Selvas Braille6, Notebook AI, Windows and iPhone

00:33 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from October the 15th, 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. What you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and [?Danica Noel]. 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.

01:17 S2

Hi, Stephen.

01:18 S1

Let's start by talking about a device known as the BrailleSense.

01:24 S2

Some people would already be familiar with the BrailleSense 6. It's been out for a little while and was a replacement for the BrailleSense Polaris. These products are from Selvis BLV - who some people would know as [?hymns] - and the BrailleSense 6 is their Braille note-taker type device. It comes in two variants, a 32 cell and a 20 cell variant. They run the Android operating system and they have a number of inbuilt apps. So they have things like a word processor, a notepad, an email client, a web browser, a web radio, a daisy player, a media player for playing your MP3 music files, and that type of thing... there's a number of other extras like a dictionary, an Excel viewer, a range of other sort of utilities, a scientific calculator. And they have speech and Braille. And you can also do things like produce maths equations and those sorts of things in the word processor. 

Obviously being an Android type device, it has all of the usual sort of wireless and Bluetooth connectivity as well. The 32 cell version is probably about the size of an iPad mini, I would say, and the 20 cell. The mini version is a little bit smaller, so it's probably a similar width to a brilliant 20, but a little bit deeper from front to back because of the stereo speakers and the headphone jack and the two USB-C ports and so on.

03:04 S1

Some listening might be wondering how does this relate to the Selfless BLV sense player that has been around now for almost two years?

03:15 S2

The BrailleSense 6 came out ahead of the sense player by probably a year or so. So some of the apps are shared. So things like the the podcast downloader, the daisy player, the media player, those sorts of things are shared between the two devices or are very similar in functionality, but obviously because this has a Perkins style Braille keyboard, you know, you have things like the word processor, the email client, the calculator and a whole range of other things. So whereas the sense player is very much a media player type device, I tend to think of the Braille sense family of products more as a note taker type device. So I use mine in a similar way to the way my sighted colleagues tend to use their iPad.

04:05 S1

And with the Braille, it's a lot more expensive, isn't it? Up around 7500? 

04:11 S2

Something like that, they are for the 32 cell version. Yes. And for the 20 cell it's about 6500, I believe. Yeah.

04:16 S1

Whereas the Sense player is down around about 1,100 AUD. That's right. Great devices, both of them. And the BrailleSense has had a significant firmware upgrade recently.

04:27 S2

Yes it has. So what they're calling version 2.5 of their of the software for the BrailleSense 6 came out this week. and it introduces a couple of cool new features, including a ChatGPT client and a new YouTube search facility where you can search YouTube and bookmark your favorites and those kinds of things. There's also about three pages of notes in terms of fixes, so there's quite a long list of things that have been updated, reworked, fixed, that type of thing. So anyone who's running a BrailleSense 6 or a BrailleSense 6 Mini, I would definitely recommend upgrading. It's definitely a worthwhile upgrade.

05:13 S1

So we're talking about the BrailleSense 6 or the Braillesense 6 Mini. They're available from Selvis BLV... and the new firmware that's available, you're saying it's good to go for it?

05:24 S2

Yeah, definitely.

05:26 S1

Tell me about Notebook LM, and when I say LM, that makes me think [?I].

05:32 S2

Yes, absolutely. And this is one that I've been playing around with this week, and I'm really quite intrigued by it. So Notebook LM, it's a Google service and it is free at this point. I don't know whether they'll change that in the future, but at the moment it's free. And Google describes it as an AI powered research assistant. So what that means is that you can give it a number of different sources. So they might be documents from your computer, you know, word documents or PDFs. They might be... websites. There's a whole range of different formats that it supports. So you can give it a list of sources, and then you can have it generate a number of different things from those sources. It'll give you a list of things like... a table of contents, a summary, a study guide, an FAQ, or frequently asked questions. 

But the one that really surprised me is a thing called a Deep Dive conversation. So you can give it a, you know, a number of documents or a course outline or a manual or whatever you've got. Tell it to generate a Deep Dive conversation and it will generate some audio in the format of a podcast. So it will sound like two people having a discussion about your content in a very conversational sort of style. So almost like what you and I are doing here, Steven. But it's... their AI generated voices.

07:02 S1

And we're not.

07:04 S2

That's right. Not yet anyway. But they, you really wouldn't know in that they sound very natural. They breathe... and... they laugh, you know, they... it is a very conversational style. And I was really quite shocked at... the results. And it generates it quite quickly. And it might be a sort of a 10 to 30 minute... you know, audio, you know, like a podcast episode, almost depending on how much content you give it.

07:32 S1

Notebook LLM language model. How do you get to it?

07:36 S2

Really, the easiest way is just to do a Google search for Notebook LM, and it'll be the first thing that comes up and you do it through a web browser. I was using Google Chrome when I've been using it this week. It'll ask you to sign in to your Google account. So if you've got a Gmail account, you're already set up with one. Otherwise you you will need to create a Google account first. And then there's a button that says Try Notebook LM. And you can set up different notebooks too. So if you're looking at different products, you know, or different things, you know, so you could, for example, have a notebook where you give it a bunch of... holiday, you know, destination websites and you could say, give me a list of all of the holiday accommodation in Byron Bay together with their prices or something like that. 

And then you might have another one for your your overseas trip to Italy, and another one on... the rules of test cricket, you know, so you can have a bunch of different notebooks that you can select from so that it organises all of your... information and your sources and the things that it generates quite nicely for you. 

08:38 S1

And to be clear, it's web-based. It's not an app.

08:41 S2

That's right. Yes, it's it's accessed through a web browser.

08:44 S1

That one called Notebook LM. Now Windows 11 and the major update for 2024.

08:52 S2

Yes that's right. Microsoft, in their sort of typical fairly cryptic fashion, are calling it Version 24 H2. And yes, it is the major Windows 11 update for 2024 for people who already have one of the new co-pilot PCs. So the new ARM Snapdragon based PCs, they'll already be running it because they've been shipping it with those devices since June, mid-June. But for everybody else, uh, it's starting to come down the line from the beginning of October. So you may already have it. You may not. And it'll come down through the normal sort of Windows Update process. Microsoft tend to do these things as a staggered rollout, so they kind of deploy it in waves based on I'm not quite sure what either geographic location or PC manufacturer. 

I'm not quite sure how they determine who gets what and when, but you can get it, you know, if you want to force the update. And there is a URL which we can put in the show notes - where you can download the installation assistant and force the update to happen. I would suggest perhaps a little bit of caution though, in that if you use Windows Mail or Calendar or Contacts, so the sort of standard windows apps for those things, they will disappear with this update and you'll end up with the new look Microsoft Outlook. And it's not like the Outlook that most of us who use sort of Office 365 would be used to. It is a web based app. It's the look and feel is quite different. 

And it's been getting some fairly mixed reviews, both in the mainstream press and in... the sort of assistive tech space in terms of whether people like it and what they think of it from an accessibility standpoint. So if you're really happy with Windows Mail, you may want to consider not not installing this update. If you use Microsoft Outlook through a sort of an Office 365 subscription or an earlier version of office, that won't change. You won't lose that. But if you use Windows Mail, Contacts and Calendar, then there is a big change. So it's just worth worth being aware of that.

11:13 S1

Yeah, so no real reason to go chasing after it.

11:17 S2

I don't think so. If you're running a machine with an ARM processor, you will notice some performance improvements and you will find that your sort of older legacy windows apps will run better. But most of the other things are, again, sort of cosmetic under the hood updates. There's some changes to Windows Explorer, some changes to the kind of the visual look of things like the system tray and Cortana has been replaced with, uh, The copilot. Probably none of those things. Certainly from my point of view, I don't feel compelled to rush out and spend my Friday evening updating to Windows 11 24 H2.

11:56 S1

It'll just come in time.

11:57 S2

That's right.

11:58 S1

Yes. Now, for people using iOS 18, particularly on the iPhone 15 Pro and above. In other words, all the iPhone 16 models. A bit of a tip about preserving your battery. People may not be aware that there is now a feature in settings in the battery part. So you go into Settings, then Battery, and it's called Charging. And within there you can set the level that you want it to stop charging at. It said, isn't it Damo, that it's better for the battery not to go to the 100%? Every time, though, there's a bit of conjecture about how important that is. But you can stop it, say at 80, which is the lowest that you can stop it at 80, 85, 90, etc. and it will only charge to that level and maybe that will preserve the life of your battery. 

There's a funny thing happened though, with iOS 18 .0.1, which came out just a week or so ago for some people. What happened was that this no longer was happening, the stopping at the 80% and it was going on beyond that. And what we found is that if you go back into Settings, move that pointer back up above the 80 or whatever you had it set at, and then back down again, it seems to take effect again. So you can get it back to behaving the way you expect it to, but a bit of a bit of a strange one. These quirks do come up in iOS. You've been using iOS 18 for some time now. You're finding it okay.

13:33 S2

Yeah, I do like it, particularly the Braille screen input changes that we talked about, and I have been experimenting with the battery life. I did set mine up to only charge to 85% just to see whether I could get through, you know, a day of sort of normal usage with it set like that. And I mean, the modern phones, the battery life is so good that really I haven't noticed much difference at the end of the day.

13:58 S1

Now, 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 to write to the program. D

14:16 S2

Damo McMorrow - that's Damo dot m c m o r r o w at Vision Australia dot org... and I have had a couple of emails from listeners each week and I really appreciate receiving those. So thank you.

14:29 S1

Very good - damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org ... This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damien McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.