Full Transcript
Jeff Thompson:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson.
Jeff Thompson:
Envision AI is an app that has OCR and a bunch of artificial intelligence type of features.
Jeff Thompson:
We’ve got a big summer sale come up and Karthik joins us in the studio to tell us all about the big summer sale. We’re talking 50% to 75% off their subscriptions. That’s right, 50% to 75% off subscriptions. You don’t want to miss this.
Jeff Thompson:
I also want to point out a podcast that we just released, Job Insights, working from home. Yes, check it out. [inaudible] and myself go over the pros and cons working from home and give you some great tips and some resources that you can check out on the web.
Jeff Thompson:
Pete Lane kicked out an iPhone 101 on tech selection. It’s a 101 series. Some of the basic stuff, but some of this stuff is just essential, especially if you’re new to the iPhone or newly blind. Check it out, that’s our iPhone 101 series.
Jeff Thompson:
Plus, we just released the home prize winner, Mona Mikara, Dr. Mona Mikara, awesome.
Jeff Thompson:
Planes, Trains and Canes, you want to check that out, and then check out all the podcasts that we got from the conventions this summer. Lots of great stuff.
Jeff Thompson:
And you can find more podcasts with the blindness perspective on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter at Blind Abilities. Download the free Blind Abilities app from the App Store and the Google Play Store. That’s two words, Blind Abilities.
Jeff Thompson:
So without further ado, here’s Karthik from Envision. Hope you enjoy.
Jeff Thompson:
Welcome to Blind Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson, and in the studio with me today is Karthik from Envision. How are you doing Karthik?
Karthik:
I’m doing good, Jeff, doing good. How are you?
Jeff Thompson:
I’m doing great. Summer’s here. And there’s also a summer sale coming from Envision. Can you tell us about it?
Karthik:
Oh yeah, for sure.
Karthik:
We’ve been hard at work at Envision last few months, so we’ve rolled out a bunch of great stuff on both iOS and Android. So we brought [inaudible] protection to Android. We brought the scan in science feature, that I think we spoke about last time, on your podcast. So we were talking about a feature where you can scan across different objects and to be able to find them in the room, scan people.
Karthik:
So we brought that big feature out and we’ve been doing a ton of improvements under the hood, and not to mention we also got a lot of new languages on iOS and Android, so a bunch of localization changes, as well.
Karthik:
It’s been really busy and throughout all this, we sort of felt, kept hearing from customers feedback about pricing, and feedback about different things. And we thought, you know what, it’s summer and it’s been a pretty nice summer for us so far. So, we thought we might share with our users and that’s when we thought of the summer sale. So, that is offering 50% off on all the plans and 75% off on the lifetime plan, which is what people are like so going gaga over, all over Twitter, stuff like that.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh yeah. That’s a huge sale. That’s unheard of.
Karthik:
Yeah. I mean, we’ve been talking to people. I’ve also been talking to different companies to see if there are ways for us to offer our users a better pricing with their health and so on. And the summer sale is pretty much the start of all of it. So, you can expect to hear more from us on that front.
Karthik:
But yeah, like I said, we just wanted to share all the good stuff that’s been happening with our users and we thought what’s the better way to do it than kick off a sale. So yeah, that’s what we did.
Jeff Thompson:
Can you tell a little bit about Envision AI? Now, this uses artificial intelligence along with OCR.
Karthik:
Yeah, yeah.
Karthik:
So Envision is basically a tool that helps you with things that you do on a daily basis. So, it helps you read text, recognize faces, recognize objects, and so much more. Though it does a lot of things, the stuff that ambition’s really known for is its ability to read text. So, we read text in over 60 different languages, so you can think of any language and we read text back. And it also has the ability to go ahead and read really dense documents like letters and so on pretty well. So that’s what users really love us for. But apart from that we have a bunch of other stuff like being able to recognize barcodes really well, being able to describe scenes. That’s also something that people like to do on the app, apart from just reading stuff.
Karthik:
That’s what Envision does in a nutshell.
Jeff Thompson:
60 different languages.
Karthik:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Wow.
Karthik:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Karthik:
I mean, our aim from the beginning has always been to be a global app. In fact, with this aid, we’re seeing huge app adoption from places like Japan where there is no other app that reads Japanese as accurately as we do currently in the market. That’s what we hear from the users.
Karthik:
So we’ve always wanted to be a global app. And the way we have done our app is sort of with that in mind, even the amount of languages that the app itself is translated to, right, it’s been translated, so far, in 20 plus languages. And that’s something that we do, also, as a [inaudible 00:04:39] here at Envision.
Karthik:
So we want to be as intuitive as you will from day one and that’s why you have 60 different languages, you know, we worked pretty hard on that.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Another thing that you work very hard with at Envision is working with the communities to ensure that it is working for them.
Karthik:
Yeah. That we do. So, we actually have been listening to the community since day one and that’s something that we’re going to do until the end of time because I think we get, I have a lot of strength from the community, and we also get a lot of direction from the community.
Karthik:
So when we talk to users, we know what’s going wrong with the app, what’s going good with the app, what they like and they don’t like. So, we have, for example, a feature called request a call, which allows users to request a call to us directly from within the app itself. And we try to get back with them in about a day or two. So that’s the kind of community togetherness, you can say, that we are trying to build at Envision, and that’s something that we’re really proud of and we’re going to keep doing that, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
And I like that now we can read handwriting. I mean, you’ve had this before, but it seems like every time I go into this it’s like there’s just another little added feature or enhanced feature for people to use on a daily basis.
Karthik:
Yeah. What we have done now is we’ve sort of joined the handwriting text and the document text together in a single button. So, when you actually hit the document text button now, it not just reads printed text, but it also reads handwritten text, as well. And if you have a document with both handwritten and printed text, it’s going to be able to read both together. So that’s something that we worked on. Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Seamless.
Karthik:
Yeah, totally seamless. So, you don’t even have to bother about putting a separate mode on for handwriting or trying to separate the two. It’s just going to read everything as if it’s part of a single document. That’s what it does.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh, that’s really neat. That’s-
Karthik:
Yeah-
Jeff Thompson:
That’s very innovative of you.
Karthik:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
What is it, 1.6.5 that just came out? I know he’s done music for you before or sounds with you, but Andre, for the summer, came out with some new sounds, as well.
Karthik:
Yeah, he did. I mean Andre’s been a big supporter of Envision, ever since it’s launched, and we met him when he came to the Netherlands and he was talking about how he’s had a passion for making sounds. And we reached out to him and then we asked him if he could help us design some interesting sounds for the Envision app. So, he has been designing the sounds since then. And then recently when we started the idea of summer sale, we reached out to him and we said we create, if he could give us some sounds just for the summer sale. And he’s actually done that. So the processing sound that you hear in the app right now with the waves and the beach effect that it has, that’s all Andre. He’s a really good musician, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, yeah. Andre’s been around freaky foods, we call them.
Karthik:
Yeah. Freaky.
Jeff Thompson:
Now, the way your app works, Envision AI, does it work completely offline? Is it done within or does it work with web-based?
Karthik:
Well, it’s a bit of both. So Envision works offline for some features and for some features relies online, so for example when you look at the text tab, the instant text feature can work completely offline for Latin languages like English, or Dutch, or German, Portuguese, and so on. But yes, it requires an internet connection for non-Latin-based languages like Arabic and Hebrew and stuff.
Karthik:
What we try to do at Envision is try to make more and more features work offline. So that’s another innovation that you can expect from us in the coming months, is we’re going to put more of this stuff offline.
Karthik:
For example, the scan and find tab right now, for the most part, works offline like that. Find objects part of it works completely offline. You can put it in airplane mode and still use it. And so was the case with instant text, and we’re looking to see if we can bring more of those features offline, as well, without compromising that accuracy. That’s what we’re working on. That’s a big ongoing sort of product research that we do at Envision.
Jeff Thompson:
It’s getting more private and more private.
Karthik:
Yeah. It gets more private. It already is private, all the online web stuff that we do that’s completely stateless, so what it means is that when you actually take a picture with Envision, Envision really doesn’t store the image anywhere. We just use the image and then we discard it completely, so that’s what we do. Even the way we train our AI, all that stuff is completely not done on user data, that’s already there, but then when you make things more offline, it becomes faster and yes, it gets more and more private.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh, that’s really cool.
Karthik:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
This seems like a trend for, I’ve seen other companies coming out with stuff, but it seems like Envision really has locked down the OCR. very good reading capabilities. I really like that. And then the scene detection to pick out items. Where do you see Envision going with this other than improving what we already have from you? Where do you see you going in the next couple of years?
Karthik:
I think for Envision, big focus in the next couple of years is the glasses. So, we are currently working on the glasses. We are trying to talk to different partners for the glasses. So, you can expect Envision to be pretty active in the smart glasses space, because we really think that’s a really good user experience for users, for all our users. So that’s something that we’re going to be working towards. And apart from that, if you just think about the app, we think there’s so much more that we can add to the app itself in the next couple of years. So maybe even something like bringing something like face time directly within the app itself. Being able to call people directly from within the app.
Karthik:
So that’s something that we were just toying around with the idea itself. Those are things that we have in the works. So, there’s definitely going to be some new stuff in the coming months, in the coming years.
Karthik:
But our big focus as a company is definitely going to be the glasses and we’re starting to work on that right now. Yeah, that’s the future.
Jeff Thompson:
Karthik, how do you envision the, I didn’t mean that as a pun, but how do you envision the glasses working with the app?
Karthik:
So right now we’re actually experimenting two or three different kinds of glasses. So, one is the Google glass, which just runs by itself. It’s a standalone device, like your phone, right? Work with one such kind of glasses right now.
Karthik:
The other glasses that we are working with is a glass that connects to your smart phone. That’s pretty straightforward because all you have to do is just put a USB cable to your smartphone and then it starts working, right? You can just use the Envision app on your phone to go ahead and take images with the glasses or to go ahead and do stuff with the glasses.
Karthik:
So these are the two models that we are working with right now and we’re kind of leaning towards the Google glass type of model because that’s less intrusive, it’s less clunky. But it needs to get better, that’s how we see it working with the app.
Karthik:
And the app will always be like a companion app to the glasses. So, you can probably, for example, teach faces with the app and that could show up on the glasses or you might do something on the app and that might show up on the glasses, as well. So that’s what we are trying to do, make the two of them work together that way.
Jeff Thompson:
Oh, that’s cool.
Karthik:
Yeah, no, what I was saying was that it’s like how you use an external video camera connected to your phone, right? So that’s how it’s going to work with the glasses, as well. Innovate.
Jeff Thompson:
Pretty soon we might just have to put a little camera thing right in the center of our forehead.
Karthik:
Yeah. But the glasses are probably what we think right now is the future going to be like. But then yeah, we’re totally open to seeing how things evolve for us and for society in general.
Jeff Thompson:
It has to be acceptable and people have to like the look.
Karthik:
Yeah, it has to have less of a stigma. I mean you don’t want to wear something really clunky on your head. No one wants to do that. So, it has to look good. It has to also be respectful of your privacy. That’s also a big thing, because you’re wearing a camera that’s always on, so you have to always think about privacy. So, we’re trying to do all of this stuff that we do in the glasses we’re trying to do completely offline, if possible. So that’s a big area of research for us now, so, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
That pretty much brings you hands-free then, when you’re just looking at what you want to be read to you, at the information.
Karthik:
Exactly, yeah. That’s exactly how we want it to be. Like you just set it in a particular mode, liquid reading mode, and then you just keep walking and doing your thing and then you just keep looking at stuff and it keeps reading it out to you, as and when it sees relevant information. So that’s what we’re going for, and hopefully we get there, yeah, and get there soon.
Jeff Thompson:
Now that would, in the future, that would incorporate a huge database.
Karthik:
Well, some of the new stuff that’s coming out in AI right now, there are these technologies that don’t rely on having a huge database to paint an accurate picture of something. Right?
Karthik:
So what used to happen was you needed like 20,000 images of a cat if you really wanted AI to recognize a cat or the activity. But the kind of future that we’re seeing right now, the kind of research that is being put out right now, it favors using NES data to go ahead and teach the AI better stuff and to actually do all of the teaching on the device itself, so that’s the kind of, all the algorithms that are coming out right now are all pointing in that direction because that’s more privacy conscious. It also makes it possible for a lot of smart devices, like smart glasses, to actually have AI capabilities. And that’s sort of the research that we’re incorporating into our own glasses or the app product that we are making right now.
Jeff Thompson:
Hmm. Seems huge, but it seems like it’s all coming together, and it’ll be able to utilize and share with all the blindness community. That’s awesome. I’m glad you guys are doing the research like this and doing what you’re doing, so thank you.
Karthik:
Yeah, I mean for us it’s been our mission to make sure that we build the best possible tools to help the visually impaired community, and we want to do that in a way that is also very affordable to people. We want to keep it as accessible as possible. So we need to look at technologies like this and make this stuff more accessible. That’s what we going for, you know?
Jeff Thompson:
Great. Well right now we can all look forward to the nice discounts that big summer sale is having, right?
Karthik:
Oh yeah, totally. It’s going to happen all throughout August. So, all throughout August, on both iOS and Android, going to have 50% off on the monthly and the annual subscription, and 75% off on the lifetime subscriptions on both these platforms. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen only once. Everyone has to just go get it now.
Jeff Thompson:
There you go. Well Karthik, is there anything else you want to share with our listeners?
Karthik:
You know the last few days has been extremely humbling at Envision, because we saw the kind of support that we got online for the sale that we’re doing right now. We’ve got literally hundreds of messages in the past week from users, through calls, through feedback emails, and we’re really really humbled by the whole community coming together and supporting us.
Karthik:
We definitely have some great stuff in the pipeline on both iOS and Android. So yeah, we’re super excited about that. And yeah, thank you so much for having us.
Jeff Thompson:
And if they want to get back to you, they can reach you at
Karthik:
Karthik@letsinvision.com or if that’s hard to remember, you can just write to support at letsinvision.com. You can always go ahead and reach us all directly from within the app, as well. So you can either request a call or send a feedback directly from within the app. So a lot of ways to reach out.
Jeff Thompson:
All right.
Jeff Thompson:
Well Karthik, I’ve got to say this again, I always love that little statement, see what you can’t with Envision.
Karthik:
Yeah, we were trying to come up with all these different tag lines and we were thinking, wow, what can we do? What’s really reflects us as a company the best? and we ended up with see what can’t, and that, I think, reflects what we do better than anything else. So yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Well that’s great. Well, Karthik, I want to thank you very much for coming on and sharing with us the big sale. So, all your listeners out there, go out, check it out on the App Store and the Google Play Store.
Karthik:
Yeah. Oh, good, iPhone and Android, 75% off the lifetime plan, 50% off both plans all through August, so yeah, see you guys there!
Jeff Thompson:
All right, well thank you.
Karthik:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you.
Jeff Thompson:
Enable the Blind Abilities skill on your Amazon device just by saying enable blind abilities…
Jeff Thompson:
A big shout out to Chee Chau for his beautiful music. You can follow Chee Chau on Twitter @LCheeChau…
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff Thompson:
For more podcasts with the blindness perspective:
Check us out on the web at www.BlindAbilities.com On Twitter @BlindAbilities
Download our app from the App store:
‘Blind Abilities’; that’s two words.
Or send us an e-mail at:
Thanks for listening.
*****
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