BT Speak, Meta smart glasses and Vispero webinars

00:08 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from November the 12th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us listening - maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated stations of the Radio Reading Network 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 your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio talking tech podcast... Vision Australia Radio talking tech podcast.

With me, Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damo McMorrow. Hey, Damo.

00:51 S2

Hi Stephen.

00:52 S1

Let's talk about BT Speak again because things keep happening there. Let's start with reminding people what the BT Speak is - marvellous little machine!

01:04 S2

Yes. So this is a device produced by Blazie Technologies in the US. It is a device that has Braille input and speech output. It is a modern version of the old Braille and Speak. So it just essentially has a Perkins style keyboard and it has a suite of applications, but can also, because it runs Linux at its core, has a desktop mode as well, where you can run things like Google Chrome and a whole range of other apps - Thunderbird, email Client, that kind of thing.

01:39 S1

Every six weeks to two months, they bring out a new update - and one dropped last week.

01:46 S2

Yes it did, and it's a big one. So there's quite a few exciting changes in this update. The one that I was most excited about was the ability to stream YouTube content from the device, without having to go into desktop mode and do it through Google Chrome or Firefox. So it does have a YouTube streaming app now in the what they call the traditional mode, which is sort of the menu driven mode, if you like, where you can search for YouTube videos, you can view channels that you are subscribed to, um, and you can also get details or go to a particular YouTube channel if you want to have a look at the videos from a particular channel. 

So that's a nice update and it works quite well. You do have to sign in to your Google account the first time you use it. And one of the things that a couple of people have sort of raised and struggled with a little bit is the... remembering how to do the At sign when you put in your Gmail address. So it uses the computer Braille or grade zero form, which is dot seven together with dot four to to do your At sign. So that's that one. There's also a Google Drive client as well. so you can now save files and open files from Google Drive. There is some updates to the AI chat function. So that's the built in ChatGPT client. And there's also a new version of that. It's sort of its little brother called I Ask - what that does is, it allows you to ask a single question and have the output dropped into your current file, so that if you were working on a file and you wanted to drop the search results straight into that file, you can do that.

03:35 S1

So to do those AI activities, do you have an account and if so, who's it with and how does that work?

03:41 S2

Yes, yes. So you need a ChatGPT account which is... OpenAI are the, is the organisation that runs the ChatGPT service. Now you can either get sort of a premium account where you pay, I think it's something like $30 a month or something like that. Or you can do what I've done and do a pay as you go. It's like a prepaid account. So you put a balance in of $20 or $50 or something, and it deducts a couple of cents per 750 words. That can be a cheaper way to run it than the monthly subscription option, if you're not sure how much you're going to use it.

04:19 S1

Sounds good. All right, I interrupted. You know, you're right.

04:24 S2

So there's a few other things, too. There's... some improvements to the phone book and calendar app. And of course, the calendar app also can sync with Google Calendar. And there's also a bunch of just changes. There's some updates to some of the speech settings. There's now the ability to alter how punctuation is spoken, which is sort of fairly common to a lot of devices that use a screen reader or use speech in some form, and a bunch of just, you know, fixes and updates and that kind of thing. But the YouTube one and the updated AI chat functionality are really quite significant, and the Google Drive integration as well. 

It's a definitely a significant update this time around, and it's a product that is just improving at a rapid rate of knots. I mean, when I first got mine back in, I think it was February or March. You know, we were limited to the either the Espeak voice or the Dectalk voice, which didn't hugely worry me because I kind of grew up on those sorts of text to speech engines. But you can now get vocaliser voices and so on as well. So if you like Australia and you want the same voice as you have on your iPhone, then that's something that you can do.

05:42 S1

Now that's the BT speak from Blazie technologies. We'll put the link of course in in the show notes. AIRA, some interesting experience you've had with that. We better remind people what AIRA is. It's been around for maybe six years or so now. 

06:00 S2

It has. So AIRA is one of those visual interpretation services where you can be put through to a trained agent, and they can assist you with visual tasks, whether it's navigation, checking the expiry date on your milk, really whatever other information you need. And until recently that's been done predominantly through your phone's camera. But we mentioned a few weeks ago on the show that they had in Beta a way of accessing AIRA through the Meta smart glasses, so that you can access AIRA hands-free. It was initially sort of a controlled rollout so that you had to apply to to test that feature. But then a couple of weeks ago, they opened it up to all of their AIRA users. And I had a practical reason for testing it out last weekend. And it's always nice to test something in practical terms rather than, you know, in a sort of a contrived or a controlled way.

06:59 S1

Certainly is.

07:00 S2

So my situation was, I was in Melbourne once again for the weekend, and I've only done this a couple of times in the last few months, but we couldn't stay at the hotel we'd stayed at last time, which meant we needed to find a different spot for toileting our seeing eye dogs, and I couldn't work out whether there were any rubbish bins nearby. And so I thought, well, I've got the glasses here, let's just try it. And it did actually work quite well. So the way it works is... you use the AIRA explorer app on your phone the way you normally do, you then instead of just initiating a call, there's an option that says Customised call. And one of the options there is Ray-Ban Meta glasses. 

You tap on that and then the call is answered through the app as it normally is. And then they send you a link to join a WhatsApp chat. It's one thing you have to click on, which is the join button. It initiates the WhatsApp call. You double tap the button on the right hand arm of the glasses and then you've got a video call. So the audio then comes through the glasses and it's using the camera on the glasses. And it was quite handy because it meant, you know, I had a backpack on my back. I had the output from my seeing eye dog as it were. So trying to hold a phone and wave it around would have been a bit of a problem.

And it worked out well because I was just able to sort of stand on the spot and turn slowly, and he said, yes, I believe there's a bin a few meters in this direction. If you can just walk in the direction that you're facing. And I did. And he said, yes, it's definitely a bin and the hull is on the right hand side of the bin and so on. And then he was able to get me back onto the street front because the bin was in. It was sort of off the street a little bit. So it was actually really good to to try it in a practical situation. And yes, there's a couple of steps at this stage to go through, but just to be able to do that in a situation where you, you just quickly need some visual assistance and you need it hands free. I was quite impressed with it. And I'm actually travelling again this week, and I'm hoping to use it in the airport and see how that works.

09:20 S1

And that's very good. Using a mainstream product, the Meta glasses, not a blind person's device that might cost ten times as much, etc..

09:30 S2

That's right. You know, you're talking about a device that's available from a local sunglass retailer or eyewear retailer, and you're talking about something that's around about $400. And I think I paid $459 for mine. And they themselves are improving. I think Be My Eyes have recently announced a partnership with Meta as well. So I think as time goes on, that device is going to become more and more useful.

09:55 S1

Let's talk about Vispero now. Still affectionately known as Freedom Scientific for all of us access Technology users. And we've talked about the 2025 releases of Jaws, Zoom Text, and Fusion. Jaws is the screen reader, Zoom Text is the screen enhancement product, and Fusion is the fusion of those two. They actually accompany their products with some terrific webinars, don't they?

10:27 S2

They do. They cover all kinds of different topics. There's a fairly recent one on the new PFS companion that we've been talking about over the last couple of weeks on the show. That's the facility where you can ask questions about Jaws features, Microsoft Office features, Windows commands, that kind of thing. I also had a reason to use one of their webinars during the week. So I'm currently doing my boss's job as well as my own. He's on holidays. I'm therefore taking lots of different notes, and I've sort of got a number of different meetings. I've got a number of different projects happening. I've got things that I'm going to need to hand back to him when he comes back, that I'm sort of keeping a bit of a running record of. 

And so I sort of had what I call the blind person's equivalent of a whole bunch of post-it notes stuck to my monitor. I had little text files here and there in different places with notes. And I thought to myself, you know, there's got to be an easier way to do this. I have an Office 365 subscription through work, and I was aware of one note, which is their note taking sort of utility that comes as part of office. And when I went into it, it wasn't particularly intuitive or I couldn't make sense of it. 

And I found a particularly good Webinar from Freedom Scientific or Vispero, which sort of gave me the basics that I needed to be able to navigate this tool, and I'm actually really liking it now that I've gotten to grips with how it works, not only can I type notes into it and divide them into sections and different pages and things like that, but I can also copy emails. I can even copy images and other content and have it all in one spot. And I can then export sections if I need to, and I can share different components with other people if I'm wanting them to be able to see my notes and that kind of thing. 

So being able to do that, being able to sort of copy emails into it and, you know, other content from other applications is is really helpful as well because it puts everything in one spot. But having access to the webinar made the difference between me being able to use that product comfortably and just deciding, no, it doesn't make sense. I'll try something else.

12:51 S1

And if you like me, you mightn't touch that activity for another 2 or 3 months, and you might find you've just about forgotten it all when you go back to it. But there's the demo still waiting for you online. That's right. You can go back to first base again and refresh your brain.

13:08 S2

Absolutely. So definitely a handy resource for any Jaws or Zoom Text or Fusion user. Or even without that, you know, if you use other things, if you use NVDA, the principles and things are going to be similar enough that you probably would get some benefit from it. And those webinars are all free resources.

13:26 S1

And there's heaps of them, and there's some that have been around for quite a while. And they're still very relevant, aren't they?

13:31 S2

Yes they are, yes. Very much.

13:33 S1

So. Yeah. So that's the training facility available through Freedom Scientific. Again, we'll put the link to that in the show notes for you so you can check it out for yourself. You'll actually find there are were features that you thought you knew enough about, but there's a lot more buried away that the demonstrators are able to show you through those podcasts.

13:57 S2

Definitely, definitely.

13:58 S1

Before we go, a reminder that you can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program by going to varadio.org/talking tech. VA radio, dot org slash talking tech. And to write to the program...

14:14 S2

You can email m,e Damo, Damo dot McMorrow - m c m o r r o w - at Vision Australia dot org - and thank you to those people who have been writing in. I do appreciate it.

14:28 S1

damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org - that's the one. This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damo McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolley. Stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.