In this edition of the AppleVis Extra, David Nason speaks to Karthik Kannan, co-founder of Envision Technologies, winner of the inaugural AppleVis David Goodwin Award. This award recognises developers who have excelled in providing great apps and experiences for the blind and low vision community over a sustained period of time. They discuss the background of the company, key milestones, and the exciting Ally app which is due to launch soon.
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by Aiko, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.
Hello there and welcome to another episode of the AppleVis this extra podcast this is episode one hundred and five my name is david nason.
Today we are talking about the AppleVis end of twenty twenty four awards again but this is a particular special one today because it's the inaugural david goodwin award david as you most likely know.
Founded AppleVisway back in twenty ten and after fourteen years of real dedication he stepped away in the middle of last year.
Thankfully we have been able to go on and it's really fitting that this award in particular has been named in david's honor.
The david goodwin award rewards a developer who has shown a lasting and enduring dedication to the community with significant apps and really made an impact and they need to have been.
Active with an at least one app for over three years and our winner has been many more years than that and so it's a really special awards and we're delighted to have started up this year and really excited to talk to the winner.
Today before I get into that conversation I will give a quick overview of the nominees we had a lot of nominees for this award and which is a great sign in of itself really.
Nineteen nominated on the panel so let us have a quick run through just to get that acknowledgement to those nominees we had a sharp LLC who make king of dragon pass.
We had american printing house for the blind to make good maps at doors agile tortoise who make drafts era tech corporation who make era explorer cash reader sro who make that cash reader app dolphin computer access limited to of course make dolphin easy reader.
Envision technologies bv who make the envision app flexi bits incorporated who make the fantastical calendar app junew quang who makes.
Mona for mastodon and also spring for twitter canoe suit who makes the leer rss feeder app library of congress who make bird mobile.
MIP soft who makes the blind square up national federation the blind to make nfp newsline oreo gomez makes round logic and accessible hangman accessible twenty forty eight and many more great games that we enjoy.
Sneaky crab incorporated who make time crest twisted wave limited to make the twisted weight audio app.
Ulysses gmbh to make the ulysses writing app and weather god's LLC who make of course the weather gods weather app a very popular app over the years as well.
And finally would you juice limited to make hockey side and fright recording apps so big list congratulations to everybody who was nominated it's.
Great to see so many developers who have shown that long term dedication to making great apps for our community.
So the runners up getting a special mention our weather god's LLC and era tech corporation but our winner was envision technologies bv who of course make envision app and as we'll discuss in the conversation the upcoming ally feature or app as well.
So for that conversation i'm delighted to be joined by envisions co founder and still very active leader carthic cannon.
Hello carthic thank you so much for joining me on the app of this podcast today how are you good day thank you so much for having me it's been pretty good and i hope you're doing well as as well.
Good and as we record it's a friday so everyone's happy right yeah and it's a valentine's day so yeah everybody's love is in the air as they say but yeah it's yeah it's it's been a it's been a pretty nice friday for me so i'm hoping it's the same for you as well absolutely and.
What a nice segway love is in the air and there was a lot of love shown to envision by the apple is community so congratulations on winning the first ever david goodwin award from apple is dot com so that's an award that's not just about what you did in twenty twenty four but it's an an award about enduring and kind of lasting significance for the community so you know the work you've done for years so yeah well done.
Thank you and honestly you know we've got we've gotten a fair you know bit of awards in you know in our in our time as a company but to be very honest with you i you know apple is always hits differently when we get something from apple is it's always a different story because.
I think a lot of the awards that we're usually given to is like given to by a committee right and it's apple is when we get love from apple visits always from the community it's you know just countless number of people that we probably have no i'm not mech i'm not had a conversation with just connecting with our mission the product and you know taking out their time to give us valuable feedback appreciating us when we actually you know do better on that feedback and.
And keeping us in check when we don't and at the end of the day when you when that kind of an appreciation comes from community and from like you know everyday folks who lose what we build instead of like some community or committee sorry i think it makes a huge difference to me and and i always mention this part that it's the community that you know it's giving the word whatever i talk about apple is because i it's very rare to find stuff like this in the internet nowadays so.
Yeah that's brilliant and great to hear and yeah you're right i mean it's ultimately a panel put together a list of nominees and quite a big list of nominees but you guys topped the poll and that was fully down to to the people who took the time to vote for you so you must be you know making an impact and you've been having an impact for some time.
Yeah no i think it's it's when we build something and we put it out there one of the first places we come to for like pointed feedback is the apples community and i think over the years like i remember making the first post about the envision ai app back in september of very 17 and i remember just going to sleep that night.
Waking up the next morning and you know i had turned on my email notifications and stuff and i also my first you know thing that i would do in those days of of of envision the early days of envision is wake up and open up an apple analytics to see you know if we had an uptick in our numbers and i remember making that post an apple miss and then checking the analytics a day later or day or day or two later and all of a sudden i see this.
Grass that's spiked to the top and my first reaction was oh my god we got hacked you know i'm going to go pro you know somebody hacked us and and and this isn't happening and then i start opening up my inbox and i see just lots of comments from people giving us their feedback and and you know and that's something that i really value in any online community you know the ability to welcome new people make them feel at home and give them constructive feedback.
I just absolutely loves that about after this and i'm so glad that after this is continuing to insist and it's continuing to honor people who would take time and effort into building accessibility because yeah i think god knows we need more of that in the world today.
Absolutely love that so tell us a bit more about that so you say envision was 2017 the years are absolutely i can't believe it's been that long.
Tell us a bit like about the audience of the company how how got set up and why and yeah how it all came about.
The envision started in in about envision was never meant to be a company you know envision was was never meant to exist as a product as an app or a company we had no plans of doing that and it all started in about december of 2016.
When we went to a blind school in my home I'm actually talking to you from my hometown Chennai in India at the moment we'd go to a blind school here and usually you know and we went there primarily.
Because you know one of my mom's friend was the career counselor or the principal in that school and she didn't really have any money to pay for actual career counselors.
So she invited me and my co founder to give a talk to kids there like we knew any better about building a career.
But you know we were around and we were me she didn't have to pay us so we just walked in there and our idea was to like really tell these kids about what it is to be a designer and what it is to be an engineer and we went there and we walked in.
We essentially told those kids that you know being a designer or being an engineer is just waking up and solving problems you know we have a to do list of problems to solve and we just solve.
One problem at a time and hopefully if we solve enough number of problems and if those problems learning matter we can make an impact in the world in some way that was the idea and it was supposed to be.
A 15 minute talk towards the end of their you know their school day I really didn't expect the kids to pay any attention to them like you know they had a long day at school i'm just going to go in there they're going to pretend to listen to me and then they're going to move on right.
But at the end of the talk I asked those kids what kind of problems would you like to solve when you grow up.
I remember the night before the conversation with the kids I asked my niece about it and she told me that you know she was a teenager and she had these. wild ideas of what it is to be a you know what she wanted to do when she grew up right and she told me she'd like to build a city on Mars.
You know kids that age usually say well I want to you know cure cancer and I want to build a supercomputer and I want to do all these wild imaginative things.
And I expected a very similar answer from the kids at the school that day, but the answers were just so different it was so different that.
It left me speechless they said things like oh you know I wish I could live independently I wish I could travel independently I wish I could read a book.
By myself I wish I could actually you know it was sunny outside and if I know it was sunny outside I wish I could just step out of my house and go to the beach without having to spend all my effort planning how to get there and worrying about me getting there safely.
And my parents having to like you know chaperone me all over the place that I wanted to just move out and about by myself.
And that was pretty moving because I just started to realize that a lot of these kids, especially in a country like India, they would spend so much of their lives and their lives energy just trying to overcome the most basic hurdles that a sighted person takes for granted.
Right and that was sort of you know the point where we kind of woke up like from a slumber and we're like oh wait this is how a lot of people live in the world today and that's somehow it didn't feel right you know as engineers as designers.
It didn't feel right to not address the problem and it was around the same time that I was really getting into AI in a very serious way so I. You know used to do AI or learn about AI and back then it was for deep learning you know a lot of that was a technical term for it and AI was basically just a very niche topic eight years ago nobody really cared about AI nobody had.
Any clue about how it was going to change the world was very niche very academic yeah but I could see some sign of AI really outpacing humans even back then you know so back then in 2017 there was.
If you were into academia if you were in the scientific circles, you could see that AI was outdoing humans in a lot of different tasks.
AI was getting good at reading text it was getting good at recognizing faces it was getting good at recognizing objects in an environment and it could do all of that.
With just the image that you take from your phone camera and that was quite revolutionary because all of a sudden we realized that you don't have to put a braille display.
On every single piece of visual information out there, you know you could use AI to basically build a bridge between the visual world as it is and the visual world as it should be you know.
And make it more accessible and that was what was the key insight which we which we had in the early days that.
Basically, if we are able to extract information from the environment and give it over to a blind or low vision person, they will then have the agency.
To take decisions on their own and all we have to do is provide that information in a seamless way and AI was the tool or the bridge that would help us through by that information.
And so that was how Envision started and you know I was in between jobs at that time and my co founder was doing his masters in the Netherlands and so we thought okay we're going to do this you know this fun little app.
For six months he's going to get a master's degree out of it I'm going to get a portfolio or I'm going to I'm going to bum around for a bit and then find a job and and move on by it and that was the plan.
And I still remember the over the over the course of six months, the very basic prototype of the Envision app that they put on test flight balloon to about 1000.
Users without us doing any kind of marketing whatsoever like it was there was no plan people were just sharing the link and we were we were stupid at that and we didn't know how to log test flights and it's no meat.
We didn't know how to do that and I remember putting my credit card you know on on one of the servers to pay for the servers.
And I remember just watching every time a person installing the app you know you know money would get deducted from my card and I'm like okay I'm going to get a little bit more every time someone installs it but it went on and at some point you know.
My co founder got his master's thesis I ran out of savings and I'm like okay it's been a really fun experiment and I'm going to shut this down and I remember shutting it down.
And writing to or like you know just sending an automated email to all the thousand folks who signed up saying hey thank you so much for your effort it's been pretty phenomenal i've learned a lot.
And I can see how much impact this technology can make but so long and you know see you guys around and that's just it and again I woke up the next day and I had 1000 people standing my inbox all posted saying.
It is stupid that you would do this you know why would you do this like you know you guys have built an app that doesn't work most of the times, but in the in the rare moments it works it actually makes a big difference.
And so that's what it does to start envision as a company and and you know to be very honest with you I moved from India to the Netherlands to start the company.
There's been no precedent of anybody doing anything like that in my images so I had no clue how to start I don't even remember filing income tax until that point in time, you know I was I was a very, very young kid I think 22 24 years old.
And it's really just you know phenomenal because it's the community that has gotten us this far and i'm not saying it just because i'm on an apple this forecast I genuinely believe that because.
I always believe that the blind and low vision community is fairly underserved and you know it's starved of innovation, most of the times, and I think when something comes along that attempts to be innovative.
Be it in terms of product, be it in terms of business model, the community embraces it and it's just the push that they have given us so far that is that that's actually gotten us here, you know, and again I don't think we are you know great entrepreneurs or any or anything of that sort.
I think you know we're just a couple of average people who try really hard and who have been incredibly lucky to find a community that appreciates us trying very hard.
That's amazing yeah there's so much in there I mean even from that first day like you say in the school and you just it dawns on you you know the.
The things that people take for granted that other people you know can't do and it's the technology is just such a.
Such a powerful way to close those gaps and to bring down barriers it's amazing and yeah it's come it's come so far and I love that thing about the 1000 people or whatever who found the test flights and you just discovered.
Just by chance almost that hey there's a market for this and there's an interest in this yeah well.
That's incredible and like you mentioned your co founder that's the other the other car thick so like do you guys have different kind of disciplines you're you're more of the engineering side is isn't would he be would he have a different kind of discipline that he focuses on or yeah.
But you see in the designer this art is in product design and in industrial design so it's sort of the combination that we have from the very early days where I write code and designs and it's the it's the synergy between us that book yeah.
And I suppose they have to be changed quite a bit so it's been out for a few years it's probably had a few iterations and a few kind of changes over the years what are the what are the big ones what are the big kind of standout moments sort of that have changed over the years.
So I think quite a lot so I think in the early days it was the inclusion of this feature called instant text which you know you can hit a button and then it just using the video feed to like the text all kinds of text around you in in in in in completely offline me so you don't have to make me the connection for it I think it's it's still the most most feature on the glasses I still remember just pushing it on the app.
You know on a whim because we just got access to this new AI technology that that did this thing offline and so we pushed it and people just loved it from the get go and I think that's that taught us a lot about the fact that you know you have to be the only I think people value speed as much as they value accuracy and and just doing more things offline the better.
I think that's something that we've learned and another big moment was the introduction of the classes themselves or envision glasses is basically a flagship product.
It allows a person to basically take experience and vision technology using a wearable you know using a pair of glasses so the glasses have a camera on them it's got a speaker microphone and you know a processing unit and people could basically use it to read all kinds of text to recognize faces recognize objects currency even make video calls from their friends or family in order to their friends or family from the glasses or even make Aira calls and so on and I remember we were.
You know we got the Google Play award for the best accessibility experience in 2019 and we kind of really milked that award that week you know I was at Mountain View trying to get you know as many things with the folks at Google.
To see if we could we could get access to some pair of glasses somewhere in that building that we could put our software on and I still remember they telling me hey you know you can actually be working on a second edition of the Google Glass.
Don't tell anybody about it yours like a 500 page NDA go ahead and sign all of this stuff and they gave me access to a couple of units which I brought with me back to the measurements and I remember me and a few engineers sat down and we built a very.
You know early version of the English and glasses you know app on the or the English and glasses product on and we invited a few testers over and we said hey you know can you try this out and let us know what you think about it and I still remember one of the testers. tried to take the glasses with them back home smoothly and that was the moment we knew we had something good so when someone tries to steal your prototype you know it's actually working so with that so we have that moment and that was a very, very.
Pivoted moment in our career and in our time as a company and ally ally is down the most exciting thing we've probably worked on we'll come back to that a little while I think, but I think yeah sure for sure it's the most exciting thing it is it's brilliant and I think it's huge as well, because people probably don't don't always realize you know you're a small company.
And you know, for a long time there was a subscription model and then when the glasses came along you made the app free to everybody, so the glasses are obviously a great product because they're the flagship now but they're still a very powerful app that you've made free to everybody to use, which is fantastic as well. yeah yeah I think it's a very conscious choice we made because you know we've always believed that technology is like or whenever the we had seen technology kind of go down in cost or become affordable. we've kind of flashed the prices of the app reflect that I remember very clearly when the app first came out, you know it was it was about $5 per month to pay for it and over a period of time when we ended up.
Making the app free by the time we made the app free people had to only pay $2 a month for the app, you know to use the app right and usually it's the other way around where you know companies start by you know cheap and then increase their prices over time.
Whereas with the Envision it's always been starting incredibly you know expensive because the technology is expensive and then just becoming cheap over time similarly with the Envision glasses when we first started out was like you know $2500 $2700 $2800 and then we decided to like make the glasses cheaper over time, which is a very counter interpretive thing in the accessibility space that everybody keeps increasing prices, whereas we've slashed down so with the Envision app they came a point where we saw that.
The cost of actually keeping the app up and running for maybe 100,000 users or 200,000 users is quite minimal and often times we realize that when somebody experiences the Envision app they are driven to try out the Envision glasses so we took a bet again on the we took a bet on the community saying okay if we make this available to everybody and if more people see how good this can be maybe they'll also want to try out the glasses right so and that's when we decided to make the app free and.
The cost of running the app is kind of upset by the fact that we have the glasses now and and that's what people like to use right so I think it's just a way for us to say thank you to the community and it's also a reflection of our own mission that yes we are here to make money we are a for profit company because that drives innovation, but we also understand that you know we really feel we feel we owe something to the community and we feel like whenever we can try to make our products more affordable we will make them more affordable.
That's great because we all know specialist technology is expensive you know we people who use braille displays and things like that will will be well aware of that so yeah I think that's a great way to do things and I suppose one thing I'm sure you would say that makes Envision stand out because there is you know other there's lots of companies doing this kind of stuff since and even when you launched for me seeing AI was the other big player in the market that I'm being up against Microsoft is no no easy feat so I'm guessing kind of community is.
Again at the part of was you would say makes Envision stand out and why people choose Envision.
Oh absolutely I think you know when we had seeing AI as a competitor and seeing AI was three from the start you know seeing AI and there were other companies and even now you know there are other companies with deeper pockets in this space but there's a reason why we're doing what we're doing because we have proof that when we put our heads down and listen to the community pay close attention to what they bought.
We can do much better than a company that's looking to just keep this community as one more checkbox that you need to tick in order to like you know look good on paper right I'm not talking about Microsoft for seniors in general I'm just talking about how broader or bigger technology companies say to approach accessibility.
Right sometimes you know it's we for us accessibility is the main product it's it's not an afterthought it's not a department or a division inside a much bigger company it is what we put our full sole focus on and because of that I think we're always able to survive and thrive in this market you know I think we've been one of the longest running assistive tech companies in the last decade or so because we just know that okay if we listen closely to the community.
We will do business the right way and focus on the fundamentals will be found you know I think that's that's what I believe I think just listening and talking to people in the community and iterating on their seat back it's it's as simple as that.
Definitely I work in customer experience in my day job and I was chatting to a friend of mine last only last week who has the Envision glasses and he he mentioned that that kind of the customer experience a customer service is one of the things he appreciates most actually because he said you know when he reaches out to Envision he gets a response he feels genuinely listened to and I think that's something we don't always feel these days when we're dealing with any companies really and so.
Yeah I think that's really good to good feedback to have yes yeah no I think that's true and it's really you know I mean a lot of times we get interviewed by bigger design magazine then and outlets and they keep asking or how do you guys design your product so much in line with what it is and and people often think there's some other technique.
Or do we or see click that we use to actually make this work and we just tell them no we just you know we've been like you see talk to people all the time and they just don't want to believe it and I think it's really comes out of that just you know and and like I said I think we've have communities like Apple this you know Apple was being the biggest but there are only small communities spread out throughout the internet and blind and no vision people are just more than happy to actually come and give you feedback you know.
We take to be quite a loyal a loyal user base I think when a company shows us you know loyalty we kind of tend to we tend to stick with them I think that's the thing we've seen it with Apple itself the fact that you know a huge number of us have stuck with Apple over the years for the same for similar reasons.
Definitely let's go down to ally then I know you're really excited to talk about his ally so for those who aren't lucky enough maybe or haven't joined the beta yet for example or you know haven't haven't come across it yet what's what is a lie.
Ally is a conversational personal ubiquitous assistant that you can go ahead and have a two way conversation with and just getting some fun right ally is the next generation of what we're doing it in vision.
It's conversational in a sense you can use your voice to have a chat with it so you can go ahead and get on a call with ally you can just go ahead and talk to it and get your sponsors from it in audio you can talk to it in as many languages as they are in the world.
And ally replies in different voices and so that's one big effect.
Ally is also personal so this is very very interesting so unlike most other assistants out there ally can be very highly personal like for example my ally is you know it's a foul mouthed.
Ishtar median the 1932s right and he uses very colorful language I call him Dali and Dali uses very colorful language to describe the world around me and just have a conversation with me and I'm always laughing and sometimes you know people around me are like looking at me a weird way because I'm just you know talking to an random AI on my phone and it's replying to me and I'm laughing at it.
But you know this is one of the things that makes ally really stand out is that you can very easily customize ally based on what personality you give it but also ally learns from you so as you keep using it ally builds a very intentional biography of yourself.
And you can pick I ask you to remember things for you you can keep asking it to you know recall things that you know it remembers about you can talk about your presences and it just remembers things over time about you.
And ally is ubiquitous which means that you know ally can be used anywhere every allies on the web on the desktop allies on your phone allies on the Envision glasses ally will be on whatsapp telegram all of the other messaging apps every ally will also have a phone number attached to it so you can actually call an ally from a pay phone or from a regular phone and have a conversation with it as well.
And ally is also able to do a lot of things for you so ally can you know refer to your calendar and give you you know and tell you stuff about it ally can refer to the weather ally can search the internet ally can basically even play games so we're actually building games on ally as we speak and you know you can actually play games on ally.
So it's just you know and always available assistant or ally that you can simply call and get things done some or just have a conversation with and so on right and it's built with accessibility in my in the app is entirely accessible on all the platforms it's available on.
And you can make it you know give you descriptions as verbose or as deep or as some size as possible and you're in the driver's seat with a lot of things that you want to do with ally and it being conversational it's very very easy to use you don't have to remember commands or you don't have to remember menus you just ask it to do something for you and then do it.
I think that's one thing that stands out for me even with you know because you like to say it is a conversational tool then it's like you know chat gbt or those kinds of tools where you can have conversations about any topic you want but it's also doing that piece of hey what's the product i'm holding in my hand.
And that's so much easier when you're just talking to it you just open it up you start the conversation hey in my case say hey leah what what's this and she'll tell me what it is and go oh can you find cooking instructions online for that and she'll go off and find them but it's really it feels really quick and easy you're not pressing a button and going and waiting for a response or something that feels very natural i suppose.
Yeah yeah that's the idea i think with ally the aim is to make it very simple but beneath all that simplicity is you know you just ask me to do something for you and it will do something for you something that's actually also playing around with allies is making it do things on your behalf because for example we know that you know having to fill out forms on the web is a pretty daunting task so you know you're just being able to excel out these weird javascript forms.
That are all over the place and are not accessible so they're actually building a version of ally that can do this for you right and as ai tends to get more and more and more powerful we are focused on having ai do also things on your behalf.
On the web which might seem inaccessible for you right so i think that's a lot of the where the future is heading with ai and that's also important very very excited about.
And is ally is it trained if that's the right word knowing that its audience is blind or visually impaired in some way or is it just like any other you know ai in that sense.
It is trained to be an assistant for or be of help for people who are blind or low vision and the elderly that's the core audience that the ai is changed for and we don't use too many off the shelf. ai for it because sometimes when you ask for detailed descriptions of things you know a lot of these ai's are nowadays like very corporate you know very corporatized right so they don't give you descriptions of things they don't read out certain things to me like if you ask it to read.
An electricity bill like there's some ai's out there which will refuse to read it out for you because it contains quote unquote it personally identifiable information now those are not really built.
For blind and low vision people that is, if you ask you know i like to actually read out any document it would actually go ahead and read it out to me because it's it knows that you know its main audience is is basically blind or low vision people.
And so yeah right so you can always go ahead and ask it to read all sorts of documents get all sorts of things and the and the after be able to do that for you.
That's great yeah and you can text or speakers all I find the speech mode is what I use 99% of the time was definitely the there are times when being able to type to it is going to be beneficial as well.
Yeah yeah um so the thing is ally is something which means both in type and talk mode so you can text it as well and all the features that are available when you text it when you talk to it and also available when you text it so yeah I use both interchangeably sometimes i'm in the i'm in the metro.
And i can see got us i need something quickly i just google or just you know ask ally stuff and it and it works with books yeah and it's in you know it's in a public data right now and anyone can just go ahead and install it to try it out.
Yeah yeah and i think the the personality things is a really interesting part of it as well.
You know i've two main ones that i use cuz i use you you might know the the pre built ones of leo which is very upbeat and you know chatty and if you just want to play a game or something it's really nice but then sometimes i created my own one that's just very to the point concise just answer the question you know what i mean and it's great to have to use that one when you when you want to so i think that's one of the things that makes it stand out like i said is you can you can use it the way you want to use it and i think that ubiquity as well it's really interesting i've.
Primarily myself been using it on the iphone and but i'm really interested to see some of the other stuff you're talking about like the web and whatsapp and you know that sort of different ways that would be able to to use it so you really do see it as a as something you interact with all over the piece.
Bill that's true i think you know for for us be decided that from day one alex has to be available everywhere all at once i think that's one of the most beautiful things about the current era evolution is that it's not tied to any device or any company or any form factor.
Right i think it's sort of literally in the air as we speak and that's a great thing because you could just you know touch you know a particular touch you know you could just go ahead and use it on your phone if you want to or if you use it on the web and the thing that the way we have built ally is that.
You could, for example, start a conversation with an ally on your phone and then you could just pick it up on the bed and then you can just continue having that conversation on whatsapp.
And then you could just so you can just continue that read all over the place without really having to feel like oh i've got to start a new check i just because i talk to ally on whatsapp doesn't mean that you know it doesn't know anything about me.
That it has learned on the phone or doesn't know anything about my calendar or doesn't know anything about where i am so there's a lot of you know power in just making sure that the thread is sort of connected to out all the different platforms and i think that was the that was something we decided to do.
From day one and i'm actually glad because i think with the whole apps you know era that we used to live in we all had to really confine ourselves to these boxes that companies built for us whereas with AI you know AI models nowadays are becoming.
Very ubiquitous very commoditized and anyone can just put in any AI model off the shelves and they're getting cheap so people can build very very interesting applications very quickly and then just look them out in the world any day you know i think that's that's pretty great.
So even on the iPhone you see it breaking out from its app you know the meaning be able to do a lot more.
Definitely like people use ally on the web on their phones so they can use the app but people prefer to use it on the bed and then they use it on the bed.
It has the exact same features it has access to the exact same things as it does on the app on your phone so you know we're going to be doing a pretty interesting experiment during CSUN.
You know next month i'm very very excited for that experiment and that's going to show how powerful ally can be across all different platforms right and i'm really excited so that i will talk about it when time is here but yeah we're going to be doing some pretty fun things to see some this year so i'm pretty excited about that yeah.
Can't wait to hear about that and it's on the glasses i know but i suppose you know the glasses like that they're not they're not cheap as we have we said you know with assistive technology generally isn't and there are more wearables coming on the market so i'm sure people are dying to know you know will envision be available or will ally be available and on other platforms be that the meta ray bands or other similar type products and similar priced products.
Yeah i think that's something that we're definitely looking into we're excited about the fact that variables are finally becoming mainstream i think for me there is still a little bit of apprehension because none of these variables are still open for developers yet.
You know there are there have been a lot of variables that companies have been putting out and there have been some companies promoting it to the blind and no vision community but there hasn't been a variable that is still open in us for us to put our software on it and actually you know get that over to the blind and no vision community.
Again we believe we're on the verge of having something like that but it's still not there yet you know i think for good measure some companies that are building these kind of glasses are wanting to make sure that there are no nefarious apps or actors trying to take control of the glasses and doing something crazy.
People are a little stooped already about about these things right so they're trying to be as cautious as possible and so for us the envision glasses hardware is still the best hardware to deploy you know our software on.
To build apps for people who are blind and no vision on we still believe that it's the best hardware to do it but having said that i am super optimistic about so many of them too early to talk about some things but.
We you know I think it's very, very exciting I think it's very exciting to finally see this becoming mainstream yeah I mean we insert some version of the envision ally app running on the envision pro etc and you know, even with how bulky it is and and all of that stuff it still makes a big difference to just be able to read it on a partial piece of hardware and then run it and and see how what is in the world so pretty cool yeah.
Yeah it's amazing because I think if it's the idea of bringing that the barrier to entry down a little bit you know what I mean like that initial purchase price down but you know and I'm guessing more of a subscription model then going forward but then you're using it wherever you want it so that could be on a pair of glasses that you've bought but it's also on your phone like I said and on the web and yeah that kind of feels like the model that makes sense.
Definitely you know I think that's the like we still haven't decided on what the business model for ally would be and where it will be with all of these consumer glasses and like I said a lot is not depends on whether these companies are open to giving developers full control of the hardware or giving us access to the powerful hardware that they've built and some of the and sometimes the hardware itself is not as powerful but just having access to the camera and and.
The internals can make a big difference so as and when that happens we will like I said you know we've always been very transparent with the community we'll again go back to the community we'll talk to you know them as to what seems right and we try to make the best possible decision going forward yeah but it's still a bit up in the air.
And as you say the existing glasses are there and they're still good hardware and they are running ally as well so you can run the ally betas on on the glasses now can't you.
Yeah yeah it is actually now become one of the most used teachers actually it is probably the second most used feature on on the glasses right now behind our scan text feature but i'm pretty sure when we do bring scan text over to ally.
Ally is going to basically take center stage on the glasses no matter what so it's there in the glasses and we plan to support the current hardware for much longer than people believe it to be right I think we will support this particular hardware for as long as possible before we are able to like you know hang up our boots on it because there's so much more that you can squeeze out of this hardware which is really scratching the surface of what we can do with this.
That's great to hear because I think yeah maybe people did get that kind of here that you know Google were ending the program and things like that and maybe had a bit of fear over but you're saying yeah we it's it's still very much alive and well from your guys point of view.
Yeah because we didn't get access to a lot of inventory from Google we're getting a bit of support from them as well we you know like I said we have complete access to the internals of the glasses themselves and so we're able to like put our own software on it we're able to you know provide service for it.
We're able to troubleshoot it if something goes wrong and you know we are able we're pushing updates continuously to the glasses so despite you know are the glasses quote and quote from Google stopping in 2023 we've actually pushed out an enormous number of updates from the clients from that time till now right and we continue to do that because we know the hardware is capable of handling more.
That's great that's great to hear and I suppose the ally then what what are the plans for us do you know do you have timelines at this point for when it will be in a in a full public release status.
It's tough to say but I'm hoping we can do it in the next few weeks right so our planning so allies now in public beta anybody basically can go to ally.me so a and then by.me and they can install a public beta of ally on their phones or they can also try it out on the web so if you go to web.ally.me.
If you just go ahead and induce the app or ally on the web as well there is a Slack community that people can be a part of give feedback.
You know provide important direction to what the latest you know what what features should be I what issues they're facing and so on and our plan is to continue to keep doing this we really want.
To have the community adopt this and guess like also to come up with a business plan that makes sense, you know and that ensures that we're able to continue and innovate on ally.
I could break neck days without really worrying about you know.
Other things I think that's what we're going to be focused on for the short term we're simply focused on building the best product putting it out there.
And having people try it and give us feedback and lose it so over the next few weeks and I will become generally available for everybody as soon after that yeah we're going to keep putting out updates and.
When we feel it's it's about me I think much more information with the community figure out what's the right business model and then just move a bit so yeah there's still a lot of lot of stuff that we want to do on ally that we haven't gotten around to what.
Amazing yeah that's it I mean I would definitely encourage anyone listening to join the beta and if you're if you're interested in what you've heard today because I'm loving it I'd say I think it's it's really good I think it's. it's the best stuff you guys have made or the best product you know that you guys have been kind of made and it's not even finished yet it's just got so much potential and it feels very kind of natural and. yeah i'm really excited for for it's the prospects reading around it so yeah definitely definitely people to get involved yeah.
I think is easily the most exciting thing happening in my life so this is the most exciting product that i've worked on.
Forever and it's it's so interesting because every other day something new happens in the world today I some new model comes out you know people were thinking oh my god you know open a is the best and then deep sea comes out and everybody said wow.
The secret is insane you know and and then all of a sudden Claude come up with something I said you know it's I realized ultimately it's not these AI companies that are winning but then developers like us are winning this in this the most because.
We get to exceed in these models and every model just is a little bit more cheaper than the one before it right and so that makes it just a great platform.
For us to build things on and and yeah like I mean envision was so alive with excitement right now the team is so kicked about this stuff.
We just you know we lose track of time building this thing and the feedbacks in the community is so positive it's so hot at the moment.
And I think yeah we we've got something very interesting in our hands and if we stick to the fundamentals, which is listen to the community listen to the feedback.
Do what is right and everything that's you know we take care of itself we'll be selling.
I think you're right yeah there's been so much hype about AI over the last few years, but I think we're one community who have kind of real world examples that we can show of like how we're using it to its benefits yeah.
So true you know like I mean very when whenever people write online about hey you know what we're like okay there'll be all these really fancy these models and this model that can do really well at OCR and people are.
Sometimes trying to find a nail to hit on with all these different types of hammers and I'm like you know what we've been doing that for like eight years now.
And there is this community that's benefited immensely from this and it will continue to benefit immensely if used the right way.
And it done the right way I think it will be transformative right and I think that's that's really the impact I'd like I'd love to see.
In my lifetime is here is for blind and low motion people across the board is to be able to live a life of complete of their full potential just without having to worry about anything.
Because AI is able to help them do you know do so much of the things that that seem otherwise impossible so I'd love to make that happen yeah.
Amazing perfect even so generous with your time so thanks so much I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to say before we wrap up.
I would love to just end with one thing which is for everybody on the call who's listening to the podcast please do check out you know our beta so if you go to ally.me. you'll be able to install the latest public beta of skyline you know we would love to get your feedback.
This big form you have to fill out once you really fill out this is if it's got three questions would send you a link immediately.
To ally ally is available on ios it's available on android it's available on the bed so you can use it on your desktop as well.
And it's also available on the envisions losses and like I was mentioning earlier in the podcast it's going to be available everywhere else shortly.
So yes, please do try out ally there's a slack community that you can join we got a myth on that community, so you can just go ahead and give me or any of the envision being.
With your feedback and good luck with your from you so please try our ally and let us know what you think about it.
Amazing that sounds great I think we can wrap up there and say thank you again so much and congratulations carthic on the win and thank you everybody for listening.
Thank you so much David for having me over I really appreciate it.
Cheers bye bye. you you