January 27, 2025 • 14 mins
This week we cover:
- Vision Australia’s Alexa Smart Home program enabling participants to gain skills with Amazon Alexa devices. Furtherr information can be found by emailing voiceassist@visionaustralia.org;
- Updates to the BT Speak from Blazie Technologies at blazietech.com and an associated podcast from Robert Carter (the Tech Doctor) athttps://www.dr-carter.com/?p=579;
- Updates to the Stella Trek GPS aid from Humanware with more info at humanware.com;
- Further updates to the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.
To access the program, presented by Stephen Jolley and Damo McMorrow you can go to varadio.org/talkingtech
To write to the show use damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:08):
Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from
January the 28th, 2025. I'm Stephen Jolly, great to have
you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated
stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network.
There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you
need to do is search for the two words talking tech.
(00:30):
And it can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon
just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask
your Siri device or smart speaker to play. Vision Australia
radio talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast.
And guess what day Moz back Damo McMorrow, Vision Australia's
(00:50):
national access technology manager. How was your holiday?
S2 (00:53):
It was great, but, um, it's always nice to be
back and good to be with you once again doing
talking tech for the year.
S1 (01:00):
We had some very good alternatives over the last three weeks,
but you've still got a job with talking.
S2 (01:04):
Well, that's good to know. And thank you to the
folks who, uh, who, you know, covered, um, some of
the shows while I was away as well. I hope
you enjoyed the content. I'd like to.
S1 (01:14):
Talk to you now about one of Vision Australia's many
innovative programs, the Alexa smart home program. Tell us about that.
S2 (01:22):
This program is really, as the name suggests, designed to
get people comfortable with using the Amazon Alexa smart speakers.
It is open to people who are over 65, and
it's funded through the Commonwealth Home Support or TSP program,
or people who are on a home care package can
(01:44):
also access it. Essentially, what we do is we provide
an Amazon Echo Dot or echo speaker, depending on what's
available at the time. We have an install partner who
comes out and sets the speaker up for you, gets
it connected to your internet, and sets you up with
an Amazon account. And then we run eight sessions, generally
(02:07):
about an hour each over an eight week period, and
you're in a small group of usually three other people.
So a group of four working with one of our facilitators,
and we go through everything from sort of just the
basics getting the time, setting alarms, timers, news and weather,
you know, right through to listening to Audible or Kindle books,
(02:28):
listening to podcasts such as this one, and then also
doing things like setting up routines, you know, so that
when you speak to the device in the morning, it
turns something on or plays the latest news for you
or that kind of thing. So because it's a group situation,
it enables people to learn from one another's questions and
that kind of thing.
S1 (02:48):
How are all the participants connected?
S2 (02:50):
At the moment we use either Zoom or Teams. Our
help desk team can help you get set up with
that before the program starts, and the help desk can
also provide you with any sort of one on one
help during the program that you might need. If you're
having an issue, getting something to work or whatever we can,
we can do that.
S1 (03:09):
For those who may not be familiar with the devices
you're talking about. What are these Amazon Echo devices?
S2 (03:15):
Okay, so these are Amazon's version of a smart speaker.
So it's a speaker that you can talk to, you know,
so that you can say, um, you know, Alexa, what's
the time? What's the current weather? What's the current score
in the cricket, whatever it might be. So it's all
controlled by voice, which is one of the reasons why, um,
(03:37):
these are such an enabler for people because you don't
need a degree in computer science, as it were, to
be able to drive it. You don't even need to
know your way around a keyboard, because everything you do
is done using your voice. So they're a really easy
device to use, and you can get a lot of
information from them. Um, you know, you can even sort
(03:58):
of do, you know, video like conference calls with your
family and all sorts of stuff. So, um, it opens
up a world of possibilities. And we a lot of
the people that we speak to who joined the program,
you know, perhaps they've stopped, uh, bothering with the newspaper.
They may not even be calling family anymore because that
stuff becomes a bit of a challenge. They might have
(04:19):
stopped reading books. They might have been an avid reader.
And so when they find out that they can read
their Kindle books again with the device or that they can,
you know, set up a routine to play the latest
news every morning, it helps people to, you know, feel
much more connected again to the world around them. The
other thing that I should mention, too, is that all
of our facilitators are themselves blind. So they do use
(04:40):
this stuff on a daily basis themselves, and they absolutely
meet you where you're at, as it were. So a
lot of a lot of people enjoy that aspect of
it as well, because they can learn from the facilitators,
but also the other group members.
S1 (04:53):
For those who want to express an interest in enrolling
in the program.
S2 (04:57):
The easiest way is to email voice assist. That's all.
One word voice assist at Vision australia.org. Or they can
ring our contact centre on one 300 8474. Double six.
That's one 308 474. Double six and ask to be
(05:18):
registered for the Alexa Smart Home program. We are aiming
to start the next run at the end of February.
So if you are interested in being part of the
next program, please get in touch with us and we will.
We'll get you enrolled and up and running.
S1 (05:35):
Excellent voice assist at Vision Australia. For nearly 12 months now,
we've been raving from time to time about the tiny
little pocket computer, the BT speak. Remind everybody about that
and then we'll talk about some recent updates.
S2 (05:51):
Yes. So the BT speak from Blazie Technologies is a
small pocket sized computer with a Perkins style Braille keyboard
and speech output. So there's no no braille out. It's
braille in speech out. It has a bunch of different
applications a text editor and a address book, and a
(06:13):
calendar and a bunch of other things. But it can
also run desktop applications. So things like Google Chrome or
the Thunderbird email client. The founder of Blaze Tech, Dean blaze,
also many years ago founded a company called Blaze Engineering
and they had a product called the Braille and Speak.
And the BT speak is really the the modern equivalent
(06:35):
of that.
S1 (06:36):
There's a gentleman named Robert Carter who runs a podcast,
the Tech Doctor Podcast. It's been going for over ten
years now. A really good podcast. And he ran a
webinar last week at which the Blaze family was introduced.
And then they talked about some of the updates and
(06:59):
then took questions from people. I commend this podcast to anyone.
All you have to do is look for the tech
doctor and you'll find it. He gave a very good
introduction speaking with Dean Blasi, the founder of the Blasi
Technology Company, and with key members of the organization, a
(07:22):
very small family company, plus a few other people, his
three sons very much involved. They talk about the philosophy
of the company, the concentration on meeting the aspirations of
users in their changes to their their product. Well worth
listening to. So that's the Tech Doctor blog. And podcast
(07:42):
is the sort of the name of the web page.
But if you look for the tech doctor, you'll find him.
And there were some updates announced. Do you want to
take us through some of those updates?
S2 (07:50):
Yeah, the most significant are the fact that they've introduced
a better way of file sharing between your BT speak
and your computer and doing that wirelessly, much more seamless
process than it used to be. So if you're needing
to transfer files to and from your BT speak, um,
there's a better process for doing that. They've also introduced
(08:14):
a feature called markdown in the BT speak editor. And
what that does is it allows you to navigate to
insert things like headings, bullets, those sorts of things in
your documents, but then also to navigate easily through your
document using those elements much the same as you might
in something like Microsoft Word. That one's definitely handy if
(08:37):
you're working with long documents to be able to jump
through them heading by heading, and I think that'll be
a very welcome feature. They've also introduced enhancements to their
media player or audio player, where you can now adjust
the playback speed. So for those who listen to audio
books and like to do it on one and a
half speeds so that they can power through it more
(08:58):
quickly or whatever. You do have that option to adjust
the playback speed on the fly. So there are a
number of other little fixes and improvements. If you're doing
a continuous read and you stop at reading, it'll put
your cursor where where the reading stopped so that you
can resume again. Things like that. So there's a number
of other little bug fixes as well, which I think
(09:20):
will will make the device nicer to use.
S1 (09:23):
A fantastic little device. The BT speak from Blazie technologies,
the stellar trek from Humanware. It's been around a few
years now. It's had some recent updates.
S2 (09:33):
The stellar Trek is the standalone GPS device from Humanware.
It's something I tend to carry everywhere, particularly when I'm traveling.
It allows you to get turn by turn directions, record
your travel routes, put place markers on places that you
need to be able to find. Again, all of those
sorts of things. You can virtually browse the map with
it as well. So they've made a few changes. They
(09:56):
have done some improvements to Bluetooth audio. So if you
use the device with something like a pair of aftershocks headphones,
Bluetooth hearing aids, a pair of Ray-Ban meta glasses, for example,
the Bluetooth connection is now quite a bit more stable.
They've also gone through and cleaned up some of the
(10:17):
points of points of interest. So they're the preloaded places,
things like restaurants, service stations, shopping centers, banks, churches, those
sorts of things. Those businesses come and go. Obviously, you
don't want a point of interest for a business that's
not there anymore. You can put.
S1 (10:32):
Your own points of interest in there too, can't you?
S2 (10:34):
Yes, you can. And you record those using your own voice.
This device does have a camera on the back of it.
There's a number of camera based apps. So we've got
a couple of text reading modes. We have a barcode
reader and also things like door detection. And so they've
made some changes to those so that they perform better
(10:56):
in low light conditions. So if you're trying to read
a barcode label and you've forgotten to put the kitchen
light on, um, you know, it'll perform better than, than
it did previously in those sort of low light situations.
S1 (11:08):
That's the stellar trick from Humanware and some interesting little
updates to that one. Updates continue. You mentioned the Ray-Ban
meta smart glasses. They continue to evolve.
S2 (11:21):
Yes. One of the common complaints with them was that
you couldn't get it to read a full document, insisted
on summarizing it for you. But in version 11 of
the software, you can get it to read the entire document.
And in the event that it it doesn't for some
reason that it truncates, which apparently it still sometimes does.
(11:43):
You can just say, hey, keep reading. But yes, you can.
If you say read entire document or read the whole document,
it will do that rather than giving you a summary
or a cut down version. I have tried it with
a couple of things, including a menu, and it did
work quite well. So version 11, that's a welcome improvement
(12:04):
because it was one of the biggest frustrations, I think,
with the meta glasses was the inability to have an
entire page read to you.
S1 (12:12):
Such a versatile device. I was listening to a podcast
over Christmas. Some bloke out camping did a video and
put it up on up on YouTube of, uh, barbecuing. Yeah.
S2 (12:23):
I don't know who that would have been. Uh, we
might actually talk about, uh, in a future episode, my, uh,
YouTube exploits, because I've been trying to learn how to
film and find accessible, you know, tools for that and
learning all about camera angles as a blind person. So, um,
we might share that in sometime in the next couple
of episodes.
S1 (12:44):
We'll tell people now where they can find it, because
it's very naughty of me to mention it and not
say where it is, but it was very interesting. You're
supposed to get out into the bush and forget about
all your technologies and stuff, but you had it with
you and it was making a difference.
S2 (12:56):
Yes. So I've called the channel the Blind Test Drive
so you can get to it. Uh, youtube.com slash then
the At sign and then blind test drive. I'm staying
away from tech on the channel itself and mostly covering just,
you know, how I do the things we do because
Marian and I often get questions. How do you caravan.
(13:16):
How do you handle your boat? How do you manage
a smoker? So it's more about some of those things
that we we do and the modifications and things that
we adapt in order to make them work for us.
So there'll be some cooking adventures, some camping, some fishing,
maybe some kayaking. I've got a waterproof camera, so we'll
see what we what we come up with over the
next few months.
S1 (13:37):
That'll be very interesting to browse. Well, before we go,
a reminder that you can find details of this and
previous editions of the program by going to VA radio,
talking to VA radio, Talking Tech, and to write to
the program.
S2 (13:55):
Email me Damo Damo MC m o double r o
w at Vision australia.org.
S1 (14:05):
Damo McMorrow at Vision Australia. Org. This has been talking
tech with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology
manager Damien McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolly. Stay safe and we'll
talk more tech next week. See you.
Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from
January the 28th, 2025. I'm Stephen Jolly, great to have
you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated
stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network.
There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you
need to do is search for the two words talking tech.
(00:30):
And it can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon
just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask
your Siri device or smart speaker to play. Vision Australia
radio talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast.
And guess what day Moz back Damo McMorrow, Vision Australia's
(00:50):
national access technology manager. How was your holiday?
S2 (00:53):
It was great, but, um, it's always nice to be
back and good to be with you once again doing
talking tech for the year.
S1 (01:00):
We had some very good alternatives over the last three weeks,
but you've still got a job with talking.
S2 (01:04):
Well, that's good to know. And thank you to the
folks who, uh, who, you know, covered, um, some of
the shows while I was away as well. I hope
you enjoyed the content. I'd like to.
S1 (01:14):
Talk to you now about one of Vision Australia's many
innovative programs, the Alexa smart home program. Tell us about that.
S2 (01:22):
This program is really, as the name suggests, designed to
get people comfortable with using the Amazon Alexa smart speakers.
It is open to people who are over 65, and
it's funded through the Commonwealth Home Support or TSP program,
or people who are on a home care package can
(01:44):
also access it. Essentially, what we do is we provide
an Amazon Echo Dot or echo speaker, depending on what's
available at the time. We have an install partner who
comes out and sets the speaker up for you, gets
it connected to your internet, and sets you up with
an Amazon account. And then we run eight sessions, generally
(02:07):
about an hour each over an eight week period, and
you're in a small group of usually three other people.
So a group of four working with one of our facilitators,
and we go through everything from sort of just the
basics getting the time, setting alarms, timers, news and weather,
you know, right through to listening to Audible or Kindle books,
(02:28):
listening to podcasts such as this one, and then also
doing things like setting up routines, you know, so that
when you speak to the device in the morning, it
turns something on or plays the latest news for you
or that kind of thing. So because it's a group situation,
it enables people to learn from one another's questions and
that kind of thing.
S1 (02:48):
How are all the participants connected?
S2 (02:50):
At the moment we use either Zoom or Teams. Our
help desk team can help you get set up with
that before the program starts, and the help desk can
also provide you with any sort of one on one
help during the program that you might need. If you're
having an issue, getting something to work or whatever we can,
we can do that.
S1 (03:09):
For those who may not be familiar with the devices
you're talking about. What are these Amazon Echo devices?
S2 (03:15):
Okay, so these are Amazon's version of a smart speaker.
So it's a speaker that you can talk to, you know,
so that you can say, um, you know, Alexa, what's
the time? What's the current weather? What's the current score
in the cricket, whatever it might be. So it's all
controlled by voice, which is one of the reasons why, um,
(03:37):
these are such an enabler for people because you don't
need a degree in computer science, as it were, to
be able to drive it. You don't even need to
know your way around a keyboard, because everything you do
is done using your voice. So they're a really easy
device to use, and you can get a lot of
information from them. Um, you know, you can even sort
(03:58):
of do, you know, video like conference calls with your
family and all sorts of stuff. So, um, it opens
up a world of possibilities. And we a lot of
the people that we speak to who joined the program,
you know, perhaps they've stopped, uh, bothering with the newspaper.
They may not even be calling family anymore because that
stuff becomes a bit of a challenge. They might have
(04:19):
stopped reading books. They might have been an avid reader.
And so when they find out that they can read
their Kindle books again with the device or that they can,
you know, set up a routine to play the latest
news every morning, it helps people to, you know, feel
much more connected again to the world around them. The
other thing that I should mention, too, is that all
of our facilitators are themselves blind. So they do use
(04:40):
this stuff on a daily basis themselves, and they absolutely
meet you where you're at, as it were. So a
lot of a lot of people enjoy that aspect of
it as well, because they can learn from the facilitators,
but also the other group members.
S1 (04:53):
For those who want to express an interest in enrolling
in the program.
S2 (04:57):
The easiest way is to email voice assist. That's all.
One word voice assist at Vision australia.org. Or they can
ring our contact centre on one 300 8474. Double six.
That's one 308 474. Double six and ask to be
(05:18):
registered for the Alexa Smart Home program. We are aiming
to start the next run at the end of February.
So if you are interested in being part of the
next program, please get in touch with us and we will.
We'll get you enrolled and up and running.
S1 (05:35):
Excellent voice assist at Vision Australia. For nearly 12 months now,
we've been raving from time to time about the tiny
little pocket computer, the BT speak. Remind everybody about that
and then we'll talk about some recent updates.
S2 (05:51):
Yes. So the BT speak from Blazie Technologies is a
small pocket sized computer with a Perkins style Braille keyboard
and speech output. So there's no no braille out. It's
braille in speech out. It has a bunch of different
applications a text editor and a address book, and a
(06:13):
calendar and a bunch of other things. But it can
also run desktop applications. So things like Google Chrome or
the Thunderbird email client. The founder of Blaze Tech, Dean blaze,
also many years ago founded a company called Blaze Engineering
and they had a product called the Braille and Speak.
And the BT speak is really the the modern equivalent
(06:35):
of that.
S1 (06:36):
There's a gentleman named Robert Carter who runs a podcast,
the Tech Doctor Podcast. It's been going for over ten
years now. A really good podcast. And he ran a
webinar last week at which the Blaze family was introduced.
And then they talked about some of the updates and
(06:59):
then took questions from people. I commend this podcast to anyone.
All you have to do is look for the tech
doctor and you'll find it. He gave a very good
introduction speaking with Dean Blasi, the founder of the Blasi
Technology Company, and with key members of the organization, a
(07:22):
very small family company, plus a few other people, his
three sons very much involved. They talk about the philosophy
of the company, the concentration on meeting the aspirations of
users in their changes to their their product. Well worth
listening to. So that's the Tech Doctor blog. And podcast
(07:42):
is the sort of the name of the web page.
But if you look for the tech doctor, you'll find him.
And there were some updates announced. Do you want to
take us through some of those updates?
S2 (07:50):
Yeah, the most significant are the fact that they've introduced
a better way of file sharing between your BT speak
and your computer and doing that wirelessly, much more seamless
process than it used to be. So if you're needing
to transfer files to and from your BT speak, um,
there's a better process for doing that. They've also introduced
(08:14):
a feature called markdown in the BT speak editor. And
what that does is it allows you to navigate to
insert things like headings, bullets, those sorts of things in
your documents, but then also to navigate easily through your
document using those elements much the same as you might
in something like Microsoft Word. That one's definitely handy if
(08:37):
you're working with long documents to be able to jump
through them heading by heading, and I think that'll be
a very welcome feature. They've also introduced enhancements to their
media player or audio player, where you can now adjust
the playback speed. So for those who listen to audio
books and like to do it on one and a
half speeds so that they can power through it more
(08:58):
quickly or whatever. You do have that option to adjust
the playback speed on the fly. So there are a
number of other little fixes and improvements. If you're doing
a continuous read and you stop at reading, it'll put
your cursor where where the reading stopped so that you
can resume again. Things like that. So there's a number
of other little bug fixes as well, which I think
(09:20):
will will make the device nicer to use.
S1 (09:23):
A fantastic little device. The BT speak from Blazie technologies,
the stellar trek from Humanware. It's been around a few
years now. It's had some recent updates.
S2 (09:33):
The stellar Trek is the standalone GPS device from Humanware.
It's something I tend to carry everywhere, particularly when I'm traveling.
It allows you to get turn by turn directions, record
your travel routes, put place markers on places that you
need to be able to find. Again, all of those
sorts of things. You can virtually browse the map with
it as well. So they've made a few changes. They
(09:56):
have done some improvements to Bluetooth audio. So if you
use the device with something like a pair of aftershocks headphones,
Bluetooth hearing aids, a pair of Ray-Ban meta glasses, for example,
the Bluetooth connection is now quite a bit more stable.
They've also gone through and cleaned up some of the
(10:17):
points of points of interest. So they're the preloaded places,
things like restaurants, service stations, shopping centers, banks, churches, those
sorts of things. Those businesses come and go. Obviously, you
don't want a point of interest for a business that's
not there anymore. You can put.
S1 (10:32):
Your own points of interest in there too, can't you?
S2 (10:34):
Yes, you can. And you record those using your own voice.
This device does have a camera on the back of it.
There's a number of camera based apps. So we've got
a couple of text reading modes. We have a barcode
reader and also things like door detection. And so they've
made some changes to those so that they perform better
(10:56):
in low light conditions. So if you're trying to read
a barcode label and you've forgotten to put the kitchen
light on, um, you know, it'll perform better than, than
it did previously in those sort of low light situations.
S1 (11:08):
That's the stellar trick from Humanware and some interesting little
updates to that one. Updates continue. You mentioned the Ray-Ban
meta smart glasses. They continue to evolve.
S2 (11:21):
Yes. One of the common complaints with them was that
you couldn't get it to read a full document, insisted
on summarizing it for you. But in version 11 of
the software, you can get it to read the entire document.
And in the event that it it doesn't for some
reason that it truncates, which apparently it still sometimes does.
(11:43):
You can just say, hey, keep reading. But yes, you can.
If you say read entire document or read the whole document,
it will do that rather than giving you a summary
or a cut down version. I have tried it with
a couple of things, including a menu, and it did
work quite well. So version 11, that's a welcome improvement
(12:04):
because it was one of the biggest frustrations, I think,
with the meta glasses was the inability to have an
entire page read to you.
S1 (12:12):
Such a versatile device. I was listening to a podcast
over Christmas. Some bloke out camping did a video and
put it up on up on YouTube of, uh, barbecuing. Yeah.
S2 (12:23):
I don't know who that would have been. Uh, we
might actually talk about, uh, in a future episode, my, uh,
YouTube exploits, because I've been trying to learn how to
film and find accessible, you know, tools for that and
learning all about camera angles as a blind person. So, um,
we might share that in sometime in the next couple
of episodes.
S1 (12:44):
We'll tell people now where they can find it, because
it's very naughty of me to mention it and not
say where it is, but it was very interesting. You're
supposed to get out into the bush and forget about
all your technologies and stuff, but you had it with
you and it was making a difference.
S2 (12:56):
Yes. So I've called the channel the Blind Test Drive
so you can get to it. Uh, youtube.com slash then
the At sign and then blind test drive. I'm staying
away from tech on the channel itself and mostly covering just,
you know, how I do the things we do because
Marian and I often get questions. How do you caravan.
(13:16):
How do you handle your boat? How do you manage
a smoker? So it's more about some of those things
that we we do and the modifications and things that
we adapt in order to make them work for us.
So there'll be some cooking adventures, some camping, some fishing,
maybe some kayaking. I've got a waterproof camera, so we'll
see what we what we come up with over the
next few months.
S1 (13:37):
That'll be very interesting to browse. Well, before we go,
a reminder that you can find details of this and
previous editions of the program by going to VA radio,
talking to VA radio, Talking Tech, and to write to
the program.
S2 (13:55):
Email me Damo Damo MC m o double r o
w at Vision australia.org.
S1 (14:05):
Damo McMorrow at Vision Australia. Org. This has been talking
tech with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology
manager Damien McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolly. Stay safe and we'll
talk more tech next week. See you.
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Dateline NBC
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