Colouring books, earbuds and speech-recognition mikes

00:21S1

Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from March the 5th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia, Radio, Associated Stations of Australia or perhaps 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 they 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 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 advisor on access technology, David Woodbridge. David, we're not starting really high tech this week, but it is something from the vision store as we talk about a product from the vision store of Vision Australia each week, colouring books.

01:18S2

So the whole series is called My First Coloring Book. And at the moment we've got three online. We've got animals, fruit and vehicles and basically what they are, they're a tactile raised drawing of, let's say, for example, an animal. And then on that page you've also got the name in braille and as well as print of the actual animal in this case. So the nice thing is you can ever use that to if you want to and you don't have to, you can colouring in for your heart's content on that front part of the page. Or you can turn it over and then if you like, because it's a raised drawing on the other side, you've officially got an indented or an engraved version of the picture that you can also colouring in on the back. So I guess I haven't seen these yet, Steve, because I only ordered mine over the weekend, but I've been assuming the maybe the animal's also been colored in properly on the front. 

So I'll talk about next week when I get my hands on it and show it to my daughter with her grand well, with my grandson and her grandson. So I'm assuming it's probably pre colored on the front, and then you do your own coloring on the back of it. I would have loved this with my own children as a blind dead when my kids were young, being able to enjoy coloring in and talking about the animals or the vehicles, whatever your essay might be doing, and the reason why I brought up the other two at the moment for the fruit and the vehicle ones, is because on the website, the moment right down the bottom, the animal one says this is also a purchase with either the fruit one or the vehicle one. 

So if you're not scrolling down for her and look far enough, you miss that. So be aware of that. And secondly, there's going to be about 20 of these books in this coloring series. So I think this is absolutely amazing. And of course, at the end of the day, it teaches children about shapes and so on.

03:14S1

That's from the vision store of Vision Australia. What are loop earbuds?

03:21S2

These are basically acoustic earbuds. Now when I say earbuds I'm not talking about earphone type electrical ones. I'm talking about those little foam stopper things that in the old days, you're stuck in your ear so that you could walk past the jackhammer or go to sleep on an aircraft. Well, these are actually like that, but they're much, much, much more advanced. So, for example, depending on the silicone tip that you attached to the primary loop earbud, it can cancel out. And this is again all acoustic. No electronics involved, different types of sounds from harsh drumming sounds in a musical festival, to other weird noises in an aircraft and so on. Now, the ones that I bought were very basic. So you literally you got the stem of the, of the loop by itself, and then you could attach 3 or 4 different sizes depending on how big your hole is. And these were basically ones for speech and  general noise. I think it was blow at 24dB, but the one that's $96. 

And the reason why I mentioned the price roughly, is because that one is the one that I really want to get, and this one has got some sort of acoustic ring mechanism where you can adjust it between the different types of sounds that you want to filter out, whether it's sort of, you know, brown noise, white noise, jackhammers, aircraft noise and so on. So my wife has given me full permission to go and buy the more expensive one. But as a starter, these things are absolutely amazing. Now what I haven't tried out myself personally, I haven't tried to wander outside and walk down the road with these in my ears because I'm a bit worried about how would I hear what's around me, but you can definitely wear them inside. But for me personally again, and listen to people talking to you, but all the other sounds have that sort of slightly deadened. A sound, so it's not so overwhelming.

05:23S1

Amazon Echo A new smart speaker. Just a little one.

05:27S2

I think this has been around for a little while. I think it's just only because it's now noticeable in Australia via the Amazon.com website. So basically what it is, if you can imagine a round Amazon Echo third generation, which was the round one, which had the, you know, the volume up and volume down, and then on each side of that cross, it had the the actions button and the mute button. Well, if you cut that thing in half and put a speaker on the front of it, take away the 3.5mm headphone jack. Take away the actions button and the mute button. So literally you've just got to play pause, volume up and volume down. That's the echo pop. So it's meant to be for those people that just want a little smart speaker to control their home and to get relevant information about the time, date, and weather. 

I would suggest personally, if you've already got an echo two or echo three hanging around as a bit of a spare, you are not going to get any more extra advantage in buying one of these, particularly because for me, with my echo three, I can still plug in a external wired speaker if I wish, not just Bluetooth.

06:33S1

There's a new accessible recorder around the zoom H6 essential, and Jonathan Mohsin speaks well of it and speaks very well explaining it.

06:43S2

He does. So I did this on the Blind Pod Makers podcast. This zoom recorder actually does speak the menus, which is number one, pretty amazingly fantastic. And the way he went about talking about XLR mics being plugged in, cables being plugged in, using the built in microphone versus an external microphone, linking up as an audio device to your computer, transferring files backwards and forwards, all that sort of stuff is 100% accessible. He did point out a few things which are not that great. For example, when you arm or disarm a track, the beeps exactly the same. But he said, as a, you know, as I go at accessibility for, you know, a first release, it's pretty amazing. So this is a full blown six track make your breakfast and coffee type thing in the morning. 

But he will be reviewing two other essential units in the Zoom Essential series. So this is the top end one, I'm assuming. Then he'll then do the medium one and the low end one. But I just think it's amazing, Steven, that now we have a fully accessible by itself recorder that you can independently use with speech output. And the fact that is, when you take this out of the box, the first option is guide on or off. Now by default it's on. So for all sighted people, they just know how to turn it off because it just says on off toggle on the screen I reckon that's amazing. That really is like an Apple product when it first comes up. When you set up your Mac or your iPhone, you've got speech first and then you choose to ignore it.

08:19S1

And most people have to get that annoying thing out of the way first. The annoying speaking thing. It's more than a recorder, though, isn't it? It's an audio interface. It's a playback mixer. Literally.

08:30S2

It's like a having a recorder, let's say a vector read a stream, which has got all these other amazing features with it. I'm probably going to get my hands on one of them. I'm not sophisticated enough to use this H6 essential one. Um, so hopefully I'll be looking at the other ones, but it's amazing. This one's about $499 Australian. So let's see what the other one's coming out later on this year.

08:55S1

Physically, what is it?

08:57S2

If you take the size of, let's say, my hand, my current recorder, which is the track P4 from zoom, the recorder is slightly shorter from my wrist to my fingertips, and it's the same width as my hand. Now that's about the size of the zoom H6 essential. So it's not enormous. It's not small. What Jonathan said is that you could probably try and fix it in your pocket if you really, really pushed. But it's not. It's not a pocket recorder. You've still got to carry it around in your hand.

09:29S1

So for people who are Braille users, those braille displays like the brilliant by 20 x, it's sort of in that area. 

09:38S2

Correct. Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

09:39S1

Very interesting to see how that goes. Now, you read something recently on the microphone for speech recognition you need a reasonable one.

09:49S2

Correct. So this was written by a person who has MS. And what he said was that over the years he's used different microphones because I think he said he was a retired BBC presenter or journalist. And because when you've got MS, your voice is not as loud sometimes or soft depending on how you're feeling, you're not always pronouncing words clearly and so on. But what he found was that the better the microphone the better. It was for the software in the background to actually work out what he was saying, and he said there was two important things to remember in doing this is that, number one, when you're using voice dictation, the clearer the microphone, the more accurate your voice dictation is going to be. 

And I've been finding that a lot with Siri at the moment. I've been trying to use it with another different type of headset. And what can I say, my voice dictation has been absolutely appalling. That's number one. The second one is to control your system. Now, I'm not talking about Siri or a lady or Google or anything else. I'm talking about controlling your computer from your voice, such as opening up documents, going back to your desktop, all that sort of stuff again, where the system has to be able to hear what you're saying. So what is at the end of the day is the clearer the microphone is, the closer this to your mouth, the more powerful the microphone is, the better off you are. And if anybody tells you that you can use your laptop, microphone or a cheap microphone to use voice dictation or voice control, they're living on a different planet. 

So if you want to get the best out of a voice system that you're using your voice to control it, then at the very least, the microphone needs to be right near your mouth, and it needs to be a reasonable, good quality. So have a really this linked article in the show notes. And it's quite interesting.

S1

Let's talk now about the envision AI app and that it's available on the blind show classic two phone. Tell us what the app is about.

11:53S2

So the envision AI app, it's a Swiss Army knife utility. So it actually gives you things like barcode reading, QR code reading, face recognition, object recognition, cash or currency notification. So it's sort of similar to what's seeing. I actually does, it's available on Android, iOS. And of course now the blind show classic two as an application that you can install and remember also that all three of these different types of phones, of course, support the envision AI glasses, which is, of course, the ones you wear with the camera that does everything that the app can do, except it's much more usable because you're wearing them on your face. I personally still have concerns about a lot of this stuff to do with face recognition, object recognition, and scene detection. 

And of course, the difference between object recognition and scene detection is object detection is just one object. Saying detection is telling you what's the whole range of objects in your environment. And number one, it's still a bit slow. And number two, it still doesn't get it quite accurately correct. So I personally think we're about a couple of years away from this thing being 100% accurate. I still have to double check with people to say, is it really seeing an X, y, and z object in front of my house? Or is it something different? And you know, 5 to 10% of the time it's inaccurate. But as a an option for people particularly to use on your iOS, Android or blind or Classic two and it's free, you don't need to buy the class with it. It's a great option to have in your toolkit.

13:36S1

I'm curious about it on the Blind Child Classic because that's a very different kind of phone. It's got physical buttons, so the way.

13:44S2

It works on the Blind Show classic two is the way you interact with it is not so much, well, there's no touch screen, so you can't touch the screen. You literally use your up and down arrows and then press the okay button, to select different options with it. And it talks about the results to you when it goes off and does its little business about object recognition or facial recognition and so on. It plays a cute little really relaxing sound, and then it comes back with the result. So from beginning to end, it's a very straightforward, simple interface, but also quite powerful.

14:17S1

Before we go, a reminder of where there are details of what you've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.

14:23S2

Indeed. So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David would be a Podbean pod band comm.

14:30S1

David would be a pod bean pod b e a incom to write to the program.

14:36S2

You can write to me in Australia where I work, which is David Woodbridge - how it sounds - at Vision Australia - dot - org.

14:42S1

davidwoodbridge@visionaustralia.org ... This has been Talking Tech - with me has been Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.