Be-My-Eyes AI Assistant Tech

00:08

S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from August 22nd, 2023. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us, wherever you're listening may be through Virgin Australia Radio associated Stations of Australia or perhaps the Community Radio Network. There is also our podcast. All you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and down. It will 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 this in Australia. Radio Talking Tech Podcast. Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. 

With me is someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. David, a couple of AI stories to start. The first one relates to Be My Eyes Now Be My Eyes has been around for a while, hasn't it?

S2

It is, and for people that don't know what it is, it's a video support service. So you get the app running on iOS or Android. You can then contact any volunteer around the world for assistance in what you may need help with through a sort of person looking through a video camera and of course talking to you as well. Things like, you know, finding out what's in the pantry, finding out that what that mystery jar is, checking your mail. 

And of course, with all these video type services, always be prepared to make sure that you don't give out any confidential information, your location if you don't feel safe and so on. So just view it like you've got a real person in your help helping you. But from all tents and purposes, it's a stranger helping you. They're just there because they can see and they can support you. 

But I've always heard very positive things from my eyes I've never heard of. Well, so far I've never heard of any negative things happening. But like with everything on the Internet and video wise, like I just said, use it with common sense.

S1

Yeah, but wonderful people, the ones I've engaged with anyway. Indeed.

S2

And and of course, the reason why we're mentioning it. Oh, do you want to say something or not?

S1

I did, yes. I wanted to ask you about the virtual assistant that's gone into public beta. Tell us about that.

S2

I know I was too excited to get onto the main the main part of it. All right. So what they've done is and this has been available in a beta for quite a long time, so it's called the Be My Eyes AI Assistant. So effectively what you do is so rather than quote, talking to a real person, you take a photo of anything and then it sends off that photo slash image off to the servers and then it comes back and gives you a overall summary of what the actual photo or the image contains. 

Where the AI comes into it is that you can then interrogate the image. So you can say, Tell me more about the third jar that you saw on my bench or tell me more about this shed. So when I did it in my backyard on the weekend, it said Your shed doors open. Now, I didn't know that because I forgot to close it. I thought, Oh gee, that's pretty good. So the difference between I guess using what we've previously used on sort of our iPhones and Android phones about taking a photo and give us the information back to us in general, This one I think is a lot, lot more detailed. It really is absolutely amazing. 

And the fact that then you can interrogate the image and you can ask multiple questions so you get in a bit of a chat and then of course, right down the bottom it always says something like, look, if you're not finding the information you want from the AI or from the photo slash image, here's a button to call a real sighted person. Now, the thing about this stuff, and I'll mention this again in the next story, this is absolutely amazing what it does. It's very detailed, but again, it's object recognition and it's artificial intelligence, object recognition, which means it's the system deciding what's in the picture. 

Now, when I took a picture at karate over the weekend, it informed me that there was this beautiful banner on the opposite side of the dojo. It got everything else correct except the banner, because there's actually no banner. But what there is, is a glass wall with mirrors in it. And above that glass wall with the mirrors in it is a long white part of the wall. And then it's got a gap at the top. Now, I can quite easily think about why that sort of thought. It was a big white banner because it's a big white part of the wall. So with everything that we talk about object recognition moving forward in the next two years or so, please remember that this is recognition or object recognition. 

So if you remember back in the old days of OCR where it was sort of garbage in, garbage out, we're sort of still getting a little bit of that with object recognition, even though it is getting better.

05:05

S1

So is that your understanding, David That. This be my eye feature of Be my eyes actually identifies elements in a photograph and then goes to other resources. So it goes to databases somewhere to get more information. Not actually what is in the photograph, but what the photograph relates to.

S2

It's hard to say because when it bombs out, because it is still in beta and for people that signed up for this beta, yes, it's coming. Just waiting to your turn comes. I signed up straight away when I first heard about it. So that's why I've got it fairly quickly when they announced it. But when it bombs out, it actually says cannot contact service. I don't know what the server ends actually doing, but I don't know what sort of database it's accessing because it came back and said that my clothes basket, you know, you close baskets got holes in it. 

So you know for the air to breathe when you've got your dirty clothes in there and so on, it came back and said, I had a heater in my room, which it described as a radiator. Now, I'm assuming in America people must have lots of these things with holes in it that are square, that look like a radiator. So it got that one wrong. It also did my famous one of calling my red garbage bin because I put it in the garbage. It called that a fire hydrant. So it's still got a long way to go. 

But may I say, let's say I gave object recognition a score of a 50% a year and a bit ago. I'd say this is about 70 to 75% now. So it definitely is improving. And, you know, I'm assuming, Steven, the more photos and images it takes, you would assume they've got some algorithm that says, well, somebody said they didn't have a good experience because you can mark it up when you do it. And hopefully on those things where you say, no, it wasn't correct, they can go back over those images and say, Yeah, look, that was obviously a garbage bin. It was not a fire hydrant and so on.

S1

I understand that if it recognised in the photographs, say, the Sydney Opera House, it would then be able to tell you more about the Sydney Opera House from places that it goes to in the Internet. And it's pretty smart, correct?

S2

Yeah. And I'm assuming like even looking at something like a bus, it says there's a bus and said, well, where's the door on the bus? Is it at the front is at the back. So what I'm going to do actually this week, I'm dragging one of my friends out into the countryside, so to speak, and we're going to be looking at trains and railway platforms and shops and all sorts of stuff. And I just want to get an idea of what this image processing really does. 

So hopefully I can give you a lot more information about what this image processing does. But like I said, this is really exciting times.

S1

Now, I've got to tell you that I yawned a bit when I read the headline for this next one the other day, Australian Invention to Help the Blind. And it's about smart glasses due out in 2025, I think.

S2

Hmm. Yeah it is. And look, must I say, I got a bit underwhelmed by it because yes, it is smart glasses. It just does do object recognition. Exactly the same thing that, you know, be my eyes I does and other things including, you know, seeing eye in the world support channel even your camera on your iPhone and your Android phone does all this sort of stuff. Now, what I noticed in the demo on the television that they had on this link was that they only did the stuff that it recognized correctly because again, we're talking about object recognition. It's artificial intelligence. It's to do with all sorts of things. 

And again, we've already talked about this, about what sort of databases or what the server is doing. So I'll be interested to see what happens in 2025. So I'm not currently getting too excited about it because we're going to have other things on the market by then, like the Vision Pro, and you can imagine, you know, if BMI, AIS and that sort of stuff, you can even run them or you should be able to run them on the Vision Pro.

S1

What's the Vision Pro?

S2

The vision Pro sorry, Is this for the people that don't remember? That's the smart glasses or the wearable AI virtual reality headset that Apple's going to be selling next year and it's going to be about, you know, 3000 or 3600 us. So it's going to be quite expensive. But, you know, there were all these I mean, remember, we've got we've got the end vision glasses out there, we've got the Orcam, so we've got all these plethora. I said that correctly of different devices out there. 

So this one's going to have to be absolutely outstanding to compete with not only other assistive technology devices, but also mainstream devices coming on board like the Vision Pro.

09:48

S1

We will await with interest Les Brillo. Now that's a GPS app that's been around for quite a few years now and it's coming to the blind cell phone. I use laser a lot.

S2

For general use. It's on both iOS and Android and like you, Steve and I tend to use it for just. Keeping track of where I am, and then I know when I'm on the bus normally or the train. I tend to use Blind Square, but if you do a app update on your Blind Child Classic two, you'll get a notification that Letsoalo is now on your phone and you can update it. And then of course, when you go out and about, if you're up and down arrow keys and your selector and your back buttons on your simple, lovely physical keyboard or your blind show classic two, you can use it to your heart's content. 

So it's a real g-p-s application rather than the very, very, very, very, very cut down version of the localisation, which is almost useless on the on the blind shelf. Classic two. So if you want a full functional GPS set that everybody else uses, then go for this and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

S1

Now tell us about V0 starter.

S2

So VR starter is an app that came out. JS I want to say almost maybe ten years ago maybe, but it's a it's a voice over starter kit, if you like. So what it does is it teaches you how to use all the different gestures in voice over. So if you're a beginner user, or maybe you might want to rediscover some gestures that always gave you pain in the past, then you can rediscover that. And of course it's going to have all the what I tend to call the iPhone ten gestures, such as dragging it from the bottom, dragging down from the top and all that sort of interesting stuff, plus your router and so on. 

So if you know someone that's starting off using a voiceover on the iPhone, the iPad and so on, including the iPod Touch that still got one, then this is a really good app and of course it's free. So again, it's called Vo, as in voiceover space starter. And like I said, it's really pleasing to see it back on the App store again.

S1

Very good. You have been playing with the Braille Doodle from Touch Pro Foundation. What's this doodle concept? I have heard of it before.

S2

The Pebble with sighted children. Back in the day there was a thing called the Magna Doodle and the manga doodle is actually a flat plastic tray with magnets underneath it. And you grab your little magnetic pen and as you draw all the magnetic filings come up and you can see lines happening on the actual underneath the plastic of the magna doodle on top. 

But what they've done for this one, the brow doodle, similar thing. You've got all these little magnet pins this time and they come up as you draw your stylus or pen across the magnet. The one that I've got is the brow doodle mini. You can also get a full size one, but this one's probably about, I'd say about 30 characters by 30 characters wide. And I said lots and lots of pins. You can do lots and drawings, shapes. You can do bar charts, you can even do your own Braille if you really want to, as in proper Braille, but really interesting. 

And the reason why I brought it up today is because they've now sold up to $40,000 worth of Braille doodles as I pre-release in 18 countries, and you get 40% off if you put in a pre interest order before October 31st. And I think it's certainly worthwhile. You don't have to spend any money up front. It's just to put your name down for interest. And then when they start selling it, you'll get 40% off. And considering that it sells for $150, I'm certainly going to put my name down to get one for that 40% off.

S1

Yeah. So just to get this right, it's for doing sort of temporary Braille, isn't it?

S2

Correct. Yeah. So, you know, particularly in a classroom, like if a teacher just wanted to quickly say, look, here's what a cell looks like, so here's the membrane, here's the nuclei and so on. Or, you know, this is what a red cell shape looks like or a white cell and anything else you can possibly think of that you can just do a quick draw up. Then the Braille doodles, perfect for that sort of stuff.

S1

Terrific. Before we go, a reminder of where people can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the Program.

S2

And Data Reservoir. You can check out my blog site, which is David Wood beer dot podbean pad com.

S1

David would be dot podbean pod b e a n to write to the program.

S2

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

14:30

S1

David-dot-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. Stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.