Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition, available from May the 21st, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia radio, associated stations of RPA Australia or perhaps the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast to catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and Daniken, or come usually on a Tuesday afternoon
just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio talking tech podcast Vision Australia Radio talking Tech podcast with me, someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology, David Woodbridge David, let's start with our product from the vision store of Vision Australia. It's one that's not quite here yet, but it will be soon. The we Walker tell us
about it. It's been around for a little while and there's a new version coming.
That's correct. What we're talking about is version two of the We Walk and for people that may not remember, the we walk is a cane which has a handle, which is actually the We Walk, which contains a lot of electronics that actually does sonar detection of obstacles, of course, in front of the handle, if you like. So pointing forward. And it's got a few touch controls on it that links up via Bluetooth to your smartphone, whether it's iPhone
or Android. And then you've got different functions such as mapping and that sort of stuff that you can run on the on the smartphone. So it really is a handy device. Now with version one of the, the we walk a couple of things that people found a little bit hard with. It was, number one, the way the handle was designed was a bit awkward and a bit heavy.
So with the new version, version two, it's now like you're pretty much like your standard golf club, what I tend to call it, um, handle on a standard cane, so it's much more slim lined. The second one was they had this sort of touch pad on version one, which you could, you know, flick left and right and swipe up and down and so on. Well, that's now turned into push button controls that you can assign different functions to. So that's much more effective than trying to
use this sort of capacitive touch screen. Number three is got a better sound system in it. So people that have ever heard the the built in speech for the basic functions of the we walk cane itself version one was actually fairly faint. So this one has extremely good sound quality coming out of it. And the app that drives again the we walk cane. So the same we walk Apophyllite that drove version one. That's been amazingly enhanced
also to do with wait for it artificial intelligence. So um, that will be able to do a lot of things based on your GPS location, which is course is coming
off your your smartphone. So if people have had a version one of the walk or I've never experienced a WI walk and want to have a look at version two, then that's probably going to be coming into Australia probably sooner than later, but it's certainly worthwhile having a look at the new version and like everything, have a go of it and then make up your own mind, talk to people about it and then see what you think.
What's it going to cost?
Roughly, I want to say about 1300, which was roughly the same price as the as the older one. And I think the other thing is this can actually use a standard cane. So you can actually take a standard cane and whack it into this one a lot easier than you could with version one. So that price tag is probably a little bit more flexible because it does use a standard cane.
The we walk version 2.0 coming soon to the Vision Australia store, a big occasion for open AI last week when they announced GPT 4OO for Oscar.
Yes, now this was very scary. I listened to the the live announcement going on, and I had to keep reminding myself that the A in AI stands for artificial and the whole two words artificial intelligence, meaning it's artificial intelligence. This is not an intelligent human based system. It's based
on predictive text and so on. But listening to this demonstration on the AI system, being able to quote, look at the real world via the camera, to look at a person's graph or chart and had a conversation about. A chart to look at photos and decide that, you know. Yep, I can see a birthday cake and some candles. So therefore I think it's somebody's birthday to give suggestions on an equation that was written down. Uh, person was trying
to work out an equation that was actually really interesting. Um, and then sort of what I consider to be sort of more novelty things like to get it to talk in a more robotic voice, to flirt a little bit with the person, um, to speak faster, speak slower, to give more animation to the voice, that sort of stuff. But the way this thing was doing on real live camera view, image processing and that sort of stuff, it was amazing. It was just so scary that I just
had to keep rethinking myself that this is a computer system. Um, it's got lots of power behind it, but it was just amazingly scary. And I think when 4.0 becomes more widely available, uh, when they bring more online, it's going to be absolutely incredible. So at the moment, it's only available for people are still on the plus plan, which is the one you've got to pay for. Um, and
that's where you get access to 4.0. You certainly don't get access to most of the stuff they demonstrated at the open AI conference presentation and the Mac version of it. You know, you press option spacebar, you can talk to it. It's not that spectacular yet. It's more spectacular when, you know, I'd love it, Steven, if I could do what they were doing and literally hold up something in front of the camera and say to it, can you tell me
more about this product? That's going to be absolutely amazing.
Yeah, it really was exciting to listen to the way it responded very quickly, and I was thinking about the way it could analyze charts and things that I might want to have somebody tell me about could do that sort of thing. Really. Well, that's ChatGPT for O for Oscar. Not the number, not the zero. Um, and it's part of the GPT plus, if you have that and it's being rolled out progressively around the world, the the app was telling me, yeah, Google I o happened last week.
Uh, yes. May I say it was very confusing. They used the word I, of course, I think according to some articles about 125 times, the problem with Google is that they tend to research so much stuff and throw everything against the wall, like having a mud competition to
see what sticks. When you try and summarize or have a think about what they talked about, you sort of start going, well, I don't quite know what direction Google's actually going in, because they were talking about things like the AI being able to listen to your phone calls and determine whether it's a scam call or not. And of course, terminate the phone call for your own protection, uh,
doing theft. So if somebody steals your phone, depending on how it gets grabbed out of your hand, um, it might be trying somebody stealing, stealing your phone so it'll shut down the phone or do stuff like that. Call emergency service and so on. They talked about AI, accessing Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Photos. They talked a bit about Gemini itself. They talked about the voice assistant giving commands to smart homes versus AI versus search.
Now you say Gemini itself. Just remind people what Gemini is.
Yeah. So Gemini is basically Google's answer to open AI. So our friends at the moment in the AI world, we've got open ChatGPT, which is basically ChatGPT, um, we've got copilot and then we've got Gemini from Google. It's the large language model, so it's not the personal assistant we know and love is, you know, the okay Google bit. And then of course, sooner or later, uh, that stable of our friends will be joined by Siri. But I've got the link in the show notes to the Google one.
I would suggest to have a read of it several times, and then you might actually understand. But anybody that I've seen on the social media verse has just said it was a very messy presentation. They were just trying to work too hard on saying how good their AI currently is.
Every year, in conjunction with Global Accessibility Awareness Day Guard, Apple announces new accessibility features.
They did. So basically this will be within iOS 18. And of course it'll be the beta when it comes out in June. After we hear from WWDC Worldwide Developers conference, they're looking at very much to do with physical motor control of your iOS or iPad OS, including actually. For that matter. So what they were talking about is eye gaze technology. Now, normally you'd need a third party to track your eyes, to see what your eyes are looking at on the screen, and then be able to actually
activate that item. Well, this is now built into the actual software using the camera. So the hardware as well. They also talked about the fact that you can assign sounds to do different types of functions. So particularly with people with cerebral palsy where you you can't talk properly due to the cerebral palsy. If you can reliably make different sounds, you can actually generate, if you like, voice shortcuts to do exactly what you need to do, that's
pretty cool. And then the other one, which I thought was actually really, really good, and I think it should have been in part of Vision Pro before it even came out, was closed captioning. So when you're watching a movie or a TV show, it'll have closed captioning on the screen as well. So really not much to do
with blind or low vision folks. This time around. But I'm really pleased to see the things about the cerebral palsy sound type utterances and also the eye gaze technology being built into the device.
Yeah, it's very interesting that one, the International Council on English Braille is holding a General assembly, its eighth General Assembly, and has them every four years in Auckland starting next weekend, Saturday going through to Thursday. So it brings together eight nations who are leaders in English Braille, including the UK, Australia, the United States and New Zealand. Of course, Canada. Proceedings
will be available from the website I seeborg. It's good that these events are available way beyond the venue these days.
It's fantastic because I remember. You know, a few decades ago, when these things were on, you'd actually only find out about stuff in dribs and drabs. So I'd be able to find this stuff directly from the source is amazing.
And it's also interesting that, you know, as we're moving into multi-line braille displays, um, electronic braille resource file type formats and so on, then being able to make sure that the braille type of coding keeps up with what we're going to be experiencing in the next five years or so, is going to be kept up by the, you know, the unified English Braille code in particular. So even though this might sound a bit dry on the surface, I think the underlying thing is it's always a live
system and it's not going to stop. So, you know, as far as I'm concerned, you know, Braille is here to stay.
If you want to keep in touch with those proceedings, I Seaborg, International Council on English Braille, icb.org. We've been talking about glide, one of those devices on the horizon, which is likely to be of great interest to people wanting to get around to it. Different ways to what we currently do. Glide is progressing.
It is progressing. It's basically a little two wheeled robot with a handle that you hang on to, and it will glide around the place of the two wheels and basically guides you wherever you're moving safely. So I got an email from the folks last week about the pre-order for glide. Now remember, this is only going to be sort of basically launched in I think it's North America and the UK end of next year. So 2025. It'll be rolled out to the rest of the world after that. 40%
off for the pre-order sounded pretty cool. It's looking very interesting that the more I read about it, the more I'm intrigued by it. Perhaps Vision Australia will be testing it, who knows yet? I'm pretty sure we might be gliding outside.
Oh. Glide inside. Oh, just before we go, a reminder of where there are details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.
You can check out my blog site, which is David Woodburn Dot Podbean pod ban.com.
David would be r dot podbean pod b e a n.com to write to the program.
David Dot Woodbridge out sounds at Vision Australia.
Org David Dot Woodbridge at Vision Australia. Org. This has been talking tech with me has been Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge I'm Stephen Jolly stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.