- [Announcer} Now, back
to "Access Tech Live," the latest in tech
and accessibility with Steven Scott
and Marc Aflalo. - And coming up, we're gonna
be joined by Michael Babcock to talk to us from the 39th CSUN Assistive
Technology Conference. Before we get to that, though, there's a been a story
just breaking, Marc, Apple in court. - Well, I mean, US
Department of Justice is claiming that
Apple has maintained, and I quote, "An
illegal monopoly over the smartphone market by locking in customers a
nd
making experiences worse for rival products." They are suing Apple. This kind of reminds me of when the government went after
Microsoft years ago, but the DOJ along with 16
state and district attorneys accuses Apple of
driving up prices for consumers and developers at the expense of making users
more reliant on its phones. We'll dig that in
into that deeper and probably get somebody
on to talk about it. I can think of some people, but it was about
time, about time. I mean, it was bound to
hap
pen let's just say that, that somebody was gonna
point the finger and say, you have too much control. It's amazing how we chastises
companies that are successful. - I don't get it. - Yeah, it's true. But, of course it's
not that dissimilar to what's been going on
over my side of the pond that the European Union,
of course has been active in going after Apple for
kind of similar things. Anyway, okay. Interesting story. We'll come back to that. Thanks for that. But let's focus now on CSUN,
which i
s happening this week, the 39th annual CSUN event, the Assistive
Technology Conference where there are many
talks, many speeches that many people go for, but it's really
the exhibition hall that interests us
tech heads over here. Michael Babcock is joining
us from the event right now. He's the host of
the Payown Podcast. Many podcasts, actually I think there's about
a thousand podcasts Michael, you're
currently hosting. - Only a thousand. - Only a thousand
he's hosting, yeah. Michael, good to ha
ve you
here on Access Tech Live. - Thank you guys for having me. It's amazing to get
into my hotel room and breathe for a minute
and hear myself think. So appreciate this opportunity. - Yeah, it's a busy place. Tell us about the scene. Tell us what it's like there. Tell us first of
all where you are. - Yeah, so I am in Anaheim, for those who don't know,
this is Southern California. Not too far away
from Disneyland. We're close enough to Disneyland that you can hear the
fireworks at night. So tha
t's a pretty
awesome experience. This is my first CSUN and everyone kept telling me it's gonna be busy,
it's gonna be busy. And I'm like, you know,
I'm a social person. I got no problem with busy. Oh man, it's very busy. So, I heard about
3,600 people are here and it is very overwhelming,
sensory overload for sure. But it's an amazing experience. And I told someone this
morning at breakfast, I said, you know what, I
am coming back next year no matter what I have to do. Because it's been
a great
opportunity to connect with exhibitors and to learn a little bit and, of course, hang out
with some friends too. - [Marc] You know, 3600 people, that doesn't seem like a lot
in the grand scheme of things when you look at conferences
like CES and stuff. So it's actually, it's
an opportunity to get a little bit more intimate than you would
otherwise, Michael. Is there anything specific that brought you
to CSUN this year? Something specific that you
wanted to get your hands on, experience firsthand
? - So one thing brought
me to the CSUN conference that I unfortunately
don't get to see for about another
90 minutes or so. I had to set an
appointment with them because they are probably one of the most
popular booths there. And that's the Glidance. And that's a great experience and I want to go play with that. And to touch on what you're
just talking about, Marc, 3,600 people isn't a bad number. But when you have 3,600 people and 3,600 canes and
3,600 guide dogs, you gotta add those numbers t
oo. - [Steven] Yeah,
that's the reality, that's the problem, isn't it? That there's a lot
of people there. And, of course you're at the
California State University, that is what CSUN stands for. It's always important I
think, to let people know, 'cause everyone calls it CSUN, but no one fully understands
why it's called CSUN. So it's always good
to mention that. Okay, so you're gonna
have a look at Glidance. We're gonna talk a bit
more about Glidance a little bit later, but there have been a lot
of announcements already and hardware announcements. I mean, even around
braille, for example, we saw Orbit Research announcing a couple of
new braille displays. What have you been
hearing about that? - So Orbit Research did
announce a new braille display, the Q40, which has
48 braille cells and the Q20, and both of these have
qwerty keyboards on them. I did see a cool braille
display yesterday called The Activator. And what's really unique
about The Activator is it has a braille
keyboard on it
. And then what you can do is
you can flip up these two clips on the left and right side and then that braille
keyboard flips back and gives you a qwerty keyboard. So you have the
best of both worlds. If you want to use
braille input, you can or you can use qwerty input. It's a 40 cell braille display. And the company that's
behind The Activator has a unique technology
where they can sense where your fingers
are on the display and share that with a teacher. So a teacher can monitor up
to four di
splays at once. And another feature of that
is if you're reading along, you can have The Activator read out loud to you
what you're reading and what's under your fingers because they can sense
where your fingers are. If you don't want it
to be that verbose, you can turn that down
a little bit and say, hey, if I pause on this
cell for half a second or for a second, then
read to me the letter and then give it
to me phonetically. And I think that
would be a great tool to teach someone braille or fo
r someone who's
learning braille and who doesn't have
experience with that. One other thing that I'll
mention about this company is they have a 20
cell braille display and it's kind of cool
'cause I touched it 'Cause you know you gotta
always put your hands on things at a braille booth and it started
playing music at me. I'm like, what is this? But they use that
sensory technology on the braille display itself and when you run your
finger across a cell and you read that braille note, it's gonna
play that
music note for you. And so it's a great way to
teach braille music notation. - Yeah, I mean, the thing
about The Activator, of course, just to
be clear on that, is that is a device that's
been out for a little while. Although, like you say that
this is the chance for you to get hands on with
a device like this. These are not
available in Best Buy. That's the problem. That's why these events
are so important, right? You know, HIMS
International also launched a new braille display as
wel
l, the Braille eMotion, which, again, has 40 cells. It has the Perkins input
from what I'm reading, it also has the word processing
built in and other tools. It seems like there's been a
lot of braille advancements. Would you agree? - Yeah, a lot of
braille advancements. And I'll tell you, I'm sure I don't have to tell either of you actually. One guess, what do you think
the buzzword is this year? - [Marc] AI. - Well, is it an
acronym by any sense? - Yeah, so everything
has AI, everything. Like
I don't think there's
a booth I've gone to that that hasn't mentioned AI and some of their
materials and stuff. So braille AI and also wearables seem to
be interesting this year. I have not put my hands
on the Envision glasses, so I'm gonna go check those out. There's a new wearable called
ARx AI, of course 'cause AI and it is a headset for
those who can see on screen. I'm wearing a pair of shocks, bone conduction headphones. So the ARx headset
looks a lot like the bone conduction
headphones tha
t I'm wearing, which sit in front of your
ears and vibrate that bone. But on the right
hand side of it, it has a flat rectangle
box that points forward and there's three buttons on it. You press and hold the
center button, which is round and it will give
you an opportunity to ask the AI a question about the text or environment
that you're seeing right in front of you. Well, that you're not seeing,
but that the camera is seeing. And then there's a repeat
button and a back button so you can get al
l
that information and navigate that
all from the headset and you don't have
to wear anything. The gotcha with it that
made me a little sad is right now it only
works on Android, it is tethered with
the USBC cable. And I asked, well, can't you use iPhone 15 and 15
Pro and 15 Pro Max? And apparently they said on the USBC ports for the
iPhone 15 line of products, Apple doesn't push enough
power to power the headset. - Yeah. So you can't get the video
capability from that. That may come in the
iPho
ne 16 though. - Maybe. - If they bring in, say, into
the pro thunderbolt port, that could be kind of cool. Just saying, Apple. That'd be nice. Now it is interesting 'cause you mentioned
all this technology and there's lots of
interesting stuff there. But you also got
hands on, I believe with something that seems
to be my arch nemesis in conversations these days, a robot guide dog. - That is, well, I haven't got my hands
on the robot guide dog. Oh, that robot guide dog.
- Doesn't like being touch
ed. - So it's not a guide
dog, it's a robot dog. And that's what threw
me off from Sony. And what Sony has
done is they have, especially for people who, older individuals or
people who may have autism or other challenges who can't take care of a dog and all the needs
that come with it, you can get a robotic dog. It's about the size of a
small puppy, like a puppy lab and it allows you to pet it, it likes to be pet, it likes
to be scratched under the chin. If it does something positive, you encour
age that behavior
by calling it a good dog. And if it does something that you don't
necessarily like it doing, you can tell it no. It learns from your vocal cues. It does wag its tail, which
I thought was pretty cool. And it bites. I scratched it under the chin and then I wowed
my hand right there and it put my
finger in his mouth and kind of bit down on it. It didn't have any teeth, but I thought it
was kind of funny. - So Michael, really, the
only benefit of this dog is it doesn't poop.
- Yeah
. - And you don't have to feed it. Dog food is expensive. - Yeah, that's a good point. That is a very good point. Okay so, you know,
we talk a lot about- - You do have to feed it. Sorry, hang on, you
do have to feed it. You have to feed it electricity. - Oh, you make a
good point, Steven. - Yes, yes. That's pretty expensive
too in some cases. - [Marc] That's a good point. We need to add a solar
panel to his head. Okay, Michael, I got
a question for you. So, we've got stuff, there's obviously coo
l things
to see in the exhibits, but there's a lot of
conferences around CSUN as well, a lot of conversations going on. Is there anyone in
particular that, you know, I gotta attend
this one for this reason? Or the people in
specific that you know, that you've been
trying to listen to or hear conversations with
or have conversations with that you're gonna finally
have the opportunity to meet at CSUN? - Yeah, so, Vispero, the company
behind Jaws and Zoom texts, I've been able to make some great co
nnections
with their team that you don't
really get to make when you're on the support line
or you're on the sales line calling them or on a Zoom call. That's been pretty awesome. I will say one thing
no one warned me about when coming to CSUN is these, after conference parties,
I guess we'll call them, where the organizations put
together a group of people and I'm gonna use air
quotes here, "Invite only" and then all of a sudden you
have 300 people in a hotel room and you can't even
hear yourse
lf thinking. So that was an
interesting opportunity that I got into yesterday. And then the last one
that I'll mention here is Parfitt over at Envision has been chatting me up
on mast on telling me, come see my booth, come over
to the booth and check us out. So being able to
make that connection and actually meet him and
shake his hand and say, hey, I want to check out
your Envision glasses and what's this
about Envision AI and some additional
artificial intelligence coming with a voice assistan
t? So I'm excited to play with that and see what that's like too. - Yeah, I mean I know
that you are there in your own capacity. I know that in previous
events we've spoken to you, you're generally there selling your wares as part of your
day job at AT Guys and obviously doing your
podcasts and all of that, which is great. But you know, I wonder, obviously we are inside the
blind bubble, you and I, but you know here
on Access Tech Live, we like to broaden the
scope a little bit. So you mentioned
the dog, which actually is cooler than I thought it
sounded initially. But any other tech
that you've thought that is either blind adjacent, you know, useful for
people who are blind and have additional disabilities or for people who have
other disabilities, anything that's
caught your attention? - Yeah, so two things. Regrettably, I don't remember
the name of the company of either of them. One of which though is a
real time signing service. So the way I envision it is Ira for people who have
h
earing impairments that need sign language
interpretation. You open up their
app, you call 'em up and then they can provide
real-time sign for you and they can, they can sign to you and
they can read people signing if necessary as well. So that's pretty cool to be
able to get that information. They are working with Starbucks, which might sound
a little familiar to those of us who use Ira. So if you go into Starbucks
you can use this service without any problems and it doesn't cost. They do have
a
consumer based plan so you can purchase minutes that you can interact
with the service on and it works both on
the iPhone and Android. That was really cool. And when I chatted with
the gentleman there, I told 'em how excited I was to share that with
other individuals. The other thing is AI, of course, 'cause
AI's everywhere, AI realtime captioning, especially on video content that is live on YouTube or other streaming services, there are some
professional services that you can use to
get those
captioned and then they'll
go back and caption some of your older content. Primarily they're focused on the education line of of videos, but they eventually
want to come in and say, hey, if you
are a content creator, we will be able to help you
with producing realistic and accurate captions
for your content. - That's really cool. The real time
communication thing is a company called Ascom and the product is the UB Duo 3. I remember because I was looking at the list of
exhibitors yesterday going
, this is what we need to talk, this is who we need to talk to. So that's really cool. Michael, still another day
of CSUN obviously today. Enjoy it. You know, take it all in. I know you're gonna want
to go back next year. That's great. You're gonna tell us if we
should go there next year, which is the important part
and we'll talk again soon and we'll find out what
your takeaways were because I'm really
curious to see what some of the other
things that'll come out of it because you're just
scrap
ing the surface here. - Yep, yep. And I was only
there for one day. Appreciate you guys having me and of course you need
to come next year. No questions asked there. - Okay, well we'll see
you next year then. That is Michael Babcock. Coming up, there
have already been a couple announcements from
this year's conference. Be my eyes and vision and more. We'll chat about those
after a quick break here on Access Tech Live and we'll check in on
that Microsoft event. - [Announcer] There's More
Access T
ech Live to come. Get involved and have your say at Access Tech Live
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