The other, very personal, reason I've decided to take the plunge with the Seleste smart glasses

Always the bottom line, doing what you like yourself best for doing. There's no better choice. smile

I have been considering the Seleste glasses. How good are they with accuracy when reading a document?

If you want to, why not?

I could see that wearing these glasses, going over to the bookcase, selecting a print book, going back to the couch, sitting down, opening the book, and reading could be fun. Smile. Anyone else present who doesn't know better would give you a double take, to be sure.

Honestly, the text recognition in the glasses is pretty impeccable. It’s just gonna take a bit of an adjustment as you need to just ensure you have your head position properly for the camera. It doesn’t take much as the cameras in the very center of the glasses. But the camera is positioned on the bridge of your nose so you need to keep your head up a bit more. It’s nice, putting on the glasses in the morning laying in bed and looking out your window and hearing all of the descriptions from outside. I learned that I have a really great view from the bedroom window just laying in bed.

Having smart glasses for the purpose of reading doesn't cause me any social anxiety, even if they look like "blind-people devices." However, they need to refine the process a whole bunch from the tedious way Seeing AI, for example, either jumps all over the place at the slightest movement, or waits and waits, and waits for you to have a perfect alignment with all four corners of the page showing before doing anything.
* Stephen posted while I was writing, so maybe it's OK.

Hiya, I'm loving all this stuff I'm reading, to the point that I want to get some now. I think they could be really amazing and helpful

What I think I'm taking away from this discussion is the happy thought that, at very worst, we're getting close to what we imagine these glasses can deliver. Smile. It's been a long time coming.

Back in the dark ages, 1979, when I was in law school at UCLA, I had the 12th braille computer ever made. I carried it everywhere for class. Later, I had the Apple 2E. Later still, I drooled at the thought of a CPU with 4 cores. Now, wow. My M1 ultra is already looking old. And so many oh so promising glittering delivering tools come ever closer. What an amazing age we live in. I pray to God we don't screw it up to the point of complete and total unscrewability.

Joy!

me

I am digging what I have read within this thread so far. I do not know if these glasses will be, "The Glasses", or not, but so far they sound close enough to count. For everyone with a pair, or who will soon have a pair, please let us know how they are working for you, in your world.

@ Charlotte,

Never be ashamed for loving technology. Technology is the future. I, too, love technology, so much I went out and earned a degree in IT.

Also, snarky geek girls are the best girls.

True story. 😀

Let us know how they go :)

I'm thinking of buying them next year, they'll have map functions then from what I've been told, so I look forward to it.
I'm going to get the guy on here to answer your questions.

Don't feel ashamed for loving tehc, I do, this new stuff is awesome and we get new toys! Who said toys are just for kids, they're not and Brad wants all of them.

For the last few threads on these glasses, I had only been considering them in terms of mobility for some reason. I find the constant, verbal feedback of the maps or Blind Square a bit distracting while actually trying to navigate.
The idea of having the AI describe things for the sake of looking around is kind of appealing. I hope there's a easy way to activate and deactivate the descriptive feed.

Well, I got so intrigued that I also ordered a pair of seleste glasses. Can't wait to get them, and start playing around with them. I'm especially excited that I might be able to read PowerPoint slides at work. Wouldn't that be awesome?

Hi, it's Shubh I'm the founder of Seleste, wow it took me a while to read through all of the comments, this is amazing to see all of the engagement on here. Thank you all for the feedback both good and bad. It seems like a lot of people have questions I'll try and answer some common comments I've heard so far:

1) Video call: We don't have video calling on the app, mainly because our Al is already able to do many of the things people usually need to call for help about. You can ask our Al to help you find a wallet, find an elevator outside, check if your socks match or describe art as you walk around a gallery. Most people don't call someone to read text they use Al, similarly with more complex tasks we can use Al too. Of course latency and reliability are two huge factors that we're working on, which is why we don't recommend using the glasses for things like crossing the street.
Also I updated the website to remove the video calling part and add an FAQ, I'm not sure why it's not updating for everyone, maybe it's cached on people's browser, not sure?

2) Cost of the subscription:
Firstly to clarify it's $100 USD upfront and $50 USD a month. For that, you get software updates which go out about twice a week and free hardware upgrades! Now if you ever have to stop you do have to ship back the glasses which I know some people (*cough brad *cough) don't like the idea of paying for something and not owning it. Well, there is an alternative which is that we sell the glasses outright as well mainly to government subsidy programs for $3000 USD. It's a lot and I think the subscription is way more affordable but if people want we can do this. And with this option, we'll upgrade the software forever and upgrade the hardware for free for the next 5 years!

Also thanks for messaging here Stephen I didn't know you were part of AppleVis!
And thanks to everyone else who's ordered the glasses, looking forward to you all getting the glasses and getting your help in improving this product! I'll be inviting you all to our internal mailing list soon!

I thought I'd have to call you later on today but I don't have to now.

I don't mind the subscription to much, it's the thing where you have to send back the glasses that gets to me a bit.

For example, a person buys the glasses, they find that the features aren't for them, then they send them back, 2 or so months later a really cool feature comes out! But instead of owning the glasses and paying for that feature, they then have to pay for another pair.

You know, I'd not mind paying $3000, if it were in monthly installments, not many people have that kind of money to just drop on a device, but I think Shub and the team are sticking to the subscription moddle for now.

I'm really looking forward to the map feature in the next pair of glasses.

I'm still not a huge fan of the idea but I'll try them out next year, who knows; by then pricing may have changed, we'll see.

Let's see.

What do they look like?
The glasses look like a regular pare of glasses with a thick but unobtrusive frame. The camera is positioned in the center of the glasses by the bridge of your nose. I’ve been to restaurants, stores and other public settings and no one notices the camera unless you point it out to them. Most common reaction, (oh really? I just thought they were just a regular pare of glasses.)
The voice in demo videos vs glasses audio:
I have heard people talk about the tts so let yours truly break it down for you. While the glasses have there own tts, it isn’t the same Text to Speech as you would hear in the demo videos. If you want to get that quality of voice, you’re going to have to use a pair of earphones.
Is there latency?
Yes but it isn’t horrible…as a matter of fact, Shubh and his team as of the latest update improved the latency for text recognition and scene description.
Subscription vs owning:
Ok ok ok so let’s break this down. I don’t mind paying on a monthly bases. Works just like a sighted person leasing a vehicle. I think the monthly cost is fare and honestly, it helps the company have a continued source of funding so they can live, pay there bills, continuously give us hardware and software upgrades. Don’t forget, you want to own them buy them outright. No more complaining about the subscription pricing. You can’t make everyone happy but these guys try the best they can but the reality is everything costs money regardless.
Text recognition:
I have to say I love the text recognition with these things. It’s nice for example to go to a restaurant and read the menu with out needing sighted help.
Everything else:
Having ela continuously exploring your environment is a pretty cool feature when you’re on the move.
I think one of my favorite features is the continue describing people. It’s interesting the things we can’t see like when sighted people talk with there hands, the multitude of facial expressions they make in one conversation. Use Ela to do this and I think you may be pretty surprised at the outcome.
Final thoughts:
These are for people who like to explore there environment. If you want to get your moneys worth go out, look around, don’t just use them for a simple task here or there. Don’t get me wrong I’m not trying to tell y’all how to live your lives, I’m just saying that if your going to take the plunge, take every opportunity you can to use them. Look out the bedroom window in the morning, look at your self in the mirror, go look at your kids, parents and pets, go out to eat and look around the establishment, go read a menu.
If you think it’s good now remember, this is the worst it’s ever going to be.

Thanks Stephen for giving us a much better idea of performance. I am now very very intrigued, and so now I have a question that's fairly important to me. can these glasses connect via bluetooth to hearing aids or via bluetooth to iPhones? If the former, which brands of hearing aids? If the latter, are you hearing VoiceOver via the speakers in the glasses?

Thank you again for your information. Very helpful.

It's telling you people's hand-talking and facial expressions?
First thing I thought of was Alex Pentland's MIT studies he describes in his book, Honest Signals, from about a decade back. Mostly ways we communicate outside of our own conscious awareness, kind of through body language.
This is starting to get really interesting...

So to answer your question, if your Bluetooth device is connected to your phone, all you need to do is go to the seleste app and set the glasses to rout audio thru phone. I haven’t tried routing the iPhone audio to the glasses speaker, I just use my AirPods.

Yeah I only found that out by accident lol. I just told Ella to continuously describe the people around me next thing I know it’s describing my mother in law and telling me her facial expression and hand gesture in the moment the glass is captured. Ever since then I’ve just worn them everywhere. Sighted people wear their glasses all the time, i’ve decided to do the same. I use them when I need them, and when I don’t particularly need them. AI is going to do some miraculous things and like I said, this is the worst it’s ever going to be.

I'm wondering how long it took, after people placed their orders, to get the glasses? I ordered about 4 days ago, and all I got was an email thanking me for the order, and that they'll let me know when they can give me the glasses.

I should clarify that I also got a receiptin a separate email, so I'm not questioning lagitimacy, just wondering how long people have typically had to wait.

It takes them about a month to ship this stuff because they don't have tonnes of people working on this stuff.

For me at first I wanted the ones with the darker frames which would’ve taken 2 and a half months to ship out because they didn’t have any in stock. When told that there was limited stock, I opted to get the clear frames instead which took a month and a half to ship. Now don’t quote me on this but I feel like demand outweighs supply in this case so them being a really small startup it takes them some time to get them out to you. You don’t have to worry, your free month starts once you get the glasses. Your not paying for the subscription in the time where you don’t have them.

Does anyone know if there has been any way to use these with a braille display? I am trying to use a lot of the AI stuff for recognition, but glasses are a missing piece of the puzzle for me as someone who has to read with my hands. If you think trying to recognize text by moving your phone around and listening to audio prompts, try not having audio prompts amd havigng to consult your braille display for the feedback. It takes 3 hands. So I'm very interested in this subject, but can't get too excited since it doesn't appear there is any way of working with the glasses through braille support. I have the same question surrounding Bluetooth hearing aids. Do these glasses allow you to pair with external audio devices? I'm enjoying reading all of these posts and hope to one day have enough access to begin testing myself.

Using them with a braille display sounds pretty counterintuitive. These are mainly used for going out and about traveling and what not. The goal is to make it hands free.

Thanks Brad and Stephen. I am just curious about other people's experience, not concerned. I am glad to support this company while it's starting up, and I really appreciate that it's not going to cost me several thousand dollars to find out if their product works for me.

I'm really keen to see how these could help me at work, but will draw on my admittedly limited pacience while waiting. 😊

Thanks for the response. Counter intuitive? Not so much. While your use case is only for out walking around, there are a lot of other things the head-worn tech can support.

You pair the glasses to your phone yes but the audio comes out of them, although I guess you could rerout the audio and see what happens but can you read as fast as the AI can write out responses?

Also you need to talk to the glasses as far as I know, yes there's some buttons that do certain things but if you want to get into the real power of them then you're going to need to talk, if you can do that and read as fast it might work but for now i don't think it's viable.

This isn't a criticism of the people in this thread, but I'm quite disappointed in the lack of consideration that has been given to people who don't have the ability to speak for whatever reason. This is a trend that continues to leave DeafBlind people behind, and I'm sure there are other groups of people with multiple disabilities who are being excluded from our inclusive society. Again, I'm not poking at anyone here who has posted, just expressing a bit of advocacy I feel needs to be put forward a little more often.

It's not on us to help every disability out there, we've got our own to be dealing with.

I'm sorry the deafblind are being left out but there's nothing I can do about that.

I'll say this; Lottie and I are brits, we, british people, can come across as very blunt, acording to Americans.

I like to think we're realistic.

Can someone just ask them if they do instead of saying they do? Agree Braille support helps those who may want it but need or want Braille support.

So they'd no what their people want.

That's interesting.

I'm here to talk about my blindness experience, this is one of the reasons I've never said i'm part of the blindness community. I don't want to nor care to represent others and that seams like a huge thing there.

I think that was in reference to me. It was not my intention to come off as such, again, I'm not criticizing anyone on the site, just pointing out a lak of access. My apologies for coming on too strongly and for disrupting the discussion.

Hey sorry for not being as active on here, again loving the discussion and would love to keep answering questions.

For the barille display you could work with it with our glasses! We have a button on the app that stores the last thing that was said by the AI for people to re-read or copy and paste somewhere else if they want to save that text or description.
A braille reader user could use this to read what was just said by the glasses! The phone could be in their pocket and if the app is open they can press a button on the glasses and then read using the braille reader.
This feature wasn't built initially for blind-deaf users but at a conference I met someone who was deaf-blind and realized that the glasses could work for them too! However we don't have any deaf-blind users so far and we would probably need to improve accessibility to make sure deaf-blind users could use the glasses since we do use a lot of audio ques.

As for shipping we'll be shipping the glasses around mid-March and then moving forward we'll be shipping glasses within a month of ordering.

Also Stephen that's really cool that it described people's facial expressions and hand movements when you were talking to them.
I can imagine that would be kindof annoying to hear while you're talking to somebody though. I was a mentor for an accessibility hackathon last weekend at MIT and someone was working on having audio ques when people's facial expressions changed on zoom calls so that could be interesting to have on the glasses!

Lastly I love that quote Stephen you're so right, this is the worst we're going to be!

I think I should apologise too, I read your post and it didn't mention anything about, blind people should this, or you must that, so yeah, I'm sorry too.

Has anyone tried reading a book? If so, how did it go? Particularly how difficult was it to center the text? How were you able to manage columns?

The owner emailed me:
Hi Bruce! Yeah we have a couple hearing aid users that enjoy using our glasses. Basically from our app you can route audio through the phone so if your hearing aids are connected to your phone you can get the audio coming out of that! Best, Shubh

So I didn’t pick up a book as I just get way too busy with work to get into any sort of book, but I did have to set up a few different Dyson machines I bought. Air purifier, humidifier and they’re really cool looking tower fan. I was able to read the instruction manuals just fine with no issues. Actually, I was quite impressed with the instant text recognition. Honestly, you just hold it in front of your face about maybe a foot away and it captures everything. It’s not clunky like other instant text readers, it’s actually very freaking smooth.

So . . ., can you stop the reading and then come back to it and pick up where you left off? Or do you have to read the whole thing if you want to read from where you left off?

Entirely up to you. If you no what page your on then yes if you don’t know then know. It’s just like if you were to have eyes. If you place a bookmark on a certain page, then you know what page to flip to. If you don’t and you’re not paying attention to what page you’re on…well you get it. It’s not like a Daisy player or anything. It just reads what you look at.

Can you put a mark to be able to know where are you? Can you tell it to go to a specific centense? That will be cool or tell which page or paragraph or chapter.

Wow! I cannot believe you are doing this! I mean it in a good way. Will you perhaps be at CSUN? If you are open to it, I would be very happy to test out braille support and provide feedback. This is also fantastic news about the hearing aid compatibility, another use case that works for me on days my hearing permits. Thank you also for taking the time to engage with the community!

This is an area I am trying to keep an open nind about. I think our brains are capable of interpreting different sensory stimuli in ways that it hasn't been done before. For example, I have vibration patterns in Morse code set up on my phone for specific notifications from specific people. From that pattern alone, I can quicly determine who is messaging me. It's second nature now. Why couldn't this happen with more complex systems such as the things presented by Lottie?

Thank you Oliver! I suppose it was somewhat justified, but I should have explained why I am putting this out there. I've noticed a trend with a lot of companies who don't stop to fully consider the needs of those with both vision and hearing loss. While that's totally on topic for the site, I'm afraid it was poorly placed. You were having a conversation on the forums about your experiences, and I came and disrupted it. For that, I apologize to anyone I have discouraged from posting.

P.S. Being blunt is how I role most of the time, even though I'm not British. If you have something to say, why not say it? I sure did.

Well, I've decided to give this a go. My hope is to enjoy using them but to also become an active part user of the technology. I really want to see what I can do. Thanks Lottie for bringing these to my atention!

Why did you get the rabbit thing? I don't think it's accessible at all, I tried writing to their team about accessibility and got nothing back.

Can you get a refund, don't those things go for about £800 each?

OK, i'm more excited about the seleste glasses, I think I'll not wait till next year but will probably by myself a pair as an early birthday present, depending on what features they have.

Just get a refund if you can, you said it yourself, it'll be years out of date in six months.

I thought you had to pay monthly for it with a sim card for some reason,, you don't.

If you don't get a refund, it's up to you of course but I don't see the point. At the moment it's just a glorified Alexa.

Hey everyone,

I am writing because I am super excited!

First, let me start by saying I know it has been a long time since I have made a post or done anything! But I was perusing the forum and seeing what was new anyhow!
Just... I wasn't logged into my account when I was browsing.

Well anyway, you're probably wondering, what is the news?
Well, here it is.

I saw all of the topics about the smart glasses, and I finally bit the bullet and got the Seleste smart glasses today. So now, I'm waiting for mine too! 🥳

How exciting is that? So I guess that now makes six of us waiting? LOL!
So here's to a wonderful Seleste smart glasses future for all of us who end up getting them!
Happy day/evening to everyone, whatever time it is for you, it's Wednesday afternoon here. And friendly hugs from me!