Blind Guys Chat
A place where the blind guys talk about the A to Z of life

#108: Jip en Janneke taal: Simple Language

13 hours ago
Transcript
Speaker A:

Welcome to blind guys chest, where this guy, Orrin O'Neil.

Speaker B:

Hello.

Speaker A:

And this guy Jan Bloom.

Speaker C:

Hello.

Speaker B:

And our guest host, Mohammed Lashir.

Speaker A:

Hello.

Speaker B:

Talk about the a to z of life.

Speaker D:

Well, hello, ladies and gentlemen, and you are very welcome to episode 108. Now, just to continue the Peugeot dialogue in these. Yeah, what now seems becoming a series Peugeot did have a 108. Yeah, well, they did in Ireland anyway, so. Yeah, it was a little tiny little. Well, it was a two door or four door, but it was very popular with. With women, I think. Oh, yeah.

Speaker C:

Just shopping car.

Speaker D:

Yeah, shopping car or shopping carta already. Well, anyway, welcome back to Mister Mohammed Lazhir. How are you, sir? How are you doing? You're very welcome to the show. You haven't been on for a while. That's because you're too busy on other shows.

Speaker A:

Oh, come on, come on. I mean, it's only because you guys gave me a chance, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker C:

We give you the platform, you know, to perform well. Yeah.

Speaker A:

Aren't you proud of all that you've achieved, you know.

Speaker C:

Yeah, that's true. But, you know, with the football player in the end, we hope when you make your big transfer, then we need to cash, you know.

Speaker A:

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. If anyone ever pays money for me, you'll get.

Speaker D:

We'll never pay money for you.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker C:

Hey, but we are enjoying. When I was walking with the dog this morning with Mister Chef, he had had a nice haircut two weeks ago. Oh, we.

Speaker D:

Yeah, last Friday.

Speaker C:

Oh, really? Okay. But it is. It was a little bit wetish, but now I'm in the sunshine, you know, the sun is shining through the window.

Speaker D:

All right. Is it?

Speaker B:

How about you?

Speaker C:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true.

Speaker D:

Yeah, no, it's. It's writing an email to somebody. Essays that autumn has really taken hold now. It's getting really ridiculously cold for this time of year as far as I'm concerned, but then I want to live in a country that has about. Between 17 to 20 degrees all year round. Other than that, as far as I'm concerned, if it's below 17, it's freezing.

Speaker C:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.

Speaker A:

I don't think such a country exists.

Speaker D:

Oh, I don't think so. Yeah, but maybe it will. With all this global warming, we probably, you know, we might get to a. You know, it might be a country that. It might be stable enough that between.

Speaker A:

17 and Antarctica or something. It's gonna be a while, though. But, you know, maybe.

Speaker D:

Our guest, occasional guest, Mister John Sweeney, was on the radio here talking about Storm Milton in Florida. And. Yeah. How this is becoming the norm now. And I'm glad to say I have some relatives who do have what they call a condominium. I have no idea what the difference is between a condo and an apartment. But their daughter managed to get out of Sarasota in Florida just before the storm hit. So, okay. That was good news. But yeah, it seems to be, the Americans seem to be getting beaten from one end of the stick to the other. It's either on fire or it's.

Speaker C:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then also our headquarters are there. You were also in cleat or where did you go?

Speaker A:

I lived in Clearwater. Yes, Clearwater, exactly. In the path of the storm. And there were a lot of colleagues that lived there that had to flee their houses. Some of them went to other states. Some of them went to shelters. People have no power, no electricity. Some of them had leaking roofs because the shingles got torn off. None of them, luckily, have too bad a situation going on there. But, you know, Florida is just being hit one after the other. And for example, what is also happening right now is that insurers are actually pulling out of the state because it's getting too expensive to be there. Right. Because every year a bunch of houses get destroyed. They have to pay billions of dollars.

Speaker D:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

And it's just horrible.

Speaker D:

I was reading an article about that in our news app, on our news app there over the weekend that the insurances didn't realize they're now pulling out. But the insurance is getting so high that, that's the reason, it's part of the reason why so many people stay behind. It's to save as many of their belongings as they can because they can't get insurance because it's too expensive. And that's why a lot of them actually stay. It's to, it's to protect the House and protect their belongings as much as they can, rather than just leaving it and leaving it to fate and leaving it to, you know, what will the insurance company pay out when I go back to my house? So terrible situation.

Speaker C:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker D:

And, yeah, I heard that Trump is now what? Yeah, Trump now is saying that Biden is controlling the weather or something. Yeah.

Speaker C:

He's like, yeah, they have a Republic public eye now. One of the senators, she is really saying that it is really a little bit awkward that only those hurricanes go over states where the democrats are not there. That is typical.

Speaker A:

That's typically true because a couple months back, the hurricane went over New York.

Speaker C:

But we forgot this we forgot. We don't look backward. We only look forward, mo. That is what our politicians also say.

Speaker A:

I'm very sorry. I didn't know that.

Speaker C:

No, hey, but you are very busy, I think, mo, with public beta.

Speaker A:

Oh, yeah.

Speaker D:

Just a disclaimer, folks. While you're listening to this podcast, Mo is going to give us some secrets of Jaws 2025. But you cannot repeat anything you hear on this show to anybody. So go ahead, mo, give us the secrets.

Speaker A:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So please, indeed, don't repeat this. Yeah, or do, but just don't say my name. Maybe just a leaked source or something.

Speaker C:

Just say chef or Larry. Chef is walking through the office all the time, so you can blame him. You know, he's sniffing around. He's our sniffer.

Speaker A:

So we got a very interesting little feature this time around, and it's actually not only for Joss 2025 users, but it's for every single person, and that is called FS companion.

Speaker C:

So, hey, hey, for the commercial point of view, you don't need to update to make use of it, to be honest, then, no.

Speaker A:

In this case, no. Although if you update, you might get a couple of goodies with it.

Speaker C:

Oh, you see, that's all goodies. That's always good.

Speaker A:

But for now, at least, Fs companion, the whole thing is actually free to use. You can go to Fscompanion AI on your web browser, and if you go there, you'll be able to ask our AI questions, and it will answer you how to do certain things in Jaws. So I can ask it like, oh, how do I move to the next heading on a web page? This is something that everybody knows.

Speaker C:

Hey, there is Mister H.

Speaker A:

Indeed. So that's a very simple question, and every blindy, as you guys call them, knows that one. Yeah, but you have other questions as well, like things that you don't do very regularly. You can ask it questions about Microsoft office as well.

Speaker D:

Oh, really?

Speaker A:

If you want to know how to do something, in word, it will answer you that. If you want to do something but you've forgotten how, or you just don't know, or somebody has told you once, but you long since forgotten and you really need it right now. Instead of, you know, going through the documentation, looking through the documentation, you can just ask us questions, fscompanion, and it will answer you.

Speaker D:

Now, can I ask, is this just about, does this just relate to Jaws? So can you ask it a question, for example, about a focus braille display?

Speaker A:

Well, for now, it works best with Jaws. It has some basic support for Zoomtext and Fusion. We are working on improving that, but there is basic support there for Zoomtext and fusion. We are also thinking about adding stuff for the focus, stuff for the other products from freedom scientific, and it's also only available right now in English. But we are also working on adding multiple languages too.

Speaker C:

Yeah, but I think you can ask something when you want to perform a Jaws feature on the focus, for example, Oren, then yes. To do that, because that is in the Jaws manual. That is in the Jaws database.

Speaker D:

Could you say what's the, what is the cord for? I don't know, control Alt on a focus.

Speaker C:

Exactly. Or how do you speak the time from the braille display? Whatever.

Speaker D:

Okay, that's good.

Speaker C:

That is all possible that it does know and you can do it really also in normal language, you don't need to be very already searching or using the right command. You can use your. Well, in Dutch we say Jeppe Jenner Ketal, but that is a really simple language. Simple language. Yeah. That is a cliffhanger. That is a really old book story for the kids. Our writer, Annie Mk Schmidt, he was writing those. She was only so low visioner. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A:

Oh, was she long vision?

Speaker C:

Yeah, she was using, she was not using. She was using an optical magnifier.

Speaker A:

Oh, interesting.

Speaker C:

Yeah. Not from Optolek or whatever, but, yeah.

Speaker A:

But I think she wasn't. I mean, I think we weren't around when she was at the house.

Speaker C:

Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true.

Speaker B:

You can email blindguyschatmail.com or tweet us.

Speaker A:

At blindguys chat if you've any comments or questions. So welcome, everybody, to this demo of fscompanion. This is to show you how the fs companion currently works. I'm in chrome right now, and I'm going to press ctrl l to get myself to the address bar.

Speaker B:

Address dash enzoquebork, edit, HTTPs, colons.

Speaker A:

It's actually speaking a little bit of Dutch with an english voice, but that's fine. Let me actually set character echo to characters and words so that you guys can hear what I'm typing.

Speaker B:

Characters, words. Both characters and words.

Speaker A:

All right, I'm gonna go to fscompanion AI. That is fscompanion AI.

Speaker B:

Fs compa c on o m p a n I o n f s. Companion. P.

Speaker A:

I I'm gonna press enter.

Speaker B:

R enter warnings. Colon. Bullet. The fs companion is trained on english language, draws documentation, and may give incorrect information for users. That use other languages. Other languages will be added soon. Bullet II can get things wrong sometimes. Check the answers you receive. Dismiss warnings. Fscompanion beta google Chrome page so we.

Speaker A:

Got a couple of friendly warnings telling us that we have only used english language documentation so far in order to trade fscompanion. Of course, that will change very, very soon here. And another friendly warning is that AI can get something wrong every now and then. We call those hallucinations. So check the answers that you're given. That's always a good idea when dealing with AI, is to check whether it hallucinates if you're asking for important information. So I'm going to press the letter e and I'm going to land in an edit box.

Speaker B:

Type your question here. Edit blank.

Speaker A:

Type space to get into the edit box.

Speaker B:

Hello there. I'm excited to help you learn more about jaws. Use the new conversation button to start a conversation about a new topic. To get started, just type your question in the chat box below. Type your question here. Edit blank.

Speaker A:

So let's start with a very easy question which I also talked about before. How do I move between headings on a web page?

Speaker B:

How do I move t between headings on a web page? Question.

Speaker A:

All right. Pressing enter.

Speaker B:

Enter. How do I move between headings on a web page? To move between headings on a web page using jaws, you can use the following keystrokes. Bullet, press h to move to the next heading. Bullet, press shift h to move to the previous heading. These commands allow you to quickly navigate through the headings on a web page.

Speaker A:

All right, so I'm now going to press numpad plus in order to get to the virtual cursor, virtual PC, I'm.

Speaker B:

Gonna press shift h. How do I move between headings on a web page? Heading level two.

Speaker A:

That's question number two. I'm gonna press shift h again.

Speaker B:

How do I move between words on a web page? Heading level two.

Speaker A:

There we go. So we can move between questions using the h key. I'm gonna press the h key.

Speaker B:

How do I move between headings on a web page? Heading level two.

Speaker A:

And now I'm gonna press down arrow.

Speaker B:

To move between headings on a web page. Using jaws, you can use the following keystrokes colonization list of two items. Bulletpress h to move to the next heading. Bullet, press shift h to move to the previous heading.

Speaker A:

And there we go. We have an answer to the question that you can read via braille. You can read at your leisure with the virtual cursor. So let's press now the e key one more time and let's ask it a little bit of a difficult question about Microsoft Office.

Speaker B:

How do I reply to an email in Outlook?

Speaker A:

Let's press enter on this and how.

Speaker B:

Do I reply to an email in Outlook? To reply to an email in Microsoft Outlook using Jaws, follow these steps. One, open the email you want to reply to by navigating to it in the message list and pressing enter period. Two, once the email is open, press Ctrl r to reply to the sender. Three, focus will move to the message body where you can type your reply. Four, after typing your message, press Ctrl enter to send the reply. These steps will help you efficiently reply to emails using jaws in Outlook.

Speaker A:

There you go. And so it answers your questions about Office, about the web, about jaws, about all sorts of things. Let's ask a little bit more complicated Jaws question.

Speaker B:

Words keep getting cut off at the start of speech in Jaws. How do I fix that? If words are getting cut off at the start of speech in Jaws, it might be due to your audio device, such as Bluetooth headphones or certain sound cards going into a lo power state when not in use. Here's how you can address this issue. One, keep audio device Active Jaws has an option to prevent audio devices from shutting down by playing silence continuously. This keeps the device active and can help prevent speech. Cut dash off white bullet open Jaws settings center by pressing insert f two period white bullet select quote settings center quote from the list white bullet if you want changes to apply globally, press ctrl shift d to load the default settings. White bullet in the tree view expand the quote user options quote group white bullet look for the option quote avoid speech cut off when using Bluetooth headphones or some sound cards. Quote and select it white bullet press the space bar to check this option. By following these steps, you should be able to reduce or eliminate the issue of words being cut off at the start of speech in Jaws so it.

Speaker A:

Can help you troubleshoot and find different problems with jaws that you may have. And it, of course, like I said, also works for Microsoft Office Windows and on the web. Now there's one final thing I want to show you. I'm going to press Numpad again for the virtual cursor virtual PC and I'm going to press shift b.

Speaker B:

Provide feedback on this response button.

Speaker A:

There we go. Joss had a little hiccup here. I can press shift b again.

Speaker B:

Provide feedback on this response button.

Speaker A:

So we heard provide feedback on this response a couple of times. And the reason why we heard that a couple of times is because every single response has its own feedback button. So if you want to give feedback for a certain response, you navigate to that question and then you press the b key. Let me press shift h. How do.

Speaker B:

I reply to an email in outlook heading level two.

Speaker A:

I'm going to press it again.

Speaker B:

How do I move between headings on a web page? Heading level two.

Speaker A:

And now I'm going to press the.

Speaker B:

B key, provide feedback on this response button.

Speaker A:

So we got to the button for feedback on the response. When I asked how do I move between headings on a web page if I press h again, how do I.

Speaker B:

Reply to an email in outlook heading.

Speaker A:

Level two, we go back to my next question.

Speaker B:

If I now press b, provide feedback on this response button.

Speaker A:

I can provide feedback on this response. Now I'm very impressed with the final answer so I'm going to press h again.

Speaker B:

Words keep getting cut off at the start of speech in jaws. How do I fix that heading level two?

Speaker A:

I'm going to press the b key.

Speaker B:

Provide feedback on this response button.

Speaker A:

And there's the feedback button for this particular response for the avoid speech cutoff question. So I'm going to press space on.

Speaker B:

That space, provide response feedback dialog. By providing feedback on this response you can help us make future responses better.

Speaker A:

Now this is a dialogue.

Speaker B:

I'm going to press down arrow group start rating.

Speaker A:

All right, down arrow again.

Speaker B:

Positive radio button not checked.

Speaker A:

And now I'm at a radio button group where I can choose between positive.

Speaker B:

And negative radio button not checked two of two.

Speaker A:

Now of course I said I was impressed so I'm going to up arrow again.

Speaker B:

Positive radio button not checked, one of two. I'm going to press space fs companion beta. Positive radio button not checked, one of two.

Speaker A:

I'm going to do a saline to make sure that this actually took positive.

Speaker B:

Radio button checked one of two.

Speaker A:

I'm going to arrow down.

Speaker B:

Negative radio button not checked. Group end rating feedback Feedback Edit now.

Speaker A:

I'm in a little edit field that allows me to give feedback and to type feedback to the developers. We check this feedback regularly so we see both the radio button that you've checked and the feedback that you're giving.

Speaker B:

I'm impressed with its answer.

Speaker A:

I'm going to press numpad plus again.

Speaker B:

Virtual PC.

Speaker A:

I'm going to press the b key submit button and there's this handy dandy little submit button. It's all the way at the bottom of the dialog. I'm going to press enter on that.

Speaker B:

Enter unavailable, provide response, feedback, dialogue.

Speaker A:

And I've given feedback and I can resume talking to it now to fscompanion, but that's it for this demo. I hope this is useful. If you want to try this out, it's available right now. Go to Fscompanion aihdenhe. That is fscompanion AI. And when Jaws 2025 comes out, you can press insert space followed by f one. Or if you're on a laptop, it's caps lock space followed by f one.

Speaker D:

Tell me about at the moment in regards to Jaws 2025 and the public beta, how is that working?

Speaker A:

The public beta is working pretty well. We've got public beta one out right now, and it has a bunch of interesting features. It has features for web publishers. Now, the issues with that is that that hasn't developed all that well yet. So the Daisy consortium is really busy trying to get that integrated into all sorts of stuff. But we already started working on this and that's that. You can now move between chapters much easier, footnotes and endnotes and all that stuff with the regions. So the r key take you to the next region, which can be a chapter or an endnote or a footnote or all that good stuff.

Speaker C:

And in which program is it on the web?

Speaker A:

Well, there is, for example, the thorium ebook reader where you can do this. Another thing that we've added is automatic language detection based on an AI model.

Speaker C:

It is really cool.

Speaker A:

We are, of course, used to having AI running the server somewhere. And so you're thinking, well, why are you doing automatic language detection on the server somewhere? It's going to take way too long for jaws to talk. But no, this has nothing to do with the server. This will run on your device, and it's a model that's lightweight enough that can run really on almost any computer. That feature is very useful because often developers don't tag their text correctly. And so it'll be touched by.

Speaker D:

Just tell us, for those who don't know what automatic language detection is, so what happens? How is this benefit?

Speaker A:

So, yeah, so if you think about, if you think about languages on the web, right, your screen reader might be able to switch between languages right now, your jaws 2024. But it will only be able to do that if the site builder, so the developer who's made the website or the person who wrote the document actually tagged their documents or their web pages correctly so that they are spoken in the correct language. So this tagging is a nice system. If everyone remembers that you in fact do need to tag your documents. And the problem with that is that many people do not. You get, for example, documents in French that are tagged in English. And that causes jaws to start to read with an english voice, the french document. And that's the problem, because the english voice is not made to speak French and so you won't hear much of use. In fact, it's gotten so bad now that, at least in the Netherlands, that a lot of people have learned to listen to Dutch spoken by the eloquent english voice.

Speaker C:

Yeah, that's what I. That's what they have learned it because the language.

Speaker A:

Because it's. Because it doesn't switch and it doesn't work well enough to give you the correct language. So we have built in a feature that should address this, at least in many places. It's not perfect, I'll be the first to admit, it's a smaller AI model and we are working on making things better there. But it works in so many of the cases that I wouldn't want to run without it. Now, personally, I use this every time. And so this feature, if you turn it on, Jaws will look at the tags. Yes, but it will also look at the text itself. And if it determines well, this tag is rubbish. You know, it says. It says it's English, but it's really Dutch. It will switch voices anyway, even though the. The text is tagged incorrectly. And if it's. There's no tag. So if it's. If it's just text and there's no tag there, for example, you have that a lot in notepad, then Jaws will look at the text and see there's no tag. But it will also see that the text is in Dutch or the text is in French, it will switch languages for you.

Speaker C:

The thing is that you need to install first also the vocalizer, expressive voices or the other languages within the synthesizer eloquence is installed already the other languages, but it does not have many languages. But for the vocalizer, they are free of charge to be installed within Jaws. But then you need to install a German or a Spanish, or when I was last week in Poland, I did also install a polish voice. And then you are able to switch over to that language.

Speaker A:

Yeah, if you don't have the voice installed, it won't switch to that language because it won't have the voice, right? So.

Speaker C:

No, no, no. But then it will. But it is really also useful. Oren, when you are. Holland is really also a multilingual country, but I think also for students who are. And it's getting more and more international world. When you receive an email, for example, for example, Mister Stewart, we throw him for the bus, you know, that is always nice. He has this german friend, you know, when he went to side city, when he receives then a mail in German, and when he has installed a german voice within vocalizer, then it will be spoken automatically without any text in the email. It will switch from English to German automatically. And it is instantly. It is really fast.

Speaker A:

Yeah, it is very fast.

Speaker C:

And then jaws needs to have a certain amount of characters to determine what language it is. Of course. So you cannot do it on one character because an r can be spelt in Dutch, English, French, German, etcetera. You know that. So it, you need to have a kind of 15 characters.

Speaker A:

This is a little trait secret. Don't tell anyone, but you need to have 15 characters. And we may change that. But, so one of the reasons why we did this is because in early testing, for example, you have words like comment in English, right? Comment is a nice english word.

Speaker D:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A:

But there is also the french word comment is comment in French, but it doesn't mean comment, it means how.

Speaker C:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

And the word how is used a lot more in French than the word comment in English. So every time it sees comment, it switched to French. Like, if you have like comment in a sentence, in an english sentence, it'd be fine. I just use English. But just, you know, one comment, it said incomment because it sees the comment. This is so, it's not easy to do this correctly, but this is one of the problems that we ran into. And so we had to rein it in a little bit and say to the algorithm, okay, you shut up. Unless we have text that's big enough for you to actually be reliable.

Speaker B:

You can email blindguyschatmail.com or tweet USDA.

Speaker A:

Chat if you've any comments or questions. Now I want to show you all how to set the language. Auto detection setting in Jaws, I'm going to press insert six for setting center.

Speaker B:

Windows OS Jaw settings center dialog search box, edit control plus e. And so.

Speaker A:

Now it put me in the windows OS settings. I don't want to be there. I want to go to the default settings. So I'm going to press control shift.

Speaker B:

D, Jaws settings center default left paranormal applications right paran.

Speaker A:

So what I'm not going to do now is type in language detect keyboard.

Speaker B:

Language one of ten search results.

Speaker A:

This is not the one I want. And so I'm going to press down.

Speaker B:

Arrow ten search result list box detect keyboard language check language processing text detect language based on eye predictions language processing text processing so here we go.

Speaker A:

My language detection is already set to based on AI predictions, but of course yours might be set differently. So I'm going to press tab to listen to the help on this one.

Speaker B:

Read only edit this group of radio buttons allows you to configure automatic language detection this group of radio buttons allows you to configure automatic language detection. This feature works with synthesizers such as eloquence or vocalizer expressive that support multiple languages.

Speaker A:

I'm going to press shift tab again.

Speaker B:

Ten search results list box detect language based on eye predictions language processing text.

Speaker A:

Processing so mine is already set to based on AI predictions. If I press space off four of four, it's off.

Speaker B:

If I press space again based on markup of document and webpage one of four.

Speaker A:

This is the based on markup. This is the default setting in Jaws.

Speaker B:

Based on text left paran vocalizer expressive only right paran two of four.

Speaker A:

This is a setting that's very, very useful to people who use other scripts.

Speaker B:

So non western scripts based on eye predictions.

Speaker A:

And here is the based on AI predictions again. So I'm going to press tab a couple times.

Speaker B:

Read only edit ok button and eventually.

Speaker A:

You'Ll reach an ok button. Now, if you've changed this setting, you might get to an apply button first. You can press that and then tab to the ok button.

Speaker B:

If you tab ok recycle bin.

Speaker A:

I'm back on the desktop. That concludes the demos.

Speaker D:

I said I'd mentioned something on the last podcast, but it just came in too late before I published. And if you remember our friend Maura Moore McCune, who was developing this app called Vipmod to help people crossing the road, looking at the traffic either coming from the left hand side or the right hand side, speeding up, speeding up, etcetera. Yeah, she's just taking part in a virtual event which was held in South Africa, which is Escom International Science expo, and she won a gold medal, whoa. In the biomedical science category for her app and she's joint winner overall. So that is absolutely fantastic news for her and we're delighted for you.

Speaker A:

Absolutely, absolutely brilliant.

Speaker D:

Well done.

Speaker C:

Well done.

Speaker D:

And I was just reading this earlier on, there are 35 regions in South Africa that are taking part in this science fair. So, and then, so they're competing against themselves in South Africa and then they're competing against the rest of the world. So this is a huge achievement for her to win a gold medal in this biomed category so, yeah, you should be very proud of yourself, and we're very proud of you. And. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker C:

Yeah. We were the first here.

Speaker A:

You guys are launching. You guys are launching a lot of careers. You guys.

Speaker C:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

You launched me. You're launching. Mara.

Speaker D:

And I also had some news from our. Because we did throw them under us for a different question. But I think you might have. Might have already got the answer, but we'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah. So Darian Lawler got a. Got on to me. That's a voice message. But there you. I'm not, not that I'm not going to play the voice message. Just forgot to load it onto the, onto the computer. So I got to say what it said you were talking about. We had asked about the ray ban, the meta ray ban smart glasses and where the camera was. And I thought they would be. The camera would be on the bridge in the kind of middle of the. Of the glasses. It turns out that Derry has a pair of these ray ban meta smart glasses.

Speaker C:

My God, he has everything.

Speaker D:

Oh, he just. Everything. Yeah. He's. Even Richard and Stewart.

Speaker C:

Yeah. He has two penthouses.

Speaker D:

His penthouse is in the cloud.

Speaker C:

Yeah. Oh, in the cloud.

Speaker D:

So Terry says that cameras. No, the camera. There are actually two cameras on. Just on the left edge and the right edge of the, of the frame, if at the front. And he said it's two. It's. Yeah. So he says it's a very wide angle, so it'd be hard for the glasses not to see anything, but to miss anything. To miss anything, rather.

Speaker C:

Yeah.

Speaker D:

He hasn't used. Because I don't, I don't think it has launched yet. Would be my eyes been available through this yet? I'm not sure. But he has used Ira. He's called an agent in Ira and he has used those glasses, these meta glasses to help him get where he wants to go. And he says, yep, they're very good. They're great. So. Okay. So really intrigued about this. I'm just trying to just perhaps we.

Speaker C:

Can ask him to give a demo.

Speaker D:

You know, we can get himself killed on the road, but then just call an ARA agent just before he crosses the road. Yeah.

Speaker C:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

Sounds like a good plan. You guys have such good ideas.

Speaker D:

Yeah, we're full of ideas. Full of something else as well.

Speaker C:

Yeah, for sure. Hey, but mo, you also said that there is something new coming also with Mehta, whether there's a new project or a rider or what they are working on.

Speaker A:

Yeah. So they are. They are showing. They've showed it off at their metaconnect event. It's called Orion, Project Orion. And these are essentially AR glasses. So they are glasses you put on your head and they can project things onto the glasses so that you can see extra information. But of course what you can also do on those glasses because they have cameras as well, is use AI on them. And these glasses are supposed to be the next big thing after the meta ray bans, and they are supposed to have things like envision on them. Oh, and more advanced AI as well. And so that's what meta is working on right now. Very exciting actually. I don't know if it will ever become something, but chances are that it will because it's meta and they have a lot of money to make this stuff work. So yeah, I mean it's very, very interesting stuff that's going on right now.

Speaker D:

I wonder if Google will jump into this space now that meta.

Speaker A:

Oh, they'll likely do that. Apple will likely also at some point jump into that space. It takes a little bit of time of course, to start up a big project like this. And meta is already ahead now because as far as I know, no other big tech company has something like this. Microsoft had HoloLens, but they've just discontinued that. So that's not coming anymore. So I think Microsoft is also working with meta on all this stuff.

Speaker C:

Okay.

Speaker A:

Another interesting little app I found a while back, but I think it's very good if people try it out. Is eleven Labs reader, have any of you tried it?

Speaker D:

No, no.

Speaker A:

Eleven Labs is the AI voice service. You can clone your voice on eleven labs and it will, and you can make your AI voice speak like 32 different languages and it can do a whole lot of stuff. That part costs money though, on the web. But they have an app, a free app right now at least, that allows you to share, for example your articles or even DRM free ebooks, epubs, PDF documents and all that sort of stuff with the app and they will transform it into audio for you with very good voices, think the way chat, GPT sounds, those kinds of voices, that kind of quality. And they even have voices of celebrity voices. So Judi Dench and others, James Dean even, which is very interesting.

Speaker C:

But then they read the book for you then.

Speaker A:

Yes, they will read the book or the article or whatever you want.

Speaker C:

Yeah, yeah. The text then in general.

Speaker D:

So you could open up an ebook and I have this read to you by 1111 labs. Eleven labs, right, okay.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker D:

Wow.

Speaker C:

Can you remember the program open book?

Speaker A:

Yes, I can.

Speaker C:

Yeah, that had already the feature, you know, that you could get.

Speaker D:

Oh, yes, yes, of course.

Speaker C:

On an MP3 file, you know, Openbook Freedom sent. It was far ahead of all these.

Speaker D:

You know, I'm getting very interesting results between on images. Okay, I must play, and maybe I'll play it the next time there's an image, a recent image that somebody took of myself and Larry at work. And the interesting thing is that seeing AI envision and be my eyes while they both, while they all got the fundamentals kind of right, then they all started to deviate in some way in saying, like, for instance, it was a picture of me and I had a jacket on and I had a blue, a light blue shirt. And envision said I was wearing a tie, whereas be my eyes said I wasn't. There was no tie. And the funny thing about seeing AI, which I thought was really poor, was that it just said man and duck.

Speaker C:

Man and duck, yeah.

Speaker D:

No concept indoor outdoor.

Speaker A:

Yeah. But for seeing AI, actually, you have to press an extra button.

Speaker D:

Oh, really?

Speaker A:

Get the real AI. So what seeing AI does when you describe a picture is it first describes it with a simple AI model that might actually even run on device. I don't know that for sure, so don't pin me on that. But, and then when you press like, oh, I want more rich descriptions or something like that, there's a button there. If you press that, then you'll get the real description. Yeah. So that's why I see what's annoying.

Speaker D:

Me about all these three applications. While they are all very good and brilliant and they're giving you lots of feedback in some way, whether some of it is, whether it's all correct or only 90% of it is correct, is the, is the amount of buttons you have to press to get the picture to be analyzed. You know, you have to hit the share button twice at least, I think. And then you've got to do a.

Speaker C:

Huge amount of scrolling. Hey, hey, hey. Then I get really something. Really, when I, when you use WhatsApp on your, on your, on your computer, you know, when you receive, then it is so simple. You have it, you, when you are in the list. I can do a demo about that.

Speaker D:

Oh, please do.

Speaker C:

Yeah, yeah. But I will describe, you will have, then you open the picture when you, and you press enter spacebar p enter. And then Josh will describe it to you because I really agree with you fully because it is. And then the moment is sometimes already gone, you know?

Speaker D:

Yeah.

Speaker C:

Because you don't have time to do it. Yeah.

Speaker A:

Right.

Speaker C:

But this is really cool with jaws. That's really nice. On the PC.

Speaker A:

That's the problem with indeed the iPhone apps, is that it takes a lot of buttons.

Speaker D:

Yeah.

Speaker C:

Swipe.

Speaker A:

Now maybe they can do something like with siri shortcuts to make that a little bit easier so that you can do it with your voice. That might be possible, but yeah, you are right. It does take a lot of other impressors. And in that case, jaws is actually better because jaws, you can even also use the voice assistant. You can use.

Speaker C:

Oh, my God.

Speaker A:

But the voice assistant works as well. If you say, hey, shark, you described this.

Speaker C:

Oh, really? I did not do that.

Speaker D:

I definitely think right now, just being between. On the phone, between being my eyes and envision, I prefer be my eyes.

Speaker A:

One more piece of news, and that's that Google has now integrated Gemini. Picture your descriptions into talkback.

Speaker C:

Oh, that's true.

Speaker A:

So you can immediately describe images on Android if you're running talkback. I don't know exactly how it works because I don't have an Android device. I should probably rectify that by. So don't go over to the dark side. Well, I mean, you can have both, right?

Speaker C:

Yeah.

Speaker D:

Yes. As long as you're just using the Android device as a doorstop or something.

Speaker A:

Right, right, right.

Speaker D:

Well, I'm going to go back to reality for a second and I'm going to talk about a show that you. That you guys may know of called. Well, it's called something else, of course, in the Netherlands, but there's. It's a show called traitors or traitors. Yeah.

Speaker C:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker D:

And our RTE have just bought the rights to show, so it's going to be filled.

Speaker A:

Oh, vis the mo, I think in Dutchess.

Speaker D:

Yeah, that's what I was trying to remember the name.

Speaker A:

Yeah. Vis de Mol. Yeah.

Speaker D:

It's gonna be shot next year in 2025, and probably broadcast in the autumn, I would imagine. But. Yeah, so it's. I was. I was pleased to read that I was coming to Ireland because it's been a phenomenon apparently worldwide, which I. Yeah. And I remember you.

Speaker A:

Very successful.

Speaker C:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There is also a nice app what you can really predict or play game or a kind of prediction, you know, who the mall. In a small team or in a small. Yeah. In your family or with friends, etcetera.

Speaker A:

Okay.

Speaker D:

That's cool. Okay. Must remember that. Yeah. So that's it for this show because we've talked about technology, this show, which is a change we don't always talk about, really. Thanks for coming on and telling us about FSD companion. I can't wait to try that out. And thanks for doing the demo. That'd be great.

Speaker A:

No problem.

Speaker D:

And yeah, that's it for episode 108. And we will see you for 109 in a couple of weeks time. Okay. Okay, bye.

Hello, our little delivery drones, and welcome to episode 108. This week Jan and Óran welcome back Mohamed Laachair and invite him to sit into the comfortable and fluffy guest-host seat. We think he really likes it.

We kick off with news of the new AI companion from JAWS which is currently available on the web: https://fscompanion.freedomscientific.com. This new feature will also become available directly from within JAWS 2025 (JAWS Key+spacebar+F1 to access it) and is a gold mine of information. You can drop your question about JAWS and some other Vispero products into the edit box and it will have a little think and then come back with an answer. Try it!

Have you tried ElevenReader App? The ElevenLabs’ ElevenReader App lets you listen to any text content, with ElevenLabs voices. This expands your library of audio content to any article, PDF, ePub, newsletter, or any other text on your phone. Get more info here: https://elevenlabs.io/text-reader

Do you remember Maura Moore-McCune? She’s the young woman we interviewed back in episode 105 (link here: https://tinyurl.com/BGC105) who is developing VIPMOD - Vision Impaired Person’s Moving Object. Well, she has just won a gold medal at the annual prestigious Eskom Expo for Young Scientists in South Africa. Students from 35 Expo Regions in South Africa compete against each other, and then compete against the best young scientists from around the world. Maura won gold in the biomedical and medical sciences category and was joint overall senior winner too. Congratulations Maura – we’re thrilled for you!

Back to JAWS - Freedom Scientific now have an automatic language translator using AI. Mohamed tells us more about this fantastic feature which is available in JAWS 2025.

Derry Lawlor lets us know about the cameras on the Meta Ray Ban Smart Glasses, and we have news of a possible contender to Meta Smart Glasses which are the Meta Orion Smart Glasses? Huh?! Read more about them here: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-first-true-augmented-reality-glasses/

So, stop getting confused about the October weather, cool the jets on the Halloween costume shopping, and get ready to listen to the most informative podcast this side of a town hall meeting: Blind Guys Chat.

8 out of 10 AI companions prefer it to being artificial.

Links in this podcast: • The new AI companion from JAWS - FS companion: https://fscompanion.freedomscientific.com

• ElevenReader App: https://elevenlabs.io/blog/introducing-elevenlabs-reader-app and https://elevenlabs.io/text-reader

• BGC ep 105 with Maura Moore-McCune: https://tinyurl.com/BGC105

• Project Orion: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-first-true-augmented-reality-glasses/

Support Blind Guys Chat by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/blind-guys-chat

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