Hey, all. Welcome back to another Unmute, and today we have a special event for you. We're going to be talking to Mia and Gary from Echobatics. First, I want to introduce you to Michael Doyce. Say hello.
Michael Doyce. Hi, everyone.
He's going to be chiming in with some developer questions and some other questions as well. And as usual, we have Michael Babcock with us.
Say hello, Michael. Hello.
And I'm excited about this. This is an app that I've been recently introduced to. And let's see where it goes.
Yeah.
So Michael, why don't you kick us off?
So we have been communicating with Mia and Gary from Echobatics, and I'm going to ask Gary real quick, can you explain to people real quick? Well, take as much details you want. What this is, it's a unique way of getting information in your environment.
Sure. So it's the Acrobatics app.
It's an app for iOS specifically.
And the intention is that people can.
Use it to interact with touch screens.
And printed text and ink print words that otherwise are not remotely accessible. And we also have a feature, our.
Second feature, they're more rolling out. We also have a feature where you can ask the app to find a.
Word in your environment.
So you ask, say, hey, could you find the Word event, please? And then you move your phone around and when it finds the Word event.
It'Ll chime and then it can even direct your finger to the word. So in a nutshell, that's what it is. It's meant to be touch screen accessibility tool. And then we're adding more capabilities to it with each release.
Well, let's actually take a step back. Can you tell us how you came.
Up with the idea of this app?
Lots of surveys and lots of doing things that people didn't want. So I started a few years ago, just asking.
I was interested in indoor navigation.
It remains an interest.
But then the pandemic started and I.
Realized there wasn't a lot of testing.
That we could do in person.
Basically none.
So after trying Haptic Braille, something you.
Wear in your hands, head level, hazard detection, and a variety of other things.
Finally had one advisor, Jerry Barrier. Hello, Jerry.
Who was retired from Perkins School for the Blind.
Know, I really want you to do.
This touchscreen accessibility thing because nothing exists. You mentioned it before. That should be the.
So that's that's.
Kind of how it came about. Just literally asking a lot of questions, talking to people face to face when we could do that, having calls with.
People across the country and just gradually.
Realizing that it's like, oh, hey, here's.
Something that could be of use as.
A tool to a bunch of different people. It's not just one narrow segment and.
There wasn't anything out there. So it seemed like a good way to start off as a first product.
Where did you get the idea for the app to begin with because I'm sure it didn't start out like this, but through iterations, I'm sure it evolved into what it is now. But definitely it's pretty interesting that you can point at something and it will read something you're pointing at, or you can move it around the room and look for something. Or even, for example, if you're say you're walking down a hallway and you're looking for a suite number or a hotel room number or anything like that. So, I mean, it's got some kind.
Of cool use cases.
Yeah, that's the hope that you can.
Do all these things.
So the way it started out was.
Just talking amongst the team, and this.
Was before Mia joined.
This is going back a few years.
And just asking, hey, what would be useful? This idea came up touch screen accessibility. People saying, I can't use, for example, the exercise bike in my home, or.
I am living in an apartment with.
A microwave that has 30 or 40 buttons. I only know how to press two of the buttons because they have indentations. You can't always put bump dots on things. And just talking to people realized, like, hey, wait a minute, we're hearing a pretty consistent story. So actually, the very first idea for.
The app was just trying to make different appliances accessible.
Read what's in the end of my.
Finger so I can press this button. And I should mention that I had.
Already been developing it for a couple months. And I'm going to mention a competitor here because he deserves credit.
And then I found out that a.
Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University by the.
Name of An Hong Guo G-U-O had been working on an app called Vizlens.
V-I-Z-L-E-N-S which is now in the app store.
And his team had tried similar things.
And we had no idea. We'd searched and searched, hadn't found anything. And then found, oh, hey, someone had tried this.
But at the time, they had to upload.
Like, if someone was going to interact with, say, a microwave, you had to.
Take a picture of it, upload it. Other people would label the buttons, then the image would come back, and then.
They would track your hand. Not using hand tracking like we are.
And that's going off to the side.
But I should mention that is essentially that's part of the chronological history of.
Let'S just say this technology.
There is someone who did it before, but we didn't know about it until we were already developing this app.
And what gave you the idea to do an app like this? Because I always find it curious when someone develops an app that goes to such a small market, like people who are visually impaired or blind, something like that. So what brought you to being someone who's an app developer come to put your time into an app like this?
I had worked in what's called machine vision, which is computer vision for industrial.
Applications, like building computers, building cars, all those sorts of things, using cameras to help automate production. I'd worked in that for over 20.
Years, and I didn't feel like I was doing what I should exactly, and so I wanted to do something different, and I wanted to feel like I was making a tool that people would.
Use and I could talk to the people directly. Not that I was building stuff for robots. Basically, I like talking to people, so I'm not legally blind. I have a visual impairment, though, and I have strabismus. One of my eyes points out it's very common among people who are blind. And I grew up in a town.
That had the second oldest school for guide dogs, so Rochester, Michigan.
So there are all these different pieces, sort of my background, and I just put it together one day. I said, hey, wait a minute, maybe this is a place where I should work.
And I just say that, for instance, for this particular app, it was like the third or fourth thing we were thinking of building as part of an integrated ecosystem of assistive tech and accessibility tools.
We're still intending to get to that, but it just kind of rose higher.
And higher in sort of the ranks.
As we realized, like, oh, maybe this is the thing we should develop first, especially since we can deliver it through.
The app store and as we were.
Working on it, not have to meet people face to face when that wasn't possible.
So are you guys using your own technologies or are you guys using something like the Apple Vision or how did you guys make that a reality?
It's a combination of things.
So for now at least, for example, we're using Apple's OCR and Apple's hand detection. They're handy. All the rest of it is ours.
And I'm expecting to replace or supplement parts over. So, again, I have an image processing background, so I'm familiar with a lot.
Of tools to do different kinds of image processing. Some of this is going to be covered by a patent, but I'm also.
Familiar with the idea, or I'm becoming more familiar with it's, like, hey, someone.
Else made this tool that works pretty well.
Let's start with it. Let's use their things. But hey, we all paid for these expensive phones. Let's make best use of what Apple offers, essentially for free, or nearly for free.
So I've built pieces in like that.
And I guess that brings up my next question is I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with what's coming in iOS 17, but they announced a similar feature where to point at items. What do you guys feel kind of really distinguishes your product from what Apple is going to be doing in 17?
Wow, we know about this. We should also come back to this.
There's a bit of a story there.
Do you happen to remember what the name of that is called? That feature is called Tap to Speak.
But from my understanding, it requires the LiDAR.
Yes, it does require that center.
They call it point and speak.
It was announced in May and Global Accessibility Awareness Day. And the way I found out about it is someone actually one of the co founders of I believe one of you guys talked about this, the makers.
Of the Oko app that you saw.
At NFB or ACB or some recent conference.
Anyways, the app that allows you across.
The street seeing crosswalk signs. Anyways, he emailed me and said, hey, Gary, you're working with Apple?
Because he knew about the app.
Me, and I had had a conversation with him, and I said, no. Why do you say that? He said, Check this announcement out. And so I look at this announcement from Apple. Not exactly pointing fingers here, but I'm.
Just telling what happened.
And I noticed that, oh, hey, they're.
Announcing an app that does what we do using a demo that looks like our demo and using the same name.
That we've used for two years, point and Speak.
So that was kind of OD, to say the least, given that we had.
Our app in beta in the App Store, and then they used the same name. I understand different parts of the company could be doing different things, but that's.
Sort of the background. And we just, after talking and discussing.
With various folks, decided, let's just change the app name to the company name. So that said, what I think is different is that they do rely on the LiDAR sensor. And I can see that there are certain benefits to that, sort of they can tell, for example, where a hand or a finger is relative to the surface of a touch screen or an appliance.
You don't actually need that.
But it's interesting.
And what's different is that our app runs on phones without the LiDAR sensor. You don't need it.
In addition.
Their feature of the Magnifier.
The updated Magnifier in iOS 17, overlaps.
One of our features. A good point, though, that your app.
Does not work with LiDAR scanner or does not need the LiDAR scanner. That's something you guys should definitely marketing. Get around that, because not everyone can go out and afford a brand new phone. And some people have phones that don't have LiDAR scanners but could make use of this technology.
Thank you.
Yeah, no, it's a good point.
And I would argue you don't need the LiDAR scanner. It doesn't actually add much, and in fact, it could introduce some problems, one.
Of which is that, okay, so they're now going to give you instructions, I assume we'll find out how it works. They know where your finger is, so oh, your finger is three inches away. Two inches away, one inch away. Okay, does anyone want to hear that? I'm not sure what sort of directions they're going to be giving to someone.
On the fly that the LiDAR sensor.
Is really going to help with.
I think that in the same scenario where you're walking down a hallway and you're looking for a suite number or a hotel room number or something like that, that might come in handy if it can pick something up from a distance, sure. But I don't think you need to know the distance of your finger to the button on a microwave or something like that.
Really?
Yeah, I think they're using the LiDAR to measure how far your finger is for precision, more than just optical recognition. That's the only thing I can gather that they're doing. But again, there's benefits to both ways. But I think most blind users I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but here, but most blind users do not have iPhones with the LiDAR. So I think what you guys are doing is a plus for those users that do not have that on their phone.
Sure, I appreciate that. And to me it's funny because actually my previous work, I spent some number.
Of years working with 3D sensors, so using 3D sensors in different applications and so on. So I'm familiar with the technology, I'm.
Familiar with the sensor.
They actually have that's in there or the precursor to that sensor.
So yeah, there are a lot of.
Applications, they may end up doing some really cool stuff. Maybe this was just their stepping stone to having some interesting features in Apple Vision Pro and other headsets that are coming. But yeah, we want to reach as many people as we can, which means.
Allowing for right now, any iPhone that can run iOS 16, which, if I.
Remember correctly, is the iOS or is.
The iPhone eight or later. We don't want to exclude people because.
People hang onto their phones for some number of years. Who wants to and who can spend whatever $1,000 every year to get oh, it's just because it's the latest phone.
It'S like no, and when people buy new phones, they don't always buy the most expensive thing. A lot of people get the se or something like that.
Yeah.
So I've been using the app a little bit. Can you explain the you talked about the fine mode and can you explain that in a little more detail? So basically the way I understand it is you speak to your phone or I guess it's using like Apple's dictation and when you speak the words, as you move the phone around, it will tell you if the word is in view and then you could point your finger at it. Is that kind of how you explained it?
Yeah.
So when you switch over to find.
Mode, it prompts you to ask it to find a word.
So find the word character, please. I'm just picking random words.
Find the word Marty, please. And we had the word please.
One, because it's nice. Why not be nice to your phone? But also because that's a way of.
Quickly wrapping up the recording, because what's what it's doing?
It's recording your voice. It's recording what you're saying.
And it knows oh, when I hit.
The please word, I know oh, the command is there. And now I'm going to extract the word that the person is interested in. And so then, yes, it immediately starts. It switches over to this mode where it's scanning constantly looking for that word amidst whatever words may be in front of it. Right now, we're not trying to distinguish between words that appear that are printed on a piece of paper, words that.
Appear on, I don't know, a washing.
Machine or a billboard or anything like that. We're just looking for the word. We're assuming it's just again, it's a tool. A person figure out what the context.
Is and then they decide the process is recording.
What you're looking for. Is the processing being done locally or does it send it out to the Internet somewhere it calls home and then brings back the information?
How's that work?
It's on device.
There are some you don't need Internet. It'll work fine without being connected to.
Any kind of Internet. That's right.
You should be able to switch it.
Into airplane mode and try it. Okay, great. Yeah.
All the processing gets done on Device.
Yes.
Now there's one exception because someone did report back to us is like, oh, no, it's trying to connect to a server.
And I think we don't actually have.
An older phone, like an iPhone eight. And we may get one just to.
Test this, but when you get to the iPhone eight, I don't think the X, it may try to do the processing by connecting to some Apple server.
And sending into the audio.
Yeah.
I thought this was already enforced, but I think this may actually be a bug that it's not being enforced to do all the processing on Device.
But we try to do all of the processing. This is decision made years ago is.
Like one of the key ideas is.
That if someone's in a building somewhere.
And they lose their cell signal, they lose WiFi if they happen to be.
Connected, may not be public WiFi.
The app shouldn't be worthless or whatever it is we're doing.
Everything should work without a connection.
We can take advantage of a connection. There may be some things and there.
Are some features coming in the future.
That will take advantage of available connections.
But we always want, at the very.
Least, the core functionality, the most basic and frankly, most useful functionality to be available whether you have a connection or not.
So there's a lot of stuff that's.
Going on there right now that find function, is it just one word or is it multiple words?
You can do multiple words. Okay. Yeah.
There are limitations that if the words.
Appear, if they all appear in a row. So if you've got ink print like I'm just looking over my bookshelves.
Programming language is on a book.
So if you said programming language and those words appear in a row, then.
Yeah, it'll find together. But if they were on two separate.
Rows, then the way it's configured now, I don't believe it's going to find that.
Or where would it store the information.
Once you have scanned? Or does it not it doesn't store it. Currently this is all live processing on the fly. We're just now introducing features to store things.
Like, for instance, that I'm getting a little ahead of any announcement or anything, but if, say, you visited a kiosk.
Somewhere and you would use this kiosk and you're like, hey, it'd be great.
If this remembered kind of what I did last time. Or what some of the features were.
What I did last time.
Those are the sort of things that we plan to add in the near future. So that, for instance, it's not having to relearn everything or you're not having to rescan everything all the time. And that's a little vague.
Long story short is we're adding a connection to the cloud that's going to allow data to be uploaded so that in the future you're in the same location or if you're doing the same sort of thing, there'll be some quote unquote memory of it.
So currently it's for identifying this doesn't have any OCR capabilities at this time.
Oh, it does, it does have OCR.
But it's just not saving anything. Yeah, so it's OCR, hand detection, various other things, but it's not saving anything long term. You shut down the app, you ask it to find a new word, you scan for a different word, it's not saving anything.
Got you.
But we do plan to save, I think, relatively obvious features that someone would want is like, hey, what if I come up to an interface that someone else using this app has encountered as well?
Why wouldn't you just kind of reload.
What their phone saw and maybe already they've already figured out, oh, here's this.
Button, here's something else. Someone else might want to try that sort of thing.
What would you say has been the biggest challenge with this app creation process.
And building this out? It's a good question.
A lot of it is the number.
Of things we're trying to do more or less simultaneously on what is still a pretty wide range of phones with different processing capabilities. So for example, OCR, as we typically.
Use it, you capture an image and say, hey, can you do OCR in this?
All of that is fast, but it's not real time really.
Typically OCR in a full image is going to take a second or two. More recent phones are going to go faster than that. Whereas what we're trying to do is constantly reading OCR where someone's finger is.
Pointing or constantly reading OCR as images.
Are coming in live as close to video rates as we possibly can. So that's meant a lot of juggling internally to say, okay, now we're doing this, now we're doing that, now we're doing this, now we're doing that. We're ignoring this part of the image. Now we're interested in this part of the image.
So that actually took a fair amount of time.
And a lot of this tinkering was.
Actually on an older phone. Initially.
It was on my old, I think.
It was iPhone seven.
Starting a couple of years ago.
So that was actually pretty tricky because we couldn't actually run OCR in the entire image and keep it on device.
And also track someone's hand.
Yeah, it sounds like a challenging problem to have, for sure. I played with the app as well, and the first thing I tried it with was the oven because I was familiar with the layout of that touch screen and I was surprised with how the experience was, but it did keep losing track of my hand, I noticed. Is that something you guys have been made aware of and I expect probably working on?
Yes. So Apple has really good hand detection.
For what's available these days.
But there are certainly situations where hand detection is tricky or it'll just flat out fail. I mean, one, there's the matter of.
Depending on how much vision someone has, it may or may not be obvious to them whether or not enough of.
Their hand is in view.
So generally with the app, you want.
To have your hand more or less.
As far from the phone as you can get it. So what it usually means, and I.
Think I'll turn it over to Mia.
In a moment because she can describe this well, she's had a lot of practice, is keeping the phone relatively close to your body and keeping your hand relatively far away. As long as we have an app running on a phone rather than some other device, there's a lot of this.
Coordination that, admittedly, it's tricky.
So that's one thing.
The farther away your hand is, the.
More likely it is that the phone's going to be able to see it. So that's one thing. But the other thing is that depending.
On the lighting, so if there are.
Overhead lights on or not, right now.
We'Re not turning on the iPhone's built.
In flashlight, which I know things like seeing AI will do that automatically in certain modes.
We're not doing that as yet. Turning on the flashlight could help, depends on someone's skin tone relative to the background.
But these are all things that we're.
Addressing and there is something novel that we're going to do that I believe is going to help hand detection.
When we're going to be able to release that, I'm not sure because it's another tricky sort of thing.
We're trying to take a hand detection.
Feature built by a massive company, Apple, and we're actually trying to improve on.
It, which is not a very easy thing to do, but we have this very specific application.
So there are a few things that we can do to I don't want to call simplify the problem, but we.
Understand it's like this is the application.
For which you're using hand detection. We're not trying to do a gazillion other things, we're not trying to generalize it. We're really just trying to track someone's.
Hand so as they're moving their hand.
We can detect, oh, here's what's at the end of their index finger. Or in time, here's what's underneath their index finger so they know, oh, we can tell them.
You can press this button.
Yeah, that's I could see how that is the way that it would work. Mia, did you want to mention how or explain how you envision using the app?
Yeah, so I would definitely say in the beginning, coordinating how you hold your hand and how you hold the phone relative to the thing you're trying to read kind of can get a little difficult, especially with the less vision you have. But I've actually done a few different videos on some of our social media platforms kind of explaining how to hold your hand, standing, holding your phone, and et cetera. So the best thing to do is hold your phone with your nondominant hand and then use your dominant hand to interact with the touch screen or the piece of text you're trying to read. And then it's also best to try to keep your dominant hand kind of like in the middle of your body. And I kind of say towards kind of how you would hold your cane if you're a cane user.
Okay.
That kind of typically helps. And then it's always best to use your index finger plus another finger because that kind of helps hand detection, be able to pick up your finger a bit better. And then I would say as for standing, you want to kind of stand at least like arm's length apart from not apart, but like arm's length away from the device or the text that you're reading. And those kind of always seem to be able to help people as I was like, helping people troubleshoot, helped people interact the app a lot better. But as Gary said, there's a lot of things that we're trying to correct.
Yeah, this sounds like a great use for favorite device called a Slinger, which is a Lanyard that could help hold the phone at chest level and then all you have to worry about is orientating your hand and pointing at the touch screen. I'm super excited about what you guys have done. I've played with the app a little bit and I think it's important for people to realize where the use case scenario is. It's not something to go read through your mail. At least I don't see it as something to go read through my mail, which is what a lot of people would see OCR apps and similar apps to be. But it is a great app to walk up to a machine that isn't accessible and point at something and be able to hopefully access that. Gary, you've hinted a lot on what you've got coming up in the future, and I imagine you can't talk much about that more. But I am just curious if you have any suggestions or offers to the listeners about how they can provide you some feedback if they have it about.
The app after picking it up. Oh, certainly.
So me and I discussed this in advance.
One thing we'll say is, let's say the first five people, if they contact.
Us, can get a promo code for the app to try it for free. And then that way they can get the app, they can try it out, and they can provide us feedback.
So after the first five sorry, you'll have to pay for it, but the.
One thing we do ask is if people are listening to podcast. Not that I think it's necessarily a problem, but we ask that they mentioned something specifically we said during the podcast so that we know they listened to the podcast and it's specifically, hey, when.
Was the company founded? May I want to answer that one for a listen?
It was founded on Groundhog Day 2020. So February 2, 2020.
That's a rough time to found a company. Congratulations.
Thank you. At the time, everything looked good.
It was like, oh, hey, it's a fun date.
If you write it out, it's Palindromic 20 2020. I was like, oh, that's funny. And then two months later, the world changed. But yes, someone mentions Groundhog Day, then we'll happily send the promo code to.
The first five people.
So that's one way they can try.
The app, and.
Someone can also just email us and try to make the case. But we'd really love to know that people are a listening to your podcast and they're listening to the whole thing. And that way we know it's like, oh, hey, yeah, we'd be happy to.
Share the app with you for free.
And to clarify, if someone already owns the app, because I know a few people who own the app and they have feedback to provide to you, what's the best way for people to do?
Can certainly, if they'd like, they can post a review in the App Store. I should mention that if someone does get a promo code, this is just one of Apple's legal things, is if you get the app via promo code.
You can't actually put a review in the App Store.
And I'm not sure where that is.
That's just the way it is.
But if someone already has the app one, they can just email us so.
They can go to our website, Echobatics.com. That's Echobatix.com.
So that's echo. As in to hear an Echo bat, as in the flappyanimal, I X Echobatics.com and we have a contact page. Or they can reach out to Miami@echobatics.com or megarry. Gary@echobatics.com Those are all different ways they.
Can get back to us.
And if someone's already purchased the app.
And they want to share it with.
Someone else, or they think someone else should try it, but that person is.
On the fence, they can send us.
An email and we'd be happy to strike a deal with them so that their friends, their loved one, colleague, whatever.
Can get the app as well.
I was going to say I'd also like to jump in and say you can always reach out to us. We're on multiple social media platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. So you can always just send us a message on there with your feedback or any questions. And it's all at Echobatics echobatix.
And just so everybody knows, the price.
If you're going to pay for it, I believe is $10.01 time fee, is that correct?
That's correct, yes.
So it's only $10, everyone. So go pick it up. It's not too much. It's one time. It's not a subscription.
So give it a whirl.
And I have one last question on that and then we'll wrap it up. And we appreciate you guys joining us. It is a one time $10 cost, and as we all know, there is an ongoing cost of development. Is there a subscription plan in the future you can talk about or how do you guys plan to maintain it with a one time cost? Because you have seen all these apps go to subscriptions.
Yes, that is the plan, in fact.
So if someone purchases the app now.
Or in the future, number one, they're going to have undue influence on where the app goes because they're going to.
Be part of the early group telling.
Us, like, hey, I want this feature.
If a few people, even sometimes half.
A dozen people, said, hey, I like.
This feature, we're most likely going to.
Develop it at this early stage.
But yes, we are going to be.
Switching to a subscription model. And that was actually our original plan. Apple's announcement back in May caused us to scramble to get the app out. We didn't want to seem, even though.
We had the functionality first, we didn't.
Make it look, frankly, like we were following after them and copying.
So we got the app out, and.
The quick way to do that was to release it as a paid app. But anyone who's paid for the app.
Will in the future be able to.
Transition over to the subscription app. We'll also have other ways. We'll have ways of trying out the.
App, which right now you really can't.
Do other than, for example, getting a promo code. So we are going to switch over and we're going to make sure this makes sense.
We're switching to a subscription model because.
Then it allows us to continue develop. We have a very long roadmap, a lot of cool features planned and that will allow us to continue development. So it's not a you buy it.
Once and that's it. We're going to be coming out with features for some time to come. Well, perfect.
I appreciate you guys joining. Michael D. Do you have any additional.
Questions before we wrap it that's I've.
Asked questions I had earlier and it sounds like you guys have a fantastic product. I'm excited to see what you guys.
Add in the future. Thank you so much.
Marty, do you have anything you want to add or feel free to wrap it up. And again, we appreciate me and Gary for joining us.
Yeah, thank you guys so much. We really appreciate you coming on and telling us all about your app. We definitely want to keep in touch and you got to keep us posted on moving forward. What you got going on, any news, updates, new features, any of that stuff. And again, thanks so much to Gary and Mia from Echobatics. We appreciate it so much and we'll see you guys next time. All right.
Thanks, guys.
Every Tuesday at 10:00, a.m. Pacific time, myself, Michael Babcock and Marty SoBo go live on ACB Community to answer your technology questions. How do you join in? Couple always use Alexa, your computer or the new ACB Link app to listen to ACB Media Five. You can also join in in clubhouse or visit ACB Community to learn how to join us live in Zoom every Tuesday at 10:00, a.m. Pacific Time. We'll see you there with your tech questions.