On the first Thursday of every month, in the Unmute Presents podcast feed, you can hear Chris talk about Braille and the technology used with Braille then and now. This show's at your fingertips and you can get it by subscribing to the Unmute Presents podcast feed. Make sure that you're subscribed or head on over to Unmute Mute show to search out old episodes. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another Android Unmuted. And with me, as always, I have Liz. How's it going, Liz?
It's going fine. How are you, Marty?
I am doing good, thank you very much. You're welcome.
Fantastic.
One thing I wanted to catch up with you on from the last episode that we did was you did an unboxing, but then there was something that you missed out on at the very end. So do you remember what that was?
I. I do. I was so excited to unbox my phone that I forgot about my case. And so I did unbox my case after the fact. And my phone is now inside of the case. I offhand cannot remember what the specific model of case is, but it is. It's a Spigen case. And as cases go, it protects the back of the phone, it doesn't protect the front. But for a case that didn't cost too much money and does the basics of protecting a phone, I'll take it. So it does what I need it to do. So I'm happy with it.
That's awesome. The interesting thing, I'm not even sure if I had said last time, but when I had opened and unboxed my phone, there was already a case on it, actually, that it was in the box and the phone was already in the case, which I've never seen on any phone manufacturer ever before. So I was surprised that I opened up the phone and boom, there was the case. So. So the phone in the case and everything. So it was a pretty basic case, but does the trick. It's like a silicone case and it protects the phone. It's nothing super fancy, but at the same time, hey, a free case that you take right out of the box that your phone's already in. You can't beat that, right?
So indeed, there are two other things I wanted to mention as well. From last episode, I did find out that my phone does have a headphone jack, a 3.5-inch headphone jack at the top right of the phone, which is helpful. That was something I wasn't sure of and couldn't tell from the phone being outside of the case. Actually, it's in the upper left is where the headphone jack is. But when I put it in the case, the rounded aperture of the top of the case, where the headphone cord would go into from the outside, led me to realize, oh, wait, there actually is a headphone jack. And be happy about that. Also related to the accessibility features that we briefly discussed, I learned that the magnifier feature that I talked about is more related to using the phone's camera to look at things and increase things, whereas the magnification feature is in relation to magnifying the actual screen. And again, mileage unfortunately, may vary on which models of phones have the accessibility features. So do your research and plan accordingly in purchasing an Android device.
Yeah, making sure that you know the thing you're getting has the things that you're looking for in your device because they're all different. So they all come with different feature sets and all that stuff. So, yes, mileage may vary. So today we kind of wanted to dive in. We've been experimenting with sort of two apps on the Android side and then comparing one of those apps to the iPhone to see how they compare and contrast. And so the first app that we want to talk about is seeing AI, because that is actually both on Android and on iPhone. And why don't you talk, Liz, about seeing AI on the Android side and what that's been like for you?
Sure. On the Android side, it is your usual seeing AI app, if you're familiar with it. On iOS, it has all the same functionality. The short text, the currency, the currency identifier, the scene, the person, light detector, color detector, things like that. It does not, to my knowledge, have the world channel, but that may be a product of my particular phone or it may be the app, I don't know. Also, another thing that I thought was interesting to note is that the controls, even though it's on an Android device, the different selections for modes are on the bottom. Which it was interesting to me because in the Android ecosystem, usually your tabs in your app are at the top. So that was something that I was kind of surprised in a way about, because I'm on Android. But yet these controls are on the bottom and their main controls. That was not something that was intuitive at first in terms of realizing, oh, wait, yeah, no, this is not your native Android experience in terms of app controls.
So when you were messing around with. We tried really two different features that we tested because we really didn't have time to go through everything and test every single thing. So we decided we Were going to work on short text and so we tested short text both on iPhone and Android and my experience is that the iPhone picks up text immediately. I mean I could point it across a room at something. If there's text, it'll pick it up. I tested it on some junk mail, I tested it on some documents, we tested it on a couple of books and it, you know, as you would expect, it works really well. It's super fast and snappy. I would say on the Android side, the one thing that really maybe is a frustration for me right out of the gate is that Android just talks and talks and talks and doesn't stop talking. I mean, I don't know if there's a way to tame that and haven't figured that out yet, but it definitely likes to talk and talk and talk. And I think, Liz, you were having kind of that issue as well.
Yes, but the two finger single tap gesture in Talkback is the silent speech gesture. So that was helpful for me where I, in setting up my phone, speaking of gestures, kind of got. Not frustrated so much. Well, a little bit frustrated, but just, it was just I'm a primary Apple device user, right. So I said that from the beginning. And so when I was setting up things and wanting to get to the top of the screen, I would do a four finger single tap at the top and without customizing that gesture that started the Talkback tutorial. By the fourth time that I did that I was just like, oh my gosh. And so I did explore customizing that gesture. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have. Google does not seem to have a gesture for top and or bottom of the screen. Google, if you are listening to this, please implement that. They do have a top and bottom of where you can move your cursor from the top to the bottom of a text field or an input field, but not such with the top or bottom of the screen.
One thing I would definitely say, this will never ever happen. This is a total wish, a dream, whatever. But when it comes to a lot of these accessibility features, even if you're cross platform, iPhone, Android, whatever, it would be great if they could at least make the majority of the gestures, if not all of them the same at least. Like I don't. Things all have to be different and you got to move them around and have different things. Different gestures do different things on different platforms. It just seems that it would be way more fluid. If you're talking about all the base gestures being the same. It's hard to get used to all the different gestures. I know that's a pipe dream, but hey, Apple, Google, if you're listening, that would be awesome if we could get some of the gestures or even most of the gestures to be in unison and just make a standard and have them do all the basic stuff, you know, that would be great.
Having said that, playing devil's advocate, I guess competition still kind of crosses over in gestures, right? So, you know, Google and Apple are in competition with each other, and so gestures, I guess.
Yeah, there you go. The battle of the gestures. Right, Here we go. So there was a second app that we were looking at called Google Lookout, and unfortunately that's not on the iPhone side of things, but it definitely is on the Android side of things. So, Liz, you want to talk about your experience with that and let us know how that was going?
I absolutely can. But before we do that, we probably should finish the discussion of CI with the currency reader part of it. The currency identification part of it.
Yes, we did test the currency reader. So on my end, again, it was super fast, super snappy. I tested a couple of dollar bills and it just immediately read them. As a matter of fact, I had a $20 bill that I test and it was actually crinkled up and not totally flat, and it still recognized it right on the money. Literally like that. Anyway, so it worked really well. I was impressed that it was just so snappy, fluid. So, yeah. What about you, Liz?
Well, first, I don't think I ever reported on the text on the short text feature on Android. For me, that experience was very fluid. It was very quick to capture text, and I had a good experience, and I would say it was on par with that of the iPhone. Experienced on the iPhone with the money identification, that too was very successful. And my experience with Google Pixel 8a was that every time it read the bill, the dollar amount on the bill, it also did kind of a haptic vibration, which I don't know exactly what if that's a feature of the app or what exactly it is, but that was helpful to know that it was actually doing something. And it also. What I liked as well is that you could hold the phone towards the bill and keep it there and it would repeatedly give you the denomination as the camera was pointed at the bill. It wasn't like a one and done thing, which was helpful.
Yeah. And I think on iPhone side of things, when I was testing, it would announce the initial time and if you kept the camera pointed at it, it would then say a few seconds later it would repeat. So if you were on a twenty dollar bill, for example, it would capture that, say the $20 bill or $20, whatever it says. And then if you just kept it held there for another few seconds, it'll repeat it again and then it stops after that doesn't keep going. So that's one difference.
Absolutely. And then, yeah, switching gears, if you want, I can speak now that we've covered the thing AI, we can jump to Google Lookout and my experience and yes, Google Lookout is only available on Android, not on iOS. So Google Lookout is a similar app to seeing AI and that it has features such as text reading, money identifier, an explorer feature where it's called Explore, where it will do a live camera view and you can kind of shift your phone in terms of pointing it at different things. And it will try, it will describe what it sees. And that was interesting. And all of those things worked fairly well for me in trying them. And unlike CI, where all of the controls were on the same screen, Google Lookout has a mode button that you go into and select the mode that you want to use and then the app will function in accordance with whatever mode you choose.
Awesome. Sounds great. So I mean another tool to help identify. So that's really great. So awesome. Anything else in closing, Liz?
Both of those apps are free, so that, that is at least at time of recording. I hope that won't change, but who knows? So that's, you know, they are free tools that you can have in your toolbox on your Android device and your mileage may vary when you choose to use one app over the other. And you know, just try them and let us know how they have proven helpful to you in completing tasks on your Android device. And to do that, how can the listeners contact us?
Marty, you can reach out to us at Feedback Mute show and if you have questions, comments, if there's something you'd like us to take a look at, or if you have questions, you know, you can hit us up there. Feedback at Unmute show and Liz, as always, thank you very much for being here and we'll see you guys next time.