Humanware has released the third generation of their Victor Reader stream. Aaron Lindson from Lab Computers will be joining me to tell us all about it on this week's episode of Life After Blindness. Hello, and welcome to the Life After Blindness podcast. I'm your host, Tim Schwartz. And thank you so so much for joining me here on today's show. Before we get to our guest, I just want to give a quick reminder that if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for us here at Life
After Blindness, please send us an email. You can send those to tim@lifeafterblindness.com. Again, that's tim@lifeafterblindness.com. You can also find Life After Blindness on Twitter and Facebook, and if you go to the Facebook page, there you can find your way to the Facebook group where so many people are talking and interacting about all sorts of things related to blindness and visual impairment and getting their questions answered or just supporting each other. So go check it out, take
a look, and join the community. Joining me to talk about the new Victor Reader Stream third generation from Humanware is Aaron Linson, who is a products product support specialist from Lab Computers. Aaron, welcome to Life After Blindness. Thanks, Sam. Now, Aaron, I say that you're a product support specialist, which we can get into what that means and and what all that encompasses here in a bit. Uh-huh. But you also
wear so many other hats. For example, couple years ago or a few years ago, you and I, co presented on a panel for the ACB's national convention about smart home technology that, you know, assistive smart home technology for people that are blind or visually impaired, which was so much fun, by the way. That was that was so much, you know, fun to do, and, we got a lot of really great feedback from that. And and,
I really enjoyed doing that. But I know that you do so many other things outside of your, you know, product support, that you do with Lab Computer. Can you give the audience just a little bit of an idea of what other kind of things you're involved
in? Sure. Sure. Sure. So I came from actually a recreating background, and, unfortunately, I was one of the, 350 contractors who were laid off in the talent acquisition space and then found out that Amazon itself was laying off another 18,000 corporate employees, which included a lot of my colleagues within the town acquisition space.
And as the markets got flooded with recruiters of myself who are like minded people looking for jobs, I thought it was a great opportunity to switch into something different. And a friend of mine, actually, one of my colleagues at at Lab Computers reached out to me and said, hey. I have a position for you. Are you interested in taking it? And I said, sure. Let's start small and kinda see where it goes and and, see how everything works out. And and here I am, talking to you today.
Very cool. And I'm so glad that you are because you've got some, great insight to different assistive technology products, including the, Humanware Victor Reader Stream third generation that we're gonna talk about today. And, so I'm I'm really grateful that you've been able to do this. And, you have been testing products like this and and doing these things for quite a long time. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. So, actually, I'm still, I still do it with with Google, testing new innovations of, TalkBack and what's coming out there and and some applications that they, that they have coming out, like, the Google Lookout application. There's been implementations and improvements based on our feedback. I've been doing that for, gosh, since about 02/2016, in different capacities. And then, and I also do user interviews with Fable as a accessibility consultant,
as well too. So I do that on the side, too. Wow. So you definitely are a busy guy. Jeez. Okay. Yes. I'm very grateful then even more so to to have, a little bit of time to talk with you because you're just, you're just all over the place. Well, let's go ahead and just get right into it then because as I mentioned, Humanware has announced, finally, after a a a long time of hearing about it. Years. Yeah. It's been for
forever. And I think the first time we even heard that this could be possible was at CSUN a couple years ago. Uh-huh. The assistive technology conference, that goes on every year. And Right. I know a lot of people that really love the design and and the Uh-huh. The independent or individual nature of the Victor Reader Stream. Why don't we, first of all, just in case anybody out there doesn't know, because we're into the third iteration of this, of course, and so it's around for a very long
time. But maybe there are some people that don't quite know what this device is in general and what it does and what it's for. So why don't you give a little bit of an overview, first of all, of of what the Victory Reader Stream is? Sure. No problem. So the Victory Reader Stream is what's called a digital DAISY book prayer. And DAISY is a format, an auto an audible format that allows for basically what I like to call sighted reading without the sight. You so you can
highlight bookmarks certain passages. You can bookmark specific pages, you can highlight specific words, and and do all this this stuff that a sighted person would be able to do with say a highlighter and a regular printed book, but we can do the same thing with auto, audio content. And that's basically what it was, the first generation was, but then it has evolved into so much more. You can play, MP3s on it. You can play audible content on it.
You can download text, words, PDF documents, and read that stuff on. So it's become, a just a library within your hand. You can download Audible, Audible, NLS, and even NFB Newsline, magazines, publications, and read those on the go as well. So it's become a really huge part of a lot of people's lives and a huge part of my life as
well. And I never thought that, you know, especially with innovations like the iPhone, that something like the victory of the stream would be as popular as it is, and it and it really is. And I can I do see, the benefit of it because I'm also a user of these products as well, which I think is something really unique that I bring, to the table here is, you know, I'm not just a, say, a a product support or customer support representative
who, you know, has site? I'm a blind person like you guys out there as well that I use these products on a daily basis. I'm not just a tester. I'm also a client. Exactly. Exactly. No. Absolutely. That's a that's a great way to look at the Victor Reader stream. And we'll do we'll talk maybe more about that later about the the individual nature, the personal nature of using a Victor Reader as opposed to, say, using an iPhone or an Android
phone like you mentioned. Because I know a lot of people, and myself included maybe in the past on on other programs I've been on. I I've raised that question, maybe not completely believing the question, but just being devil's advocate to say, okay. But I can do all of this on my phone. So why do I need this? Now I know the answer to that, and we'll talk talk about that here in a bit. But, but, yeah, the the Victor Reader stream for many, many years has been able to do
many different things like you said. And and has become really important to a lot of people, whether they wanna use a smartphone or not. This has become a really great device for people. So in the first Victor Reader stream, I mean, it was simple, although they say simple, but it still did a lot of things, like you mentioned with Daisy Books and being able to play audio with m
p threes and anything. If you could download it, you could play it because you could put it on the SD card that that you could pop into the to the top of the Victor Reader stream, and and it would you know, you could catalog everything by folders, and and it was fantastic. I loved having my first Victor Reader stream and and be able to use it for for all
those different things. I would download audio for pretty much anything I could get my hands on and put it on that thing and and and play it, and it was just fantastic. And like you said, be able to mark it with bookmarks and chapters and and all the different things you can do. And then they came to the second generation Victor Reader Stream, which added a couple of different things that the original
couldn't do. Because, for instance, anything with the original, you had to plug it directly into a computer. But the second had had a few more, four few more features, didn't it? It did. And that's where we got the being able to sign in to, essentially, your Barter Bookshare account, here in The States, and, you download directly to the device. You didn't have to go to the computer to do that anymore, which was,
really big for the time. And then it also added a little bit, on the Bluetooth side to where you could, put in, or use, like, say, AirPods or any other wireless headphones or earbuds you wanted to. And then it also added, Internet radio streaming, as well. And then a feature update that added the ability to download podcasts too. So now that we've set the stage for Okay. The Victor Reader Stream and its history and and where the previous devices have been Sure.
Let's dive on into this third generation. My understanding is most of the functionality as far as buttons and and things like that are basically the same? Yeah. Basically the same. You do have some different tweaks on settings. So if you're in your bookshelf and you press and hold the your seven key, that will jump you into the bookshelf settings. So you're not having to drill down into settings.
Likewise with the serial number where you had to press zero a bunch of times to get to that serial number, you can just press and hold 5, and it will read out that information. So it kind of will easy way to find different shortcuts to to the different settings and things that you would need, quick access to. But, overall, on a on a dimensions level and the way it looks, it's pretty much the same.
They've added they've changed the the button texture to a more grippy texture because myself included with the Victory to Stream second generation, the one that's out as of now when when we are recording this, it has a plastic texture to the buttons, to to every single button. It's really kinda hard to distinguish those those buttons. And with the the textured, more tactile feel, it's easier to, figure out where you are on the device.
I was reading something about that that that it does apparently seem to be easier to feel and and to differentiate, like you said, between the different buttons, especially especially your, you know, buttons, you know, one through nine and and the zero and all that. And I also saw where they've added some extra tactile feel to some of the numbers on on the button pad. So, obviously, like most number pads, you've got a little notch on the number five so you can orientate to
that. But then I saw something about the two I think it's two, four, six, and eight, for navigational. They've they've added a little bit more feel to those buttons. Yeah. It's it's more textured. And I think with the the outgoing one, my my, two, four, six, and eight keys, the the, the plastic feeling on them to where the the bumps have actually rubbed off because I've, you know, those are the ones that you press a
lot when navigating a book. And so with this new texture, that probably that is not likely to happen as much now. Yeah. I really like that. I think it's a great idea to have that texture be physically part of the button instead of maybe, like, an overlay or a sticker, whatever it was before where it could wear off, like you said, with your Uh-huh.
Previous generation, picture reader. And so to have it actually part of it, hopefully, it won't be an issue as as to rubbing off, and you will be able to feel that, you know, that difference between the buttons. So I I do really, really like that they've thought about that and and and implemented something like that. As far as the other buttons and and locations of things, I know you said they're pretty much all in the same
place. I I did see where they've gone back to having, different ports or separate ports for a microphone in as well as your headphones, which I think was it the Victor Reader Stream two that they just went to the one jack and and and, and then now they've split it back to two again? Yeah. They split it split it back to two. So your headphones on the bottom near a, hooray, a USB c port, so no more micro USB. The only thing that we need to get taken care of on the USB c port
are the iPhones. So, hopefully, you know, one cable to read them all over here very, very soon within September coming with Apple. So, Apple, we're we're look we're looking at you, and, don't disappoint us again this year. Come on now. It just means that every every, person who has an iPhone is just gonna have to switch over to Android. Oh, no. Now wait a minute. But but yeah. So they've split up the
headphone and microphone jack. So that headphone jack is on the bottom along with the speaker, which makes, makes the the speaker a little bit louder and more clear to understand, from an audio perspective, because you have more room for that speaker to resonate around the entire cavity of the Victorio Stream. And then on the left side, near the volume down button, they have actually put a a microphone,
input as well. So you do have that option to use other microphones if you don't wanna use the built in recording, the built in microphone on the Victory Industry. I really, really like that they went and separated that again, and I like the placement of it being in the bottom, the way they've done. So that that makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned the speaker there. I did read where the speaker, as you said, is much louder and a better quality.
How much better do you think it is over the the Victor Reader Stream second generation? I mean, was it pretty significant? I think it's gonna be pretty significant just because with the stream the second generation stream, I even had trouble understanding it because of where they placed it. And so and I don't have, I'm not hard of hearing at all, but I know people who who have used the stream. It's been hard
for them to hear. So, hopefully, this new, speaker and it being in the bottom will be a little bit louder for them to to actually hear what's going on. Very good. I'm looking forward to that too. That that sounds great. So as far as software, you talked a little bit about the
makeup of the software and navigating. Is there anything else that's different about navigation once you get into the stream and and the software as as well as other, maybe, services or other things that that the new stream can do? Sure. So the layout and and the menus are pretty much structured the same. What's really neat is you can actually now directly download the voices and split those between
your reading voice and your menu voice. So you can combine two voices, and there's a new voice that's coming out. I don't know what that voice is, but it's a new American voice. And you can split those. So you can have one for reading and one for your menu navigation, which is really, really neat. And you don't have to ever touch a computer, to to do that. You can do that directly from the device itself.
You get, actually one of the really one of the biggest life improvement features is if you ever had the Stream one or the or the current Stream, you know how easy it is to lose SD cards. You just I mean, it's ridiculous. I've gone through five or already, because they've been crushed or I've lost them or they've been jammed in doors Uh-huh. Or whatever whatever have you. And they've actually put a flap on that SD card slot. So now you have to actually want to get it out
in order to actually get it out. So it's it's non it's the nonissue now. And you don't even if if you're not planning on putting a bunch of podcasts or a bunch of audiobooks or a bunch of books on the device, you have 16 gigabytes of internal memory, which 13 of that is is free, for you to use, which is a pretty good a pretty good amount.
But the craziest thing is I was able to put in in my second generation, and it really depended on the brand, and you kinda had to see what worked or what didn't. You were limited to 32 gigabytes from what Humanware said on the second generation, and people were putting in anywhere from two fifty six to five twelve and just kind of seeing what brands worked and what didn't. Now they've upped that to where it's so you can put in a one terabyte SD card regardless of brand.
Nice. And so that's ridiculous. I mean, I remember when with the stream one, when we went from 256 megabytes up to one gigabyte, and we thought that was ridiculous in itself. Yep. One terabyte is it has gone way beyond that. Now depending on how much information you put on there, it may take a few seconds or a few a few minutes to load all that information.
But, you know, to have that to basically have an entire an entire library of of books and information, I'll wait those few seconds or those few minutes to have to have just that one SD card full of all that information and then one storage space. Absolutely. I really like that that they've been able to do that. So, like you said, the 16 gigs of, you know, on device storage, although I I get that, you know, bit of that's gonna be taken up with operating system that's in there and how it
runs and all that. So you get 13 gigs of it, which by itself might be plenty for most people. That that could be, you know, quite a bit just to use for for educational book, especially if you don't keep a book on there. You you get a book, you read it, and then you delete it. Delete it. Yeah. You get another one. You you can still, of course, keep a library of books on there for 13 gigabytes. That that'd be quite a bit of
a a library by itself. But then to be able to add an SD card with up to up to one terabyte of space Uh-huh. I mean, that's just that's a whole lot of books and a whole lot of, newspapers and and and Yes. Articles and whatever other sort of audio media you, can get your hands on to put on there, I'll say. And, so, no. I think that's that's fantastic. And another thing that's been improved too is
the Wi Fi speed. So now we're up to five gigahertz Wi Fi, and this doesn't necessarily mean that books are gonna download faster. But if you have podcasts that are an hour, hour and a half long, some of them that I listen to are two to three hours. Your connection's gonna be stable more stable and allow you to, not buffer as much when it comes to that to to the download speed. And, also, it's not gonna buffer as much as well when it comes to the Internet radio side
of things as well. And it's gonna support even more podcast because they've Hemaware has updated the audio codex that a lot of podcasts are now using, and so you'll have more podcasts to be able to download and listen to as well. Yeah. Let's talk about that because, as you mentioned, you you can access, you know, certain podcasts and Internet radio was something, I believe, that you could do with the
Victory Reader Stream, you know, second gen. And and so talk to me about how you know, what what is that, involved with with with the Victor Reader Stream, and how does that work? Sure. So there's a tab that you that you can listen to Internet radio streams in, and it's still using OO tunes. But Hemaware has stated that they are looking at other providers.
My speculation, and they're not telling anybody this, but my speculation is they're moving to tune in, which would be awesome because there's just more radio stations there and more podcasts there. And so we shall see what happens with that. But it will, because they they've updated the chip, they've updated the the RAM, and they've updated the faster Wi Fi, your your buffering and your streams shouldn't be as latency specific as they were with the
current second generation stream. So it should be a lot easier, a lot stable, a lot more faster to, get those up get those streams up and running. And then as for podcasts, how are you how are you able to get podcasts onto the Victor Reader? Sure. So you can, either take in, and produce a RSS list and just download that onto the root street to the root SD card of the device, or even just on on an, on a external SD cards, the internal or the external memory.
Or you can also just download those and find, I say, Life After Blindness podcast in the podcast category and actually download it and say subscribe. And and what you will happen is when you turn your stream on, it'll search, for the podcast that you subscribe to and automatically download those podcasts for you, and then you will have them available. I love it. So, yeah, definitely, people go and go and subscribe to Life After Blindness so it'll automatically download to your stream when
you connect it. Yes. I like this idea. This is great. Yeah. It is. It's an awesome podcast to listen to as well. Oh, thanks. Appreciate that. But no. Yeah. So no. I think that's really a great feature to be able to have the Internet radio, even if it is OTOONES for now, and and, yeah, you're right. TuneIn would be fantastic considering the amount of things that, TuneIn has available for people. So that would be
great. But even though oTunes for now, I mean, that still gives you quite a bit of Internet radio to, to stream and enjoy on the Victor Reader stream and, and the podcast, you know, capabilities. So there are so many things that that this one device can do. We mentioned this earlier in our discussion, Aaron, about why would somebody use this. And I think we've answered a lot of this question based on just what it can do and what's built into it. But there still might be skeptics saying, but
I can do this on my iPhone. I can do this on my Android. Why do I need specialist tech that's separate from that? Explain why you think this is so popular with people even if they do have a smartphone, and especially if they don't have a smartphone or or they're not interested in a smartphone. I think the reasons there are kind of obvious. But but Right. What what makes this so popular even for those people?
So I will say that along with everything that we've talked about, the the battery life on this device is crazy. To where the second generation stream, you had about ten or twelve hours of its removable battery. Unfortunately unfortunately, the way you look at it, there's not a removable battery, so you will have to take it in to get it serviced, but you do get fifteen to sixteen hours of continuous playback on the device.
Now, you take into consideration everything that you're doing with your smartphone. You're using it for texting. You might be using it for GPS. You might have three or four, in my case, three or four GPS applications open because Soundscape is now gone. It would be deprecated in a few months, and you're trying to find something different. Or you or you might have, Facebook or Twitter open if if Twitter still exists,
next week. You might have a lot of that stuff open and also listening to a book at the same time. So your battery is gonna decrease really, really fast. And then even say, you know, you may be making multiple calls to Aira for to help with navigation. Whereas with the stream well, and also too, With the NMS, Bard app, there's a bug now that affects the sleep, functionality of that application. And so we are at the mercy of these mainstream developers who, yes, are aware of accessibility.
And in my opinion, they use automated testing to make sure all every single button is completely labeled, but then they don't do manual testing with users. And this is where bugs come into these systems. With the stream, is it whether it be a second generation or the third generation, I know exactly what I'm getting, how to use it, and I know that this device is being built and scripted and the software is being written by blind people for blind people, for myself.
So that I know if I pick up a stream, if I pick up a Stellar Tray, even if I pick up, say, a Prodigy Connect 12, which is a low vision, portable CCTV tablet, I know exactly how to use it, and I know that the software is going to work. Whereas if I pick up my iPhone and there's an update, say, for the Audible app or, the LMS Smart application or the Kindle app. I don't know what that experience is going to be like, and it may break a functionality of the device that I use on a daily basis.
And I would much rather go to a device where I know what I'm getting than a device that the experience might change from month to month, and I have to learn a whole new way of doing it. I think it's a really fair explanation as to, you know, as you said, being at the mercy of developers and app developers and and what may or may not work in an app and finding different apps and being able to just go to a device like this that
you expect. And and, of course, there still could be bugs and then things can still happen. But but you know that for the most part, it's just going to work. As so so you talked about the internal workings and and and that part of the Victor Reader Stream, third gen. What would you say about the the externals, you know, the tactile nature of it, being able to grip that device in your hand compared to using a smartphone? I know a lot of people really just
like and enjoy having that feeling Yeah. Right in the palm of their hands. Sure. So tactile is a great thing. I know that if I drop the stream, it's not gonna have glass shards all over the place. I'm gonna have to go buy a new $500 phone or a thousand dollar phone to get it replaced. It had to transfer all that data. Whereas with the the stream, the tactile clickiness of just buttons in general is something that smartphones can try to replicate, but they haven't been really successful at it.
A good case in point is with me being being a musician, I've got a couple a couple of, instructional, material books from Diana Spard that I am learning a few songs with. And, yes, I could use my iPhone to use the Bard app. But if if I want to go back, I have to hear find the rewind button, double tap it, here voice over say rewind, it missed half of what the instructor is
saying. To whereas, if I go over to my stream, I know that I could just hit that rewind button and not have to worry about anything speaking ahead of the instructor and being able to focus on the information at hand as well. And having that tactile button knowing, okay, that rewind button is three over on the
bottom. There it is. And it's a, inverted, less than sign pretty much, and just being able to hit it and know that that action's gonna be completed and know that focus isn't gonna jump around to a back button. I'm gonna be jumped out of my application or every anything that I'm doing and have to go and find my way back into the application.
I think you sold it right there because I don't know how many times I'm in an application, no matter what it is, if it's audible or or barred or some any actually, really any app, and you know where the button should be and you can't find it. And even if you're using your rotor and trying to swipe by buttons or headings or form controls or whatever it is, your focus gets messed up or you swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe swiping your way
through, and then you finally find it. And then, you know, it's just it it it most of the time is really easy, but it it can be quite difficult and, in trying to find what you want. And so being able to have a tactile button that you just just go right to it and hit it. So I mean, that that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. It it it can be, and it does make a lot of sense. And I'll even take it even further. Let's say you try and there's an update, and everything's still in the same place, and you
hit the play button, the app crashes. And Yes. Something happens to where now the book that you have played is now not downloaded to your device. You've you've been signed out of your Audible account or whatever account you're you're looking at, your your Internet Spy account. You've got to re sign back in. That is gonna take a few minutes to whereas if I have a stream if it to read a stream, I know that I'm not gonna be signed out anything.
And I I I'm exactly where I was the last time I turned off the device. Fantastic. I love it. I think that that's a really great use case and and explanation of of why people would want to use this, you know, somebody from from a smartphone. I did want to touch on something else that has been a bone of contention as well. Sure. So there used to be, with the second generation, the Audible and Amazon, had broke Audible support, so you weren't able to download audible content.
There was an open letter that circulated, and, I got to say a big thank you to Jonathan Mohsen and the Mohsen at Large podcast. He, put this out and asked people to sign it. And I was I, along with a bunch of other people, about 600 plus people had signed it and added my name to it. It has come out that the audible sync will work. It was actually slated that it was gonna be at launch. Now
it's not. Now we're looking at, you know, a software update, around the April or May time frame, and that is because Amazon and the HumanWare have to work together to make sure that it all works out perfectly. So if you're holding off to buy the Victory Edition because it doesn't have audible content, just know that it's coming. And I always tell people, look. Don't buy a device for what it will promise to do in the future because it may not ever come to that. Buy it for what it can do now.
And so it's great that that has been, taken care of and that Amazon actually has to send, to its peep to the blind community at large and thinks that it's a great investment, to continue the support. I'm going to write that up, Aaron, because I did hear some folks at HumanWare talking about that here recently surrounding the the, you know, launch of the Victor Reader Stream third gen Okay. And this, you know, audible sync
issue. And I've actually heard them even say that even though the full rollout and full fix might be another, you know, month or two or a couple months, they've actually started seeing some of it kind of out in the wild, people already reporting that it might be working. And so that that's something that's definitely, you know, worth looking at is that, you know, it's being worked on, maybe even in in more in real time than we realize. And
and yeah. So so if it is something that that you've heard about and you're like, well, the audible sync in the past just wasn't working, and I've heard horror stories, etcetera That's right. You know, it it obviously is being worked on because even human words are saying, yeah. We're we're kinda seeing this trickle out, and and we have this expectation, like you said, Aaron, of, you know, within the next few months, you know, from now, that
this should be completely fixed. So I I am very glad to see that Amazon, at least in this case, is is doing something right and doing something good and and getting Audible to work for us. Because my my understanding is that HumanWare actually sent Audible, the folks at Audible, a a demo, model of the Victor Reader Stream three and let them work with it and play with
it. Yeah. And so I'd love that there's that kind of partnership, between the different companies to be able to work on these kind of things. Yeah. It it it is it is great. And one thing I will say is there's other services. If you did want to rely on Audible, there's, a service called ebrady.fm that does sort of the same thing. And it's not DRM content that you just pay and get m p three files, and you
can do whatever you want with them. And I will say as somebody who's been on the inside in a recruiting capacity at Amazon, it is a huge company, and I don't think people understand how large this company is. Multiple departments. I was recruiting for solutions architects, and, basically, they would go in and, basically, do be a a salesperson for the Amazon Web Services platform. And that was only one department out
of thousands of different departments. So it does take time, but I will state as well and say too that sometimes there has to be pushback in order for them to make a decision because Amazon is so data driven that sometimes the data that is being used, is not as accurate as what the market wants it to be. And so if we push this, hey. This is really important, and we do advocacy around these specific things, then that's just another data point for them
to say, hey. Actually, what we have is not reflecting what these data points out in the world and these people have been saying about this about this and let's actually get it done. And so that's how things get kicked up in Amazon a lot faster as if there's a bunch of different more active data points than what they have internally within their systems. Very well said, Aaron. I I I think that it's important to note that that, you know, there there is a lot going on behind the scenes here, and
it it is working, thankfully. There things are being done. So good on them for for getting that taken care of. So I'm sure people are wondering now at this point, when can they get their hands on this? How much is it gonna be? My my understanding is that it will be coming out in The US first, followed maybe a month or so later by Canada and then The UK and and then the rest of of the world. But, can you give us kind of an idea of the the timeline for that and and what these are gonna cost?
Sure. I can. So you're correct. The Victory Stream third generation will be coming out in the February for The United States and then a month later in March for Canada and everywhere else. There's been a there's been a bit of a a price increase just like everything else, around the world has hiked up in price. We're looking at a price of $550.
Unfortunately, there is no trade ins or anything because these devices are such a small margin that they can't do that, and we can't do that as a company, unfortunately. Well, Aaron, I really hope that we've given a lot of information to those folks out there that are interested in the Victor Reader
Stream third generation. If you've had a previous generation or are just kinda curious about a device like this, whether you use a smartphone or not, I think it's something that, is still good to have in the conversation and and maybe even something to have in our our blindness toolkits, that people can can still utilize. And, so I really appreciate you coming on
and talking to me about this. Now I know that with your work as a product support specialist, you've kinda got your finger on the pulse of a whole bunch of different, you know, products and services and apps, devices. You name it. You you you're kind of
the guy that knows what's going on. And so I'd really love to have you back on the show sometime that we can talk about other things outside of, something like the Vicky reader and and break down some other products and things that that you feel are important that we need to know about. Sure. No no problem. And and I will point out there too is,
my contact information for live computers. If you wanna get a hold of me, ask questions about the, Victory to Stream third generation, or you want to buy one from us, my number is 50244724586, or you can email me at aaron@labcomputers.com. That's aaron@labcomputers.com. Very good, Aaron. I appreciate that. And, yeah. Thank you so much again for coming on the show. Look forward to talking to you again soon. Thanks, Sam. I really enjoyed it and looking forward to talking again as well.