Full Transcript
Jeff Thompson:
This interview may be a little bit different. Typically, we interview people who happen to be blind. Ryan happens to be sighted, and he works for Aira Tech Corporation. Aira, as you may know, makes and provides a service providing instant access to information when you need it, and there’s a free Ira app for IOS and Android. Ryan, as you will find out, is a customer experience operations analyst. Ryan was hired at Aira Tech Corporation, and then was introduced to the blindness community, just like a trained Aira agent. They too happen to be sighted, and they too get introduced to the blindness community.
Jeff Thompson:
This intersection seems to be a great relationship of people learning more and more about the blindness community, and it occurred to me while doing this interview that all of us have someone in our life, someone who was been on our journey as a blind and visually impaired person, someone that knows what’s it’s like to hang out with someone who is visually impaired. We all may know something like that, someone who would probably make a great Aira agent, a career opportunity. And just like Ryan, someone who was introduced to the blindness community and now is making a career out of it. And I want to point out that all the music used in this production was composed and performed by Ryan Bresnahan. So without further ado, here’s Ryan Bresnahan. We hope you enjoy.
Ryan Bresnahan:
It’s not that I’m doing things that matter, it’s every day I’m doing something different. And every one of those things feels like it matters.
Jeff Thompson:
Introducing Ryan Bresnahan.
Ryan Bresnahan:
I think it’s a really cool place to be, and kind of a sign of success that things that we thought were amazing are just normal now.
Jeff Thompson:
Customer experience operations analyst, who happens to be sighted.
Ryan Bresnahan:
I laugh at myself. I never expected to be at a startup. At one point I said, “I hope to never have a LinkedIn, or resume, or anything else that anyone ever has to look at or care about ever again.” And I’m now neck deep in the world and drinking that Kool-Aid.
Jeff Thompson:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson. Today in the studio we have Ryan Bresnahan, and he is the customer experience operations analyst from Aira. And when I think of analysts, I think of someone who analyzes information, like in the case of Aira. You have explorers and you have agents, and you have development of your product, and when you have someone sitting at the intersection of all these departments, that is where every day begins for Ryan Bresnahan. Ryan, welcome to Blind Abilities. I know I many have over analyzed your job title, but it’s a big one.
Ryan Bresnahan:
When I first got it I was like, “Can we like shorten this?” And then I was like, “Well, I can’t be a CEO analyst, because that sounds like I’ve got like higher pretensions than I’m actually going for there.”
Jeff Thompson:
Well Ryan, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about your position and what you do at Aira?
Ryan Bresnahan:
I work primarily with the agent team and the agent management team to try to build in efficiencies in how Aira works day to day, really focusing on the service we’re providing to explorers, and honestly the service we’re providing to agents, as well.
Jeff Thompson:
Ryan, you’re working for Aira which predominantly creates a service and product for the blindness community. Did you ever had any connection with the blindness community before joining Aira?
Ryan Bresnahan:
I would not have answered this yes when I checked out Aira, when I started. My grandmother had like debilitating cataracts near the end of her life, but she also had any number of other issues, so it never really caught on to me that like she was legally blind. And it was never something I really thought about. I think really what I would say is I didn’t have any contact with the blind community before Aira.
Jeff Thompson:
Ryan, what led you to Aira?
Ryan Bresnahan:
I had a friend who was up in the Bay Area, he started with a smartwatch startup, and then I think he got tired of the startup life, came down here and got back into a startup, but came down here and kind of looking around for a while, and ended up picking up a marketing job at Aira.
Ryan Bresnahan:
I’m a musician. I, at the time, had just graduated college, I was like living literally below the poverty line, like missing meals. And I started picking up some substitute teaching. I double majored in music composition and music education. But I found that I really just hated babysitting and loved teaching, and they don’t trust subs to teach, they only trust subs to babysit. It was immensely frustrating to me. I was lucky that I ended up making friends with all of the band directors in the district that I was in. So, it got down to the point where I would … and this was stupid on my part, but I would only take gigs if they were in a band, a choir, or an orchestra. But that meant that I was working maybe two days a week, and really suffering for it. And again, that’s my fault. I was hardheaded about the whole thing and just didn’t want to deal with not teaching if I was going to be in a teaching environment.
Ryan Bresnahan:
But anyway, this whole time my friend had just like talked about this company. Like you’d wake up and be like, “Yo, hey, how’s it going?” And he’d be like, “Oh, it’s going Aira.” And you’d be like, “Okay, great.” And then you’d be like … two hours later you’d be like, “Hey, cool, check out this gif I was watching.” And then he’d be like, “Great, this gif reminds me of Aira.” And like just everything always came back to this Aira thing. It was one of those things that you’re like … you have friends that get into weird things, like okay, cool, whatever bro, like I’m glad you’re happy, you’re doing it, you’re having fun. It’s a little weird. And so I always laugh looking back at that, because eventually he told me that they were looking for people to fill the agent position. I came in, this was the old, old office so it was … gosh, maybe like 300 square feet packed up into this like little crammed area. They stuck me in the back for my interview and at the time … you know, it’s a startup so everyone’s sitting there in like jeans and t-shirts, and I’m in like this full suit and Amy, who interviewed me, just kind of like looked at me and I could feel … and I’m not going to attribute to this without like talking to her, but it felt to me like there was eye roll behind this.
Ryan Bresnahan:
So I’m in this back little room just like sweating because there’s no air conditioning, and it’s the middle of summer, and it’s like just ridiculously hot and I’m in like a thick, heavy wool suit.
Jeff Thompson:
You didn’t have the shorts and Birkenstocks going on yet?
Ryan Bresnahan:
No, not yet. And see, I still don’t do the Birkenstocks, no one in this office wears sandals and it makes me sad, because I would love to come to the office every day in sandals.
Jeff Thompson:
Well drop that hint.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
We’ll put it in the podcast.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yes, that’s where you’ve got to go. I was like the weirdo who walked around college barefoot half the time. To be fair, I also went to college like on the beach. Point Loma is … my dorm as a freshman was less than 200 feet from the beach, so it was a little more accepted there, but it was still a little weird, so going all the way from that into like shoes is … it was a big step for me.
Ryan Bresnahan:
So anyway, Wesley like just talked about this all the time and then I came in, I went into the interview, it went great, they hired me on. And like not kidding you, two weeks later I was the guy who didn’t shut up about Aira. Every single conversation I had. And honestly, like years later, to this day, every single conversation I have I’m like, “It’s Aira.”
Jeff Thompson:
It’s not just Aira, it keeps on evolving into a little bit more and more.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Well, that’s true. And I definitely have to say that, and I think that’s part of why I do talk about it in the way I do. There’s a certain level of like, “Oh cool, I’m working for a startup, I’m in this cool, hip business and like I’m doing things that matter,” but like it’s not that I’m doing things that matter, it’s every day I’m doing something different, and every one of those things feels like it matters. And to me that’s a really cool place to be.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Ryan, with regards to what it was like, tell us your experience and how it was getting introduced to the blindness community.
Ryan Bresnahan:
I think really difficult at first. It’s different now, we go through a lot of training with agents and all of that, but like I was … there were maybe 10 agents before my class, and there wasn’t anything written down, there was nothing like … there wasn’t any sort of real onboarding process. And so a lot of what I’ve learned about the blind community I’ve kind of felt out. It was hard, I think, in a lot of ways, because not being familiar with the community I was always trying to not step on toes, but try to find things out, and like I think I was nervous about like asking things. Which like now I don’t at all. I’ll go up to like Juan or anyone else and be like, “Hey, what’s this thing? How does it work? What’s it like?” And I think that reaching that point of comfort has really helped me better be able to do what I’m doing.
Ryan Bresnahan:
But yeah, again, back then I thought all that training material like we have now, it was definitely a weird place to be in trying to be respectful, but also being completely just unaware of how to do so.
Jeff Thompson:
Ryan, the processes that you use to bring on agents, were you part of the development of the onboarding of agents and the screening of agents?
Ryan Bresnahan:
I’ve actually come into that a lot recently. A lot of that previously have been some of the other agent analysts. And I went through some time as an agent analyst. I’m currently an operations analyst, which is like a little more towards the numbers side and a little less towards the people side. Which honestly in a lot of ways, like I love it, I love numbers, but I miss being on the dash as much as I was and all of that.
Ryan Bresnahan:
It was mostly actually other analysts who really put a lot of that into the training of the new agents.
Jeff Thompson:
Ryan, I remember hearing it took three to four weeks to bring an agent onboard and get them up to speed. Tell me about the changes that you’ve seen in the processes of onboarding an agent.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah, we’ve actually turned around that process, we’re getting it down to less than two weeks. It’s information dense, and we didn’t cut out anything, you still learn the same, honestly probably more than you used to, even three, four months ago. We’ve been really trying to speed that process up. A lot of it is because it’s nearing the end of May, conference season’s coming up again, and we’re gearing up to have a huge influx of calls here. And so really trying to push our agent numbers up now so that beginning of July this year, so you don’t come up to well suddenly there’s 25 people all trying to get on and no one to answer that.
Jeff Thompson:
But you have teams now that are doing the training and stuff. Like when you got on-
Ryan Bresnahan:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
It’s changed quite a bit, as you mentioned.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah, yeah it has really revolutionized.
Jeff Thompson:
And so too has the hardware that the agents are using, such as the dashboard, the Horizon glasses, and now the Bose frames to help facilitate the needs of the explorer.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Well I remember when I came on, we were six months into me agenting, we connected to Uber for the first time and that was like the biggest selling point ever. That was back in the day when onboarding someone, like an explorer, when you bring them on for the first call, that was like an hour to an hour and a half long process to go through everything, and definitely made that a lot simpler as our design team and our product team has really, I think, worked really, really hard to make everything as simple and intuitive as possible.
Ryan Bresnahan:
But back in that day, you’d tell someone, “Hey, we’ve got Uber on, and you can call right from the dash,” and it was just like mind blowing to people. And now everyone’s that’s just like, “Yes. Obviously, that’s expected.” I think it’s a really cool place to be, and kind of a sign of success that things that we thought were amazing are just normal now.
Jeff Thompson:
I think a really neat aspect of having an Aira agent available during an Uber right is the point of pick up, not only identify the car when it approaches, verifying that it’s the right car, the right driver, and getting you to the car itself, really adding another layer of security when using the ride service.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Oh yeah. Yeah. That and then like New York City, you get someone calling an Uber and like 12 cars all show up at once, and even if there’s no ill intent, there’s a really easy way to get into the wrong car three or four times in a row. So unless you have that. When we see it, not only are we tracking the Uber from GPS, but like we’ve got a picture of the driver, and the license plate, and the car and the color it’s in. It’s a pretty robust tool, and we do a lot with it, so …
Jeff Thompson:
Not only Uber, Lyft as well.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah, when we started it was just Uber, now it’s Lyft as well.
Jeff Thompson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jeff Thompson:
You moved on into operations, what is your daily routine like, what do they expect from you?
Ryan Bresnahan:
Who knows? In a lot of ways we are still like a startup, startup. I said I was a music major, I had not picked up a math book or taken a math class since, gosh, like … not a real math class since junior year of high school, I did two music classes instead of calculus my senior year. And so when I came on actually, at first I came in and was looking … kind of digging around looking at numbers, they hired me as an analyst, an agent analyst, to start to train and work with a new team of agents that they were going to hire on. And I was just kind of looking through some stuff, and I realized you know, hey, it looks like we have too many agents, we’re over staffed, like we just weren’t in a place where I think that we were really comfortable with being. But we just didn’t have the manpower to attack that problem. And so I kind of noticed that, and I was like, “Hey, we should maybe stop hiring agents.” Well, you know, I’d just got hired to train all of the agents we were hiring. So two days into my job I was like, well, I’ve just worked myself out of a job, I’ve got to fix that.
Jeff Thompson:
You wanted to cut the load a little bit.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah. I figured I had to do something, and so I just started looking into all of our numbers, and really did a lot of self-teaching, but also I was helped a lot along the way. I like to say that Aira walked me to the edge of the pier, pushed me off into the deep end, and then said, one, make it back to shore. Two, we believe you can do it. And three, they gave me the tools to do it. So I think with that, and with the mentorship of some of the people who had been there before me, I was really able to kind of move into the place that I was. And I wasn’t officially doing what I’m doing now by title for a long time, but that’s what my day to day looked like.
Ryan Bresnahan:
And so today, what do I do, I made up my own position more or less, as I kind of described there, so a lot of what I do is just try to find inefficiencies, try to find any of these places where we could be doing just a little bit better at like a systemic level in the company, but especially agent focused and explorer focused. And I tried to make that better, whether that’s … like my big thing is balancing the experience of explorers against being able to make sure that we’ve got the proper amount of agents on in a given point.
Jeff Thompson:
And just like we all understand that during rush hour the traffic’s a little bigger, so you would then analyze when the peak number of explorers are there, you want to have your peak number of agents available to service them.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yep. And we’ve built a lot of really sophisticated tools. I’m lucky enough to work with some absolutely incredible machine learning specialists who do a lot of this, and a lot of what I’m doing is going to them and saying, “Hey, here’s the problem, here’s the business aspect of this, can you give me numbers that make this business aspect work?” I serve as kind of a conduit in a lot of ways between the agent team and a lot of the other teams, looking at the machine learning and AI team, looking at the analytics team. There was a while where I was doing a lot with the shipping and provisioning, and the customer care team.
Ryan Bresnahan:
It’s really a matter of finding these places where things are just a little bit broken and fixing them and realizing that like that little fix in the beginning, especially at scale, really just avalanches into like incredible levels of efficiency.
Jeff Thompson:
Ryan, as you mentioned, you majored in music and you’re a composer.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jeff Thompson:
So when you are orchestrating and bringing this symphony of instruments, the divisions all together from a business point of view, it seems just fitting that the math is now your-
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Scales, notes, and treble clefs.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah. I laugh at myself. I never expected to be at a startup or like in a business at all. At one point I said, “I hope to never have a LinkedIn, or a resume, or anything else that anyone ever has to look at or care about ever again.” And I’m now neck deep in the world and drinking that Kool-Aid.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah. And you and your roommates sit around and say, “Aira.”
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Jeff Thompson:
But you get it now.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Oh, yeah. I mean like even when I started as an agent, one of the cool things about being an agent is that we really provide the flexibility of like work when you can and when you want to, but in a sustainable way. For me, a lot of the agent was like okay, I’ll do this while I’m getting ready to go to LA, while I’m looking at doing a graduate degree in music, while I’m looking … you know, all of these things, and there was a point where I realized, and I couldn’t tell you where the point was, because it was maybe not a point, but a gradient, but where I realized I was on the other side and like I’m bit by the bug hard, and I’m Aira for life, you know? So …
Jeff Thompson:
You’re an agent.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
A lot of our listeners out here are visually impaired, they’re blind, and maybe users of Aira services, and have their app, which is a free app. They’re probably in contact with some sighted people that have been around them for quite some time that they used before, or still use, but those are possible Aira type of agents.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah, absolutely. We find that really the qualities of a good agent is that you have to be able to think fast on your feet, and describe things quickly and well, and especially succinctly is an important one. You get someone walking down the road and there’s a certain aspect of like trying to say every single thing that’s going on, but also there’s the aspect of trying to do that without tripping over your tongue, and not getting to the important things like intersection descriptions before you get to an intersection. One of the things that I do when I train people is really push them to learn how fast they talk, and time the end of the what they’re doing when they’re describing an intersection so that your foot hits the tactile plate right as they’re done. To me, that’s an optimal service. It’s you as the explorer never having to interrupt anything to get what you’re looking for.
Jeff Thompson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ryan Bresnahan:
So we’re looking for people who can think fast on their feet, describe things well. A thing that I find is more and more difficult to find in perspective agents is the ability to read a map. We live in a time and age … when my boss was learning how to drive, she didn’t have GPS at all. When I was learning how to drive GPS looked like one of those giant slow Garmin units that took you like three days and a year to open up. And down to the point where most of the people who are coming on as agents now, like they’ve just followed the GPS without really thinking about it a lot their entire time. So that is something that we do really need to look for and need to find in people to be able to be good agents.
Ryan Bresnahan:
That and really honestly is empathy. There’s an aspect that you have to be able to really understand the thought process behind how the explorer is traveling, what they’re doing, why and how they want that information so that you can provide it to them in exactly the form that they want it. And that really requires the ability to read people and to understand without having to like ask a whole slew of explicit questions. Or like, “Okay, well, when I say turn right do you want turn slightly right but slightly more than slightly, or do you … ” you know, and as you go with an explorer, I’ll say, “Turn right,” is like the first thing I’ll say and I’ll see exactly how far they go. And then the next time giving them directions on where they’re going, and when they’re asking for navigation. It’s a matter of looking and seeing what the understanding is of a communication, and then tailoring your next communication to meet that understanding.
Jeff Thompson:
A lot of these tendencies that you may have, or preferences that you may have, are built into your profile by your agent the first time that you download the app, connect up with your agent, they’ll start a profile process, and that time does not go against your minutes. And you can tell them that you like north, south, east, west, or 12:00, 9:00. Do you walk with a guide dog, do you use a cane? Do you want a lot of information or do you just want the minimalist amount of information? And that stays in your profile so any agent that you call into has access to that information.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah, and you definitely … you start with that baseline, but you have to change, and you need to be able to adapt, and you need to be able to adapt when someone wants something slightly different. If you’re running through an airport, you’re three … which is like the highest level of description, is not necessarily going to be the same three you wanted when you have an hour to stroll to your next gate.
Jeff Thompson:
Well that’s really cool that agents can adjust to each individual. Just because they’re blind they’re not all the same type of people. Yeah, being flexible, I understand how that would really be a good asset for an agent to have.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah, no, I definitely agree. I think honestly that’s one of the big things. We do a lot with AI, and like that’s an important thing for any business at the time, but you know, one of the things that we do over a lot of our competitors is like AI is AI, as cool and interesting and forward thinking as it is, it doesn’t react to you. And like there’s a value in the human experience that we have that I think is just … and I’m sure 20 years down the line, or 30 years down the line in science fiction land I’m going to look at this and like laugh that this is broadcast and that I’ve been saying this, but like AI doesn’t react, and I don’t think it will anytime soon enough to matter.
Jeff Thompson:
Unless Anirudh really gets to work on that.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah, I was going to say don’t tell Anirudh unless we’re looking at this as a challenge.
Jeff Thompson:
Well, it is a challenge because you’ve got to meet peoples’ expectations, and people think that everything’s going to be perfect, but you guys have been adjusting, growing, as you said, a startup from the small building to probably a bigger one now, and from technology that was yesterday but now you have the Horizon glasses, to different price plans, to Chloe, I mean it’s been growing exponentially. And like you said, people are expecting it to grow, and make your last hurrah just an expected thing.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Well that’s great. You’re meeting the challenges.
Jeff Thompson:
Your experience with the blindness community, from when you first started, not knowing much about it to where you are today, has that changed your perspective of people with disabilities?
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah. Oh, definitely. Again, when I started, I didn’t know, and I was in a lot of ignorance and honestly in a lot of bad ignorance. And that doesn’t mean just like not realizing that not all blind people just have blackness, and not realizing that there’s like a spectrum and all of that, which I didn’t. But like there was honestly a lot of probably negative ableism that I had before I started here that just has vanished. That really, you know, every day I come in and find that these preconceived notions that you have as a sighted person in a world that caters to sighted people and really does … honestly it’s best to push off into the corner and sweep away anything that doesn’t match what you think and what you expect should be what everything is.
Ryan Bresnahan:
It’s easy to go in and live in that world and never be confronted by the fact that you’re wrong. Because it just is a numbers game. How many people am I going to interact with day to day, outside of Aira of course, who are blind as opposed to how many people I interact with who are sighted? But that, I think, goes to everything and so it’s easy to remain ignorant and excuse me, but like it’s easy to remain blind to the fact that you just don’t really realize what’s going on and how much we have stacked the world against people who are perfectly able to go about doing anything anyone else can do. Like I say, it’s a thing that I came in not at a place where I was in a good mindset about that, and I learned really fast.
Ryan Bresnahan:
But I’m still learning, and I think I always will be, because until the point when … and if I lose my sight, which … as I say based on a lot of family genetics, is not unlikely for me, that’s not something that I can ever truly experience. And so there will always be something that slips through the cracks that I will need to learn again, or learn in the future, and really find my way around doing what I can, and having Aira do what Aira can to bring the world into a place where we don’t shuffle aside people who are not the quote, unquote “standard”, the median person.
Jeff Thompson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I was one of them at one time, too, until I lost my sight and where do they keep the blind? I had no idea. I do remember one time there was a blind guy across the street walking with a cane and I remember turning my head looking at him going, “Huh.” That’s all I did, so I had my stereotypical limited expectations of what people can do with disabilities in general. I didn’t narrow it down to blindness, and then when I lost eyesight, I had to go to a training and I’ll just say it straight out, I went there, I visited, walked out and told my mom, “What a bunch of freaks.” I mean, I had no idea. I didn’t even meet any students really, I just met the teachers, and they thought they knew everything and blah, blah, blah.
Jeff Thompson:
But after I went back, I went there for two weeks, and they were the greatest people I ever met, because you got to know the people. I was just seeing their disability. So it took me a while to change totally around, wrap myself around and then realize that society does have … but it’s not their fault. It’s not society’s fault in a sense, and that’s why education … but I think, too, with Aira you’re going to have agents out there and they have friends, and they have … like your roommate got you involved, but when the topic comes up in every day conversation there’s more people now that are sighted because of the agents out there, and because of family members who are talking … it’s something they can talk about together, that it does help break down some of those limited expectations that people have.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah. Well and I think when I interviewed for the agent analyst position, so like as an agent, you’re a contractor and so like the first time I really got to my feet wet into the company, one of the things that I talked about was part of my love for Aira is that it’s really like a force multiplier, because on one hand it’s a tool in the toolbox, right? And it’s this thing that really forces sighted people to confront the fact that given accessibility options, there is not a limit. And so there’s like this like first order reaction, right, where it’s like the explorer who is able to overcome inaccessibility due to whatever reason, I don’t need to list off the reason for inaccessibility, there’s like a billion of them because again, as I said, we kind of shuffle people off in the sighted world.
Ryan Bresnahan:
There’s not only that kind of like original reaction, but then there’s like the second order reaction where now instead of just that one explorer being able to show themselves as capable to someone who might be sighted and unfamiliar with the blind community and with blindness and general, and really if that person doesn’t believe in the capability of someone to live a normal life, first of all it gets rid of that but then you go to this like second order where now instead of just that one person, next time they see someone who is blind they’re going to have that same reaction, right? Like they’re in the know now. And I think it allows this sort of exponential reaction where we really do force people who are sighted to confront this inaccessibility of the world we’ve built.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, it’s a .. as I may say, an eye opener isn’t it?
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah, yeah, it really is.
Jeff Thompson:
A lot of people might say like the word see, “Do you see that?” Which means do you understand or like an eye opener, it like opens your mind up to the opportunities and the possibilities, I should say, that exist out there.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah, the more and more people that I meet in the visually impaired and blind community, and some of the people that I meet doing podcasts, that some people climb Kilimanjaro or they run the rim on the Grand Canyon, they do all these major feats, but some of the feats are some stuff that you’ve probably seen as an agent, they’re able to accomplish getting to class on time, learning that path, maybe not having to us Aira all the time for that, but they’ve got it down. They had someone to give them some key points, they can wean themselves off stuff and then move on to more horizons, more challenges. It’s a really neat tool to have. Seems like people who are using Aira are out there doing something. It’s neat that they’re out there doing stuff.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah. Well and I think that too, like when people ask me about me what Aira is, and they always want some grand story. And I have grand stories, like don’t get me wrong, I’ve done … I’ve been on the other side of calls where like just absolutely incredible things have happened. And I was going to say at some point I’d love to tell one of them, it’s kind of the story that I always tell whenever I think about this, but like people always want the grand stories, but like really the important stories are not necessarily those, it’s the everyday functionality that like overcoming these obstacles that are thrown up in your path. It’s the things like going to a hotel and being able to run your laundry because you can tell what cycle it’s on, that sort of thing, right? And like that’s an everyday thing, and I have explorers call in and like apologize that they’re wasting my time when I have calls like that, and I just like … there’s nothing further from the truth.
Ryan Bresnahan:
So there’s every day things and the fact that we are part of peoples’ everyday lives that like really, to me, is the most important part of doing what I do.
Jeff Thompson:
Well just the other day I used the $29.00 intro plan.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jeff Thompson:
And I just took a picture, I got Bridget on, and it was her first day, in the conversation I found that out, but we took a picture of my dishwasher, the panel on it, it’s a fairly new one, so they have the soft touch panel. But you can kind of tell where they are because I put two markers, two on the left, two on the right. She was able to take the picture, put a description on it starting from left to right, and putting a coma in between each one, and then she put in parentheses “bump” where the bumps were. And so now I have a reference in my folder in my Aira app.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Oh, so she like put together a diagram of it?
Jeff Thompson:
Well she took a picture so the picture’s there, which doesn’t have much meaning for me, but-
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
I have the description and it’s separated by comas, each button going left to right.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Oh man, I have not yet met her, but I’m going to go congratulate her because that’s brilliant. That’s such a cool way to do it, like I wouldn’t have ever thought of that and I’ve been on the dash for … on and off for three and a half years.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah. And it was just neat to have that done, and I asked my wife, I said, “Should I send it to you?” She said, “No,” because she pretty much knows how it works pretty much, and I was just getting myself, but I didn’t have to bother anybody, I just did it. And now I don’t have to use that again, because I have it. And I think that’s one of the things some people say that you don’t want to become dependent on Aira to do your tasks. Well, I don’t use it every time I do the dishwasher. I have reference, and I’m going to learn that so I can move on to, like I said earlier, a new horizon, a new challenge. And I did my roll end keyboard, the back of it on the left-hand side there’s some inputs and some other things that I didn’t know about. And the same thing, an agent took a picture of that, and labeled that, and then on the right side, so I got two pictures, two descriptions. So when I have to move my roll end keyboard I can just pull that out and reference it and I know where to put the foot switch, I know where to put the sustain, I know where to put the left, right, outs. So they’re labeled.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
And I didn’t have to go in with someone labeling bumps and me trying to remember or put brail labels on, I have it in my email and I have it in the folder. So that was my Kilimanjaro. That was my mountain, you know?
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
To be able to do that and I didn’t have to call up my son, or have someone come over, or interfere with anybody’s day or schedule, or duties, or anything like that. And now I don’t have to do the roll end again, I’m eliminating things so I can do other things too with it.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that’s the thing, is like it’s a tool and you can really use it like that, and you say about calling someone to get them to help you with that, how long did it take for someone to drive over, or walk over as opposed to the 10 seconds on a bad day to get on a call?
Jeff Thompson:
Well yeah. The main thing, it’ll open you up to use it for the next thing, the next further thing down the sidewalk, the further thing down your journey.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Yeah.
Jeff Thompson:
The things that you just need to get out of the way to label, to get to know. I have a lot of computer equipment, a lot of musical equipment, and every once in a while like the back of my microphone has a couple switches back there, and do I remember exactly what they are, because they set them up one time, and all the sudden one day a year later you go, “Hey, I want to change this,” well quickly you could get a reference. But if you’re going to use the Aira agent, I suggest taking the picture, having them put a description on it, so you don’t have to do that again. You’ll have it, so there’s certain ways of doing things that you’re always doing new stuff with it, and I think that’s one of the challenges of having Aira, is what do you with it?
Jeff Thompson:
And it’s like, I found out that if I’m down to the end of the month and I still have 20 minutes to burn up, I call it burning them up, I find something to do. If I want to sort out CDs, or I collect record albums, I could pull out a box and just flip through the albums. I have to become creative, too, because I’m a fairly new user to it, I’m starting a plan that … I’m starting a list of things to burn Aira up with. Which allows me to do new things. And it’s all on my own. I’m not bothering anybody. So that’s my promotion for Aira right there.
Ryan Bresnahan:
I was going to say, I don’t know why I’m on here, you’re selling us well enough as it is.
Jeff Thompson:
Well, at first when I was getting it, or hesitant to get it, I had doubts. I didn’t know … I considered myself … I am very independent. I’m a competent person. However, I have a thousand vinyl records, so I should never have any minutes wasted.
Ryan Bresnahan:
I’m curious, this might be a bit of an aside, how do screen readers do on OCR, on things more artistic like an album?
Jeff Thompson:
And album can consist of reversed out lettering from a busy picture. It could be bold lettering with fancy cartoon, so you’re not going to get everything. It’s look for columns, it’s looking for paragraphs, it’s looking for structure. And sometimes it matters if it’s on a dark or a light surface, so there’s so much colorization going on there. I don’t think that’s a word, but I’m going to use it. There’s so much graphics going on that it’s kind of cumbersome for an OCR to detect.
Ryan Bresnahan:
Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, I mean like that’s a great use of Aira. I think even with OCR screeners, like when I first started agenting I … again, we didn’t have very many agents, and I’m west coast, I’m in the office in La Jolla. I pulled somehow the morning shift, the 4:00 a.m. shift, because we weren’t open 24 hours then. And one of the things that I would do almost every day is we had a gentleman who called in and I was reading like a law text book. And that was something that like his OCR worked on, but there’s that aspect of the smoothness of the human voice, and the interaction with the human voice, and to be fair, I don’t read nearly so fast as voice over can. But there’s certainly a nicety to it, that you can’t get as well with like a computer-generated voice.
Jeff Thompson:
Yeah. I mean, come the day when we’re more used to robotics talking to us, I don’t know … I don’t know if we’ll be around, but it could happen. It could happen. Why not? This AI is going somewhere. But you guys are really doing a lot with AI, and the possibilities where this can go. I know even the Bose glasses have a lot more built in to it than it looks. You may get the sound, you may get the directions, but I see there’s other apps in my Bose app that gives me some augmented type of reality situations and stuff, and I’m sure your team there is looking more and more into all that type of stuff.
Ryan Bresnahan:
There are a lot of really cool things that I wish that I could talk about. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on.
Jeff Thompson:
Well stay tuned, right? And if you want to find out more about Aira, check them out on the web at A-I-R-A dot I-O. Download the free Aira app from the app store, or the Google Play store. And Ryan, if someone is interested, or may know someone who might be interested in becoming an Aira agent, where can they go to find out more information?
Ryan Bresnahan:
It is Aira.IO/our-agents. That’s O-U-R dash A-G-E-N-T-S.
Jeff Thompson:
Well there you have it. Ryan, I want to thank you so much for coming on the Blind Abilities, and taking the time out of your day to share with us a little bit about what it is to be a customer experience operations analyst for Aira. But before we go, is there anything else you’d like to tell the listeners?
Ryan Bresnahan:
I just want to thank everyone for the time you guys spent listening, and thank you Jeff, and for anyone who’s checked out Aira in the past, we’ve changed a lot so it’s worth checking out again. And to anyone who hasn’t check it out yet, it’s a really cool thing, I’d heartily recommend it. So thank you everyone.
Jeff Thompson:
Thank you so much.
Ryan Bresnahan:
All right.
[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:
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Contact
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