Envision & Meta Work Together To Bring ‘Ally’ To Life

This is just describing the sort of Assistive Intelligence acessibility agent AI me and others have been banging on about for years. yes, it is theoretically possible to have an AI-companion that works like this, but we have all spent years talking about how Apple restricts access to the camera Etc.

you might as well say JAWS will be cross-platform and work on every device - that would be cool, is easy to imagine and wil probs never happen!

I am guessing that this integrations is going to be far more successful on Windows and Android side, rather than IOS and Mac side, as someone above pointed out, Apple likes to keep things closed. Not sure if Google Chrome on IOS and MacOS supports extensions.
Keeping aside Apple's restrictions, I don't see any technical limitations for implementation of such a cross-platform intelligence. I was hoping Be My Eyes would do something like this.
It all sounds fancy and very far-fetched, but, with money from Meta, and experience and knowhow from Envision, I think they stand a fair chance of delivering something acceptable. Envision platform has always deserved something better than those expensive and funny looking Google glasses. I hope the Meta Rayband like glasses become that new AI host.

Hi all,
Unless I'm missing something, this will be available on a pair of Meta smart glasses, so no need to worry about whether Apple restricts access to the camera or not. Unless of course, you don't plan to buy a pair of meta glasses. If you've got Meta's glasses, whether Apple's camera access is restricted or not is surely irrelevant. But if Apple keeps restricting the camera, then this will never be truly cross-platform.

Regardless of where this goes, it's great to see blind accessibility becoming part of the conversation.

The only thing is, what if these project aria glasses aren't really affordable? What if they cost a couple of thousand? Even if this sort of thing were available for the iPhone, getting your phone out your pocket to see what's around you when you're travelling wouldn't be practical.

They just wrap up other services for a very premium price. There is no insight, no great creativity, not much of anything really. I hope they haven't captured Meta's heart to much, there is nobody at Envision I would want to trust with developing this.

The project aria glasses aren't being released. They are a test bed for future developments. There is an article on the verge about them. The follow up, the one that can be built within budget, are several years off.

All nice stuff, but, like the vision pro, the dream is still outrunning the reality of hardware limitations.

Saying that, during meta connect there is talk of video based AI on the meta ray bans which can identify things in real time. No doubt it will be partially useful for us unless meta actually allows us to use these cool existing toys in the way that is most benefitial to us.

My bad, I'm not sure if they are the same project or device, this is the verge article about orion:

https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo-mark-zuckerberg-interview

I've been trying Ally out a bit and like it thus far. Seems I was grandfathered in, probably since I am or was helping test Envision Assistant. I haven't been able to take a photo yet. I'm also wondering where the web interface is for Ally? The blog post on Envision's website states that there is also a web interface. In any case, I like the fact that you can have a conversation with it. That'll come in handy for nutritional stuff, and right at the moment I'm hankering for some good ol' nutritional info. They're doing a wonderful job!

You can. What else can you do with it?

It’s not quite true about photograph, you can’t actually take a photo, you need to import a photo into it I think.

Surely though, if it is being integrated with the glasses, it needs to be able to see directly what am I holding, et cetera.

I have the Ally app and it is amazing that you can ask it to look at something for you. Will it remember info for you? Is there a web add on that you can use as they talked about. How do you get this if so