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Hey everyone, Marty here and I'm back with a friend of the show, friend of mine, Patrick Burton from Speakaboo. How are you?
Hey, Marty. Doing pretty good. How are you?
I am good. So we're here to talk about Speakaboo and all of the things that are going on in the moment as we're heading into the holidays. So why don't you give a little primer just kind of on the history. For those who don't know, people can go back and check out past episodes because Patrick's definitely been on here in the past. But want to give a quick primer just for those people who maybe haven't heard of Speakaboo yet.
Yeah, definitely. So Speakaboo, it was originally it was meant to be a companion app for our other app at Ben Vision, our other app called Ben, which is a spatial audio navigation app. But Speakaboo quickly became so popular that we actually, we had to put Ben on hold for a little bit so that we can meet the, the rising demand. So where Speakaboo came from is we, we looked at some other solutions. You know, Generative AI is very hot and it's got a lot of potential to help out the blinded low vision community. And we were looking at some of the other apps that are on the market and we realized that they're not all of them, but a lot of them are not that fluid. And we could imagine the frustration of having your site impaired and trying to use one of these apps and then getting blocked by having to dig through menu options or an unintuitive user interface. And so we just wanted to create something that would take all of the friction out of it. And, you know, we're a team of designers, so we wanted to design the experience to make getting audio descriptions of your surroundings as easy and quick as possible. And so that's where Speakaboo came from. It's a minimalist designed app and our first iteration only had one button. Now we have two buttons, but our first one had only one button that you, with simple gestures, you could either get very quick description of your surroundings, or you could ask it a question and have your question about your surroundings answered for you.
You have no idea how important that is too, especially to people you know, in the low vision and blind community to have a simple navigation and something that doesn't keep changing all the time. One of the biggest kind of jokes in the blindness and low vision community is why do developers have to change it around all the time? It's like going to the grocery store. You figure out where everything is at finally, and then they move it all around on you. So it's much appreciated that you kind of keep everything simple, streamlined, and don't make it difficult to navigate around the app. So that's super appreciated, for sure.
Oh, yeah, thanks, Marty. Yeah, it's been kind of a challenge, actually, because we want to stay true to our minimalist roots. And I think that's what our users have come to love about Speakaboo is that it's very minimal and it doesn't change that much. But as I've been engaging with the community on appleviz and getting a lot of email feedback and there's so many great ideas that people write in with, and then I take them back to the team and we're like, oh, we want to put all these features in, but we also don't want to take out the one thing that everybody loves about it, which is simplicity. Yeah.
Sometimes less is more. You don't need everything to do everything, you know.
Yeah, yeah. It's a balance. Balance that we, we got to walk that line.
So where did the idea come from to do Speak a Boo? To build Speak a Boo?
Yeah, it really came from looking at the other apps that were doing similar things and just realizing that if we were trying to use those apps, it would be really frustrating for us. And all of us have, we are sighted people and we just thought like, you know, it's just one feature that we're trying to get to. Why can't we just make it one button? And that's kind of where it came from.
And so this brings up a really good point. You know, being sighted, what drives you to build something for, you know, the blindness low vision community? Like, where did that come from?
Yeah, that's a great question, Marty. You know, I, I, I actually get that question a lot. A lot of people ask me, like, oh, do you know, do you have a family member or do you, do you have a friend who's, who's blind? And before, I mean, now I do. Now I have dozens of friends who are blind. But no, when I got, when I got started with no, I really wasn't plugged into the blind community. And I don't think that you have to be. I don't think that that should be the sort of the reason that you're doing it. Just because you have people in your life, you don't need an excuse to build something that helps people. So I kind of stumbled into the project again. This is part of a larger umbrella of our company, Ben Vision. And Ben Vision started at a hackathon. And the only thing I wanted to do at that hackathon was to build something that would help people. And we sort of organically landed on the blind community because we were building a solution that used mixed reality, which is a very visual medium. And we wanted to serve a community that wasn't being served by that technology yet. And so that's kind of how I found my way into assistive tech and into the blind community specifically, you know. And then once I started building for Ben Vision, I reached out to my local charity for the blind, the whole foundation, Learning center for the Blind, which is actually how you and I met. And yeah, they welcomed me in with open arms. They were really. They were. And they still have been just amazing people to work with and have really given me a lot of opportunities to plug myself into the community. You know, I've been working with them for a little bit over a year now, and I've stayed overnight at several of their retreats, sometimes for up to a week at a time. And I really get to know a lot of these people, not just as a community as a whole, but also as individual people. And that's been really, really valuable and really rewarding. Soul fulfilling too. Yeah.
Hall Foundation's super awesome. And for those who don't know, they're located in Sandy, Oregon and they have this really awesome property and they have retreats where you can go and you can stay up there and it's really awesome. It's up in the mountains and it's super cool place. So, you know, you can always check them out. But Patrick, talk about this hackathon thing. Like, how do you get into a hackathon and what's that all about?
Yeah, so Hackathon, it's. It's kind of a tongue in cheek name at this point. I think there's not, there's not always a lot of hacking that goes on, or at least not in the traditional sense that, that most people think of. It's just a programming Competition. It's a fancy word for a programming competition. And you know, this is a tangent, but I learned recently that the first, the first hacker was actually a blind man is he was hacking phone lines by basically like crazy. Yeah, he would like whistle or something to emulate dial tone or the tones that it would make when you press a number key. And he was able to like infiltrate different, different phone lines and stuff like that.
That's so awesome.
Yeah.
So how do people get involved in or check out Speakaboo? So I know you got some special things going on right now with the holidays happening and all that, so talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, definitely. So to learn more about us, you can visit either Ben Vision, which is Ben Vision's website, or we have a redirect URL at Speekaboo app. So you can quickly find Speekaboo's page and find the download link for the App Store. But yeah, we're running a promotion through the holidays. It ends January 1st. But we're doing a lifetime subscription. And it's a little controversial, actually. Some of our advisors told us not to do this because it's objectively, it's a bad business move when there's now monthly and annual subscriptions that are so popular. But we really wanted to do something to kind of thank our early adopters and give them an option to experience the best that we have to offer for life. And we thought that might kind of help, you know, build the community. And from what we've been hearing, that seems to have been the right move that like people are done for the most part, people are done paying like once a month or once a year and would rather just pay, you know, pay maybe a little bit more, but pay once and then get it over with.
Yeah, so once, once the New Year's over and this special ends, what can people expect price wise if they don't do the one time payment?
Yeah. So our other subscriptions I think are still very reasonably priced. The monthly subscription is $5 a month or 4.99 and annually it's 50 bucks or $49.99. So you save, you know, you save yourself 10 bucks by going with the annual and we don't plan to change that anytime soon. So we want to keep it all very reasonably priced. And that's for the premium option. Speakaboo Free still has all of the essential features, everything that the community came to love about Speekaboo to begin with, which is that all important? Tap or double tap to quick Describe and tap and hold to ask a question. That feature will always be available for free. And we've also added. We will continue to add and continue to build on the free version to add that support for essential features. Like at first we didn't have a distinguisher between metric and imperial measurements. Now we do have a toggle for that. We just came out with language support for Spanish, French, German and Hindi.
Oh, awesome.
Yeah. And that's all available in the free version.
Awesome. Yeah, that's great. And you were also talking about a little bit at the top of the show about appleviz. So you want to talk about that a little bit?
Oh, yeah, yeah. So appleviz, I was delighted to see, just a couple days. I was delighted to learn that Ben Vision, the makers of Speakaboo, were up for the Developer of the Year award on appleviz. So that's amazing. Yeah, yeah.
Everyone's got to go out and vote on appleviz.
Yeah, yeah. That'd be incredible. It's such an honor just to be nominated.
Definitely. That's awesome. So, yeah, and also you said that you had another thing that you've got coming that you kind of wanted to tease a little bit.
Yeah, yeah. Really, really excited about this new project. So myself and Vaseh who was on this previously, he's my co founder, we built something, we built a new app for actually for another hackathon which was hosted by Google. And this app is called Vidiscribe and what it is, it's a platform. You can go to Vidiscribe.com it's live right now. You can go to Vidiscribe and drag and drop any video as long as it's within the the time constraint limit. There is a time constraint because it's using AI, but you can drag any video in there and then get it sent back to you fully audio described using artificial intelligence.
That's incredible. You're going to have to come back and give us a full demo on that once it's ready to go.
Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to. I'm really excited to share more about that.
That is awesome. So Patrick, just before we go, why don't you give everyone how to get a hold of all the things that you do and where you're at and how to find Speekaboo.
Yeah. So you can learn more about Ben Vision, my company which makes Speekaboo. Ben Vision. Or you can just go directly to speekaboo by going to Speekaboo app and Vidiscribe our new award winning platform from the Google hackathon. That's@vidyscribe.com that's V I D D Y S C r I b e.com and those are. Those are my three three little plugs.
Awesome Patrick, thank you so much for being here. And everyone go check out all the things that Patrick's building and has to offer. They got some great stuff over there. And if you want to check out everything we got going on, you can check out our website at Unmute show. And if you have questions, comments or anything else, you can always reach us at feedbackmute show and we will see you next time.
Thanks Marty.
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