adviser on access technology, David Woodbridge. David, let's start with another tech show and we're only in February. This is the Atea Assistive Technology Industry Association, another event in the United States.

01:08S2

Correct. So this all happened, I want to say about two weeks ago, and it's effectively the first conference for the year. And it's all different types of assistive technology. It's not just for blind and low vision people. Sam from The Blind Life, he did a really good compilation of interviewing quite a few different suppliers on his YouTube channel. And I think roughly, he sort of it sounded like he gave people every sort of like 20 to 30s. It's really been fascinating. There was quite a lot there are all different sorts of gadgets and software and services. So if you really want a good overview of what happened at the Atea conference, uh, that's a really good YouTube one to check out. And as I said, it's the blind life, from Sam. And the reason why I just say Sam, because that's the way it just tends to just introduce himself anyway.

02:05S1

Yeah. Very interesting. You suggested that we introduce a new segment to this program, a product minute each week, a product from the store, the Vision Australia store. Hmm. What are you going to talk about this week?

02:20S2

This one's going to be on the Sense player OCR. And the reason why I'm starting with this one is because one, it's a daisy player. So it plays all the Daisy books from the Vision Australia library. Two. It's got a built in camera that allows you to read, if you like, in quotes text. So it does optical character recognition. Three it's a system that's got a built in FM chip so you can listen to, you know, normal terrestrial radio, if you don't have any access to cellular or Wi-Fi on your smartphone. And four important to me is the fact that you have access to your smartphone, whether it's Android iPhone, the sensor player actually turns into a smart keyboard for those devices. All the other stuff like podcasts and internet radio and the stopwatch and so on are all really great. But for me, there are four things that stand out for me of the sense player. And just one final thing which may be interesting for the future because it can run Android apps. Who's to say that at some stage this year we might even see some sort of ChatGPT or bard or something happening on that device as well. So I just think it's well placed to be a very customisable device moving forward.

03:48S1

Physically. It's beautiful, isn't it?

03:50S2

It is. I love it, and the little stereo speakers at each end, it looks really cool as well. I don't normally go on about sort of daisy player devices too much, but yeah, this one is just really, really attractive.

04:02S1

Just sits in the palm of your hand and can Bluetooth to other devices speakers? Yep. AirPods etc. really? Well, I have to say and you did mention them in passing, but it's my go to device for radio web streaming and also for listening to podcasts because you can have them there so conveniently. So everyone has their their different applications that they go to in this multifunction device. It's quite amazing indeed. And the cost.

04:32S2

It's around about $1,100, so it's fairly expensive. But then again, it's like that sort of Swiss Army knife. It's a Swiss Army knife of daisy devices, and you've got all those other functions built into it as well.

04:48S1

We'll spend a little time now on the Apple Vision Pro device that has hit the streets. Um, just explain to people who are not aware of it what it is, and then we'll talk about how people can find out more about it.

05:03S2

Yeah. So basically it's a virtual reality headset. Apple's terms. It's a spatial computing headset. It's basically a set of goggles. So if you've ever felt sort of snow goggles, which are those sort of big chunky goggles that people were in the snow, it looks like that. And I should say they're very weighty. They say it's about 650g. So and it really does push down on your forehead and your cheekbones because things are so heavy. You've got to wear the strap around the back of your neck and a strap over the top of your head to support the Vision Pro goggles on your face. And because they've sort of wanted to reduce the weight a little bit, the actual battery is not part of the headset. It goes on a wire, uh, into another thing that also weighs, I think it's 300g, this one, and it's a battery that sits in your pocket. So it's a wired connection to the battery. And that gives you about 2.5 hours of continuous video playing capability. So at the moment, I guess what you can say is that it's a a device that's sort of definitely pushing forward the boundaries of what we can do with current technology. But just saying it's a fairly heavy set of goggles on your, on your face, uh, a battery that has to be connected via wire and it doesn't last very long. To me. It's almost like the technology to support. It's not quite there yet. So this is definitely a 1.0 release. Um, I'm sort of looking forward to the perhaps the one that's next year.

06:44S1

Perhaps we've got the benefit in Australia of being one of the countries that doesn't have it and won't have it for some months, available in the US for around 3,500 USD. So you can do your arithmetic on that. It's going to cost a fair bit. By the time it does get to us.

06:59S2

It does. And by the way, all the reviews are coming out at the moment. It really looks like a lot of people are using it for a course. Watching movies and TV shows, not so much at the moment on productivity app. So because what what happens if the headset is that you can park? I like to say park because it sounds better. You can put these apps in different spots on your environment so you can put them on the wall. This is all virtual reality stuff, by the way. You can put them on the wall, the ceiling, the floor, in front of the kitchen window. So when you look around, you've got all these different apps that you can actually look at. And of course, once you look at them, they get activated. Apparently one of the things that really annoys people at the moment is if you just use the on screen keyboard, uh, with the Vision Pro, it's one key at a time. So you look at the actual key to activate it, then you look at the next key, then you look at the next key. So it's actually very clunky. 

But luckily, the Vision Pro also supports the use of a Bluetooth keyboard, but it doesn't support a mouse. And of course, the reason why it doesn't support a mouse is because you're actually using your hand gestures to control the device. Plus, you can also use your voice so you can do voice dictation as well. One of the things that people are getting a bit weirded out by, apparently, when you're watching a movie, when people look at you, they can see these sort of virtual eyes. And apparently people are getting really freaked out by it because it looks very, very weird. And when you FaceTime from, say, another Vision Pro or from your iPhone or Mac into somebody wearing a Vision Pro, you also get this made up character that supposedly looks like your face but isn't. So people are also saying that also looks a bit weird, and I can't understand why Apple would want to even do that in the first place. And there are some apps that sometimes will fall over for no apparent reason. People have been noticing that when they've been wearing them for a while, because you're looking at a virtual environment, when you come back to your normal environment, your spatial orientation is off, including your balance, reaching out for things, those sorts of things. So that's another thing that it'll be ironed out, you know, in the next couple of months or so. 

Because, you know, beta testing is one thing. Putting it to a mass market is another thing. And I think from memory, they said they sold around about 200,000 units in the United States. So I guess we'll see what happens. We're now finding out what the device can really do. And of course, there's another call I've got in the show notes Vision Pro in the wild. And some people have been wearing them in public and trying to do, you know, things at the gym because it's not. Designed for fitness. Some silly person was wearing them in a Tesla car that was under self driving. And of course, one of the things in the notes about the Vision Pro is do not use this device when driving because you're literally looking at the world through a camera. So there's lots and lots of things. I've only scraped some of the major things to think about at the moment, but I do have some really interesting articles in the show. Notes about it.

10:32S1

Yes, you've got quite a number of articles there in the show, notes a lot about accessibility and all sorts of things.

10:37S2

That's correct. So we've got our standard things like voiceover, zoom, color, contrast, switch control. I will say now the hand gestures are very involved and it involves one hand, both hands or from 1 to 4 finger pinches or taps. So it's not something that you're going to pick up overnight. It's something that you're going to have to actually learn to do. But there is a proper voiceover tutorial, gesture practice mode. And if you're wondering, because when you see the setup demo for the Vision Pro, it wants to do your eye tracking for you. Now, of course, what they've done for VoiceOver is that's going to be turned off. Once it determines that you're using VoiceOver, it's not going to do your eye tracking because it knows you can't see anyway. So just in case you're wondering, that's not an issue.

11:31S1

Staying with Apple. Tim Cook, the CEO, hinting that AI is going to be much more important in Apple products later this year.

11:40S2

Correct. What people have been saying is, look, we don't care about the AI stuff behind the scenes with machine learning and so on. We want a Siri, see Siri in a proper non command system where we want to see it like a ChatGPT or a bird or a co-pilot. And he did strongly suggest that in iOS 18, which is coming out in June at the Worldwide Developers Conference, we will be very surprised on how fantastic AI will be.

12:10S1

You read an article recently that saying that perplexity and other AI applications threatening the Google search.

12:19S2

And I also read another article which was brought up by perplexity and ChatGPT because I said to it, what's the difference between a ChatGPT and a Google search? And what it actually said simply was the chat function or perplexity gives you a summary and goes through all the searches and gives you definite points on what you need to think about or explore next. What a Google search primarily does. It just brings up all the links and then you decide what you want to actually look at. I must say, I'm using Perplexity and ChatGPT and copilot a lot more now that I'm using Google search.

12:58S1

Some updates coming to the blind shell classic to phone correct?

13:03S2

If you've been chatting to quantum lately about your blind shell not connecting so well to your carrier, uh, there's some issues going on with those different systems at the moment around Australia, we have Telstra, Vodafone and Optus. They're supposed to be a system update coming sooner than later. So as soon as it happens I will let people know. So that's all to do with the mobile carriers at the moment.

13:27S1

And some good news for talking tech that it's now available. The most recent editions of it on the Vision Store web page.

13:35S2

That's right. So it's decided to put up the last three episodes so it'll be updated every week. But of course, if you want to catch up with the latest episode, you're probably a bit off just using your favorite podcast or smart speaker and do it that way. Dare I say even using the sense player to do it as well.

13:51S1

That's it. Shop Dot Vision Australia. Org shop dot Vision australia.org. And that's where you can find out about the sense player that we were talking about earlier. Indeed, before we go, a reminder of where there are details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.

14:09S2

As always, you can check out my blog site, which is David. Would it be a dot Podbean pad be a incom?

14:16S1

David would be dot Podbean pod be a incom to write to the program?

14:23S2

You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work, which is David Woodbridge (as sounds) at Visionaustralia-dot-org.

14:30S1

David Woodbridge at Vision Australia - dot- org. This has been Talking Tech - with me has been Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.