Category: gadgets

This one’s going to be a honker. Get something good to drink and sit back and read.

I got to go to CSUN again this year, which was awesome. While I was there, I took a stroll around the exhibit hall. One booth I definitely wanted to find was one run by Aira. What is Aira? Well, it’s like Be My Eyes, but it’s a paid service and the agents are trained in helpful blind guy stuff and they’ve signed agreements to not share sensitive information you have shared with them. You also have the option of using a pair of glasses with a video camera or your phone. When I went to CSUN, I didn’t think it was widely available in Canada. It wasn’t, but I found out I could get a subscription, and did I want one? This was a moment where I was totally caught by surprise, and before asking all my questions, the words “Yes, hell yes!” flew out of my mouth.

I can hear people asking what are the differences between Aira and Be My Eyes that would make it worth paying for? A lot of things. Don’t get me wrong, Be My Eyes is awesome and I hope it stays around for a long time. But there is a limit to what I feel comfortable doing with it. For one thing, the people who answer your Be My Eyes calls are volunteers, so they’re doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. So the most I would want them to do is read quickly a message on a screen or tell me what colour something was or confirm something. I know some people have enlisted them to do all kinds of things, but I personally would feel a little bit bad about that. Also, because they’re answering these calls wherever they may happen to be, you have no idea how strong their internet connection is…which has led to some calls failing before they begin. Sometimes people turn the app on and forget they have it on, so when you do call, they end up answering it from the middle of a party and have no focus to actually pay attention. And some people say they speak English, but it turns out they are not fluent speakers in the least. sometimes it takes a few minutes to connect at all. And there are things that I’m just not comfortable sharing with them because it’s personal, and if they decided to do something illegal with it, I have no way to identify them or track them down at all.

With Aira, for one thing, the agents are paid to be there, so I don’t mind enlisting them to do something complicated like hook up a piece of technology or walk through a store looking for items or organize a ton of things that need organizing. Most times, I get someone almost instantly, so if I need to do something quickly, it will happen. Also, they have signed documents saying they won’t share our stuff, so I don’t mind getting them to help me fill out forms with personal information in them. And, if someone decided “screw this confidentiality stuff,” not that they would, I have a record of when I spoke with them and a way to trace things. Plus, I have a profile on this service and agents can leave notes for other agents about future tasks or email me things. They can also take pictures of your surroundings so they can blow them up and have a better look, or they can take pictures of things for you so you have them for later. I can take pictures of my adorable nephews or Shmans or whatever.

Another thing is the agents are trained, so you don’t get a wide range of abilities like you do on Be My Eyes. I have had super wonderful people on Be My Eyes, that’s for sure, but I swear some of the people on there just signed up for a lark, you end up being their first call, they spend half the call going “Oh my god I got a call holy crap oh my God!” and the experience becomes super frustrating. These agents have been trained in being able to help us navigate places safely, how to give us help in orienting the camera so they get a good picture, all kinds of stuff. Not only that, but these guys are just plain amazing! They’re not agents, they’re ninjas! And finally, you can connect to an agent quickly. I know it’s been a while since I’ve used Be My Eyes, but sometimes I had to wait a good 5 or 10 minutes to get an agent. This makes it impossible to do spur of the moment things.

I have talked long enough, here’s a video.

That video looks a bit more advanced than the way things are right now as far as the tapping on the glasses and the dinging at crosswalks, but all the rest of the stuff totally happens.
That video is great, but I have to admit that ever since I heard about this service, all I can think of is this scene from Black Mirror.

Let’s pray that, um, things in my life don’t play out the way they do in this episode. That would be very bad, very very bad. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go watch the Black Mirror episode called “Black Mirror, White Christmas.”

Speaking of the social aspects of using Aira out in public, although it’s freaking liberating, it’s definitely awkward and something to get used to. At first, I had a really hard time coping with the inputs of the Aira agent in my headphones and the people in the real world all at once and I felt like I was shorting out. I also didn’t know how to explain to the people in the real world that I had somebody who could see my surroundings through my glasses. Plus I was always afraid that the video would drop out and then nobody would help me. But I’m getting better at explaining things. Plus, the agents are really good at sort of stepping back if there’s someone live and in the flesh helping me, but they will step in if they feel they can offer extra information. For instance, once I came into a store looking for a gift bag for a toy. I said I needed a birthday gift bag for a 2-year-old boy. They heard 2-year-old boy and started leading me somewhere. Suddenly, over my headphones I hear “You’re entering the toy section” and was able to explain to the person helping me that I need a gift bag, not a toy. Win win freaking win!

I have to chuckle. I have discovered something over the nearly 3 months I have been using Aira. If I go somewhere where help is typically hard to find, and put my glasses on, I will suddenly have scads, oodles, piles, heaps of help all over me! It’s a law, and it needs a name, like Murphy’s law. Aira’s law just isn’t quite what I’m looking for, but you get my point.

Also, watching me move with Aira is a real brain-twister for folks around me. I have to wonder how many of them think I have either been faking blindness all these years, or been healed. Some of them, even after I’ve explained the whole video call thing, don’t get the hint that I’m talking to the agent, even though I’ll use the agent’s name to try and give them a clue. It’s really funny when I have a male agent, and the person who has offered me help is female. I will say “Thank you, Peter,” and the person will say “No problem.” It is really, really, really hard not to bust out laughing.

So, what have I used Aira for? What haven’t I used Aira for? They have helped me use an inaccessible touchscreen, get out of an unfamiliar parking lot, shop for grocery items, navigate unfamiliar buildings, fill out an inaccessible form, come back to the place where Tansy pooped and I was foolish enough to go out there without a bag so I could pick it up before anyone knew, take Tansy out to do business at a busy conference without bothering a soul, the list goes on and on. Hell, I picked out a Mother’s Day card! I hate doing that with store people because they’re busy, and picking out a card is something that takes patience because so many greeting cards are sooooo baaaad. If I’m going to bring a card to my mom, I want to get one that I feel proud presenting to her, not just the first card we happened to find. An agent stayed with me for 40 minutes, started to figure out my tastes, and started changing the cards she would point out to me. That was the best card I’ve picked out in my whole life because I could take the time to pick a good one.

Since I got it, I feel like I’ve become an unofficial salesperson for Aira. I will tell anyone who will listen all about it…probably until they are bored stiff. My manager says I sound like a kid with a new toy. All conversations lead back to Aira. Every week, I message a couple of my friends who are thinking about getting it and tell them the new wacky thing I have done with Aira, they tell me they still enjoy this. I remember showing it to another blind friend and his response was “Where do I sign up?”

I would say Aira has three big flaws, and I hope they can be temporary. First, there is the inherent trouble of beaming video across the internet, which is hard for any product doing that sort of thing. Next, some people would find the subscription fees pretty high, especially when dealing with exchange rates between countries. I have been living on free months, and I imagine that the first time I have to pay for a month, it’s going to sting a little bit. But I can pay for it, and I will because holy freaking crap this is a game-changer! Finally, they’re going through some growing pains, so their support staff are being kept hopping, which means sometimes you have to persist to get things fixed. But I have faith that they will develop solutions to all of these things. They already are developing new glasses that can handle the connectivity load easier. I also think they will find more ways to make subscription plans more affordable. They already have deals where your minutes are free if you’re searching for a job, there are some areas that are free all the time, and they have different deals for students, veterans, NFB members, etc. They have to start somewhere. As time goes by and things get more stable, support won’t be stretched as thin and will improve as well. We have to be patient. This company has been around for four years tops with a really small market. I think they’re doing alright.

When I first signed up, I worried that I would get lazy, and instead of solving a problem myself, I would just go *boop* “Hey Aira.” But when I look over the things for which I have used the service, all of these would have needed somebody’s help anyway. All the blindness skills in the universe aren’t going to help me grocery shop, read print that isn’t scannable, or use a touchscreen. If there’s a way to do it faster, more efficiently and with less frustration, why not? As everybody says, it is a tool in the toolbox. I didn’t realize this, but when I used Aira to take the dog out for a pee at the conference and didn’t have to bother my colleagues, apparently I had this massive grin on my face. Yup, that sums up Aira’s power right there.

So there you have it. I still feel like I’m working out some kinks with using it, like which situation works better through the phone vs. glasses, how to keep everything charged, and what accessories would help me use it better, but my god, it’s been awesome. If the service ever goes away, I will cry.

It seems people have some questions about Google’s creepy human sounding AI assistant. Fortunately or perhaps unfortunately, these are questions that go beyond why are you trying to give us all nightmares from hell, Google?

As Axios noted Thursday morning, there was something a little off in the conversations the A.I. had on the phone with businesses, suggesting that perhaps Google had faked, or at least edited, its demo. Unlike a typical business (Axios called more than two dozen hair salons and restaurants), the employees who answered the phone in Google’s demos don’t identify the name of the business, or themselves. Nor is there any ambient noise in Google’s recordings, as one would expect in a hair salon or a restaurant. At no point in Google’s conversations with the businesses did the employees who answered the phone ask for the phone number or other contact information from the A.I. Further, California is a two-party consent state, meaning that both parties need to consent in order for a phone conversation to be legally recorded. Did Google seek the permission of these businesses before calling them for the purposes of the demo? Was it staged in the simulated manner of reality TV?
Google isn’t saying. When Axios reached out for comment to verify that the businesses existed, and that the calls weren’t set up in advance, a spokesperson declined to provide names of the establishments; when Axios asked if the calls were edited (even just to cut out the name of the business, to avoid unwanted attention), Google also declined to comment. The company did not immediately respond to a series of questions from the Hive.

Let me say right off the top that I’m glad people are asking questions. Right now and headed into the future, we need all the critical thinking we can get. But some of this stuff strikes me as being kind of nitpicky, and in one case just flat out wrong.

Let’s start with that one. No ambient noise? Ok, in the salon call there isn’t any, but in the restaurant one you can pretty clearly hear people jibbering in the background. I’ll hear your argument that it’s not as loud as maybe you would expect it to be, but it’s there. Part of that could be proximity of the phone to wherever those people are, but part of it I’m going to go ahead and blame on the somewhat poor quality of the recording.

As for the salon, maybe it was closed. Maybe it wasn’t busy. Maybe there’s an office with a door on it and a phone inside. Plenty of things can explain that away.

Did Google edit the calls? Of course they did. The way the calls are answered is completely unnatural. It sounds like the person picks up while their greeting is already in progress. It’s a pretty obvious edit for a pretty obvious reason. I’m sure they did the same thing if there was an exchange of contact information. Nobody wants an 867-5309 situation on their hands.

But what about two-party consent laws? Glad you asked.

Federal law and many state wiretapping statutes permit recording if one party (including you) to the phone call or conversation consents. Other states require that all parties to the communication consent.
Unfortunately, it is not always easy to tell which law applies to a communication, especially a phone call. For example, if you and the person you are recording are in different states, then it is difficult to say in advance whether federal or state law applies, and if state law applies which of the two (or more) relevant state laws will control the situation. Therefore, if you record a phone call with participants in more than one state, it is best to play it safe and get the consent of all parties. However, when you and the person you are recording are both located in the same state, then you can rely with greater certainty on the law of that state.

That’s simple enough to understand, and simple enough, I suspect, to get around. Do we know for certain that those calls were placed from and to California? Google has offices and employees all over the place, and salons and restaurants are even more all over the place than that. As long as these recordings don’t involve problem areas, this is a non-issue.

The way I look at this, Google being doubted is all Google’s fault. Why not answer the questions? Better yet, why not be up front about the sorts of processing you did on the recordings so that maybe questions won’t have to be asked in the first place? Saying that yes we edited some stuff for privacy reasons or even yes the businesses knew we were going to call them isn’t going to give away any proprietary information that could be swiped by a competitor. Nor is it going to make what it seems you’ve accomplished here any less impressive…or scary. Because holy hell is it ever scary.

Listen to this phone call.

And now listen to this phone call.

Just somebody calling to make reservations and appointments. Nothing odd about that, right? Well, nothing aside from neither of the callers being human.

Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.
One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively. Duplex can only carry out natural conversations after being deeply trained in such domains. It cannot carry out general conversations.

While sounding natural, these and other examples are conversations between a fully automatic computer system and real businesses.
The Google Duplex technology is built to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable. It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that. We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming months.

That is both amazing and extraordinarily creepy and unnerving. It’s yet another case of it’s cool that you can do that, but should you really be doing it? As someone who often gets headaches because of the telephone I like the idea of somebody else doing all my scheduling and such, but having a computer dressed up as a person do it feels dishonest and wrong, like I’m tricking people.

I want my machines to sound like machines. Clear voiced machines sure, but still obviously machines. It’s a trust thing, like I said. Right now it’s just scheduling appointments, but eventually it’s going to get more sophisticated. And the better it gets, the more its use will spread. The more it spreads, the more likely it becomes that any of us could find ourselves interacting with it. And the more we interact with it, the less we understand what’s real and what isn’t. Google might want to somehow be transparent, but what about the next company? There are already enough things in this life that can’t be trusted (audio clips, video clips, photography, corporations, the government), the last thing any of us needs is for our basic one on one interactions to join that list.

If you know anything about me, you won’t be terribly surprised to learn that one of my favourite things about our new Google Home Mini is the radio. That function is mostly powered by Tunein, the best radio streaming app there is. There may be a better one out there somewhere, but I haven’t seen it. Discovering this was extra exciting for me because I subscribe to Tunein’s premium service, but it also turned out to be another example of one of my least favourite things about our new Google Home Mini. Information availability.

Don’t get me wrong, it can be pretty easy to find information about these things. The problem is that it’s not consistent. Searching for anything and Google Home Mini could take you anywhere. Sometimes you’ll get official Google help. Sometimes you’ll get a general tech website with lists of things you can do that may or may not be relevant or up to date. Sometimes you’ll get press releases. And more often than you’d think, you’ll wind up in a forum full of people just as confused as you are.

Such was the case when I tried to answer what I thought would be a relatively simple question. Is it possible to play paid Tunein content over this speaker? There are, as far as I can figure, only two answers to this question. Yes and here’s how, or no and here’s why. But all anybody seemed to want to tell me was that Tunein was available on Google, all you had to do was ask. Well yeah, but is *all* of Tunein available? Nobody could or would answer that. I Googled. I asked the Mini. Hey, why not? It should know what it does. It doesn’t. It never seems to know how to help you when you ask it questions about itself. I even looked in Tunein’s own knowledge base and came up empty.

Finally I wrote Tunein an email, and later the same day I got my answer. Right now you can’t use a Google Home device to play Tunein premium content, and there aren’t currently plans for that to change. The person who wrote me back did say he would pass my feedback along to the development team though, and I hope he does. But in case he doesn’t, consider this me passing it on to you myself, Tunein Dev team.

Please please please please please consider letting us link our premium accounts with our Google Homes. I have other ways to listen to that stuff and they work just fine, but since I’m already yelling at my Mini to play me things using your free side, it only makes sense at least from the end user’s point of view to be able to do that for everything you offer. It’s not as though I’m unsubscribing if this doesn’t happen, but it wouldn’t hurt to offer people one more reason to stay or sign up, would it?

Carin and I have some pretty cool friends. Over the weekend, a couple of those pretty cool friends gave us a Google Home Mini for Christmas. Yes, Christmas. Yes, it was April last weekend. I know. The thing you all must realize is that the we don’t do anything on time around here philosophy that often sees us writing about things that everyone else saw months ago isn’t just a gimmicky site thing, it’s real life. That and it snowed a lot when us and those friends happened to be not busy at the same time, which also didn’t help.

But anyway, back to the Google Home Mini.

My first impression, which I think Carin would agree with, is that it’s pretty cool. I’ve enjoyed using it as a radio, flipping stations while I do dishes or what have you just by saying “Hey Google, play station name/frequency/call letters.” It’s also handy for controlling Spotify or getting news on demand, which like radio are things I enjoy messing with while I’m doing housework. All of this is nice because it means that I don’t have to drop what I’m doing to wash and dry my hands every time I want to do something so as not to slop shit all over my electronics, a small task that never bothered me much until this week when it dawned on me that I no longer have to do it.

There’s loads of other stuff it can do too, much of which we’re still scratching the surface of. The games are going to be fun when people are over, and I did one of those Fitstar workouts, which was surprisingly intense for something that’s only seven minutes long with short breaks in it.

All of this, combined with plenty of other handy and silly things we’ve tried or have yet to discover, makes it a nice little addition to the house. But with that said, it’s still kind of weird letting a corporate machine into our home and giving it access to our voices and lives. How much is it hearing? How much is it storing? How much is it sending back to the mothership? They say it’s not recording everything, but if that’s true, how does it know when I say “ok Google”?

These are all questions Carin and I asked even before we had one, and now that we do, they’ve become much more important. Thankfully there are answers, at least to the most pressing one.

The way that the Google Assistant devices work is by actively listening for a “hotword” or specific phrase — by default, this is usually set to “OK, Google” or “Hey Google”. This is why, when you first set up the Google Assistant, it’ll ask you to say these hotwords aloud – so that it has a locally-stored audio sample to match recordings against.
In theory, this trigger phrase acts as a key that unlocks the recording function of the device. Once heard, the device then records a few seconds of audio, sends it to the cloud, analyses it and then delivers the server’s response to the user.

Google say as much in their own online FAQ about Google Home. According to them, “Google Home listens in short (a few seconds) snippets for the hotword. Those snippets are deleted if the hotword is not detected, and none of that information leaves your device until the hotword is heard.”
“When Google Home detects that you’ve said “Ok Google” or that you’ve physically long pressed the top of your Google Home device, the LEDs on top of the device light up to tell you that recording is happening; Google Home records what you say, and sends that recording (including the few-second hotword recording) to Google in order to fulfill your request.”
So while your Google-powered smart speaker is constantly listening to you, it stores that ‘ambient’ data locally and is constantly overwriting it once it fails to detect the any wake words.

As for the recordings that the device makes whenever it does detect those wake words, these are stored – and accessible to you – via the Google Home app. Using the app, you can listen back to audio recordings of any ‘interaction’ you’ve ever had the Google Home. If that makes you a little uneasy, it should.

Thankfully, Google insists that you can delete those recordings through the My Activity section of the app anytime. You can also disable the online storage of these recordings, though Google have indicated that this will more-or-less prevent you from getting the full smart-speaker experience — as it prevents the Assistant from learning from your interests and behaviors. 
It’s not impossible that this data could be backed up in some form by Google elsewhere, but given this disclaimer it seems improbable.
Google also note that “when you delete items from My Activity, they are permanently deleted from your Google Account. However, Google may keep service-related information about your account, like which Google products you used and when to prevent spam and abuse and to improve our services.”

There’s a lot in that article that makes these smart speakers sound like a mixed bag, which is exactly what they are. But now that we have one, I’m going to use it. Maybe not to build my entire life around, but as another tool for fun, convenience and information. Is there risk? Sure. But there’s risk to everything. The computer I’m writing this on could be one undisclosed security flaw away from ruining me. Ditto the iPhone right next to it. Hell, somebody could be breaking into the dead tree mailbox down in the lobby right now and assuming our identities. Life is risky. Sometimes that risk is unavoidable, and sometimes it’s manageable. The best any of us can do, Google Home Mini owner or not, is manage what we can and hope that good fortune will help us out with the rest.

When I first got an iPhone back in 2012, my favourite app very quickly became the Fleksy keyboard because I couldn’t touchscreen touch type for shit and it was pretty much the only way I was going to be able to text. Eventually I did learn to touch type reasonably well, but I still loved Fleksy because it was always going to be orders of magnitude faster for typing than I could ever hope to be.

But then came the day when the developers of Fleksy kind of sold all of us blind people who made them famous out a little, and the options were suddenly down to touch typing, dictation or bust. Like I said, I can touch type pretty alright and dictation is a bit of a technological marvel even though it screws up a lot and forces you to double check everything before you send it, so I survived. But boy oh boy, did I ever miss Fleksy. Nothing ever came along that could match its ease of use, its speed or its accuracy.

…Until now.

Does it feel familiar? It’s because it is! Using the standard QWERTY layout and 3 simple flick gestures, FlickType is the fastest available typing method for blind and low-vision users, ever. You don’t need to learn a new way to type. Just tap where it feels natural and FlickType’s powerful algorithms will get it right, almost every time!

No more spacebar or other control keys to hunt for. Simply flick right for space. To delete, flick left. Not the right word? Flick down for alternative suggestions.

An extremely fluid typing experience, and with enough additional functions to satisfy the book writer in you, FlickType will turn the chore of typing into something you may actually enjoy!

Happy typing! Smile

If that description sounds a lot like Fleksy to you, that’s because it should. FlickType is the good version of Fleksy. The Accessible one. The one without all the garbage. The one we were promised. The one we paid for.

I installed it this afternoon and have been using the hell out of it since. I’m not writing this post with it because I don’t like blogging with the phone very much, but knowing that I could do so efficiently if I wanted to is pretty friggin sweet.

For now the app is free, but if they want or need donations, count me in. Yes, even though I already paid for it once.