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Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?Įarly on with my idea, I worked with a handful of talented people to home in on a solution to access content. This, despite all my efforts to create a voice-first (using speech primarily over all other modes) interface having presumed that the screen was not used by blind people. I was delighted to see that Voicecaster predominately worked and that it had passed the test for use (by screen) with a blind person. With Apple’s accessibility features, one swipes back and forth, anywhere on the screen, moving down the screen from button to button while tapping to select and activate a button. I did not realize that blind people use the screen more than sighted people, even with Siri. Incidentally, I had received feedback from an advisor who is blind who had used the two versions of our app, but I had never sat with a blind person and watched how they interacted with it, or the iPhone for that matter, by using its accessibility features. But I had no firsthand knowledge of how a blind person uses an iPhone.Īfter working for about a year-and-a-half and accomplishing a simple but completely hands-free solution, I met with the director of sponsored technology programs for the National Federation of the Blind. I focused on this as I developed the voice interface for our audio reader, Voicecaster®. Listening to things and responding becomes harder for several reasons relating to memory and brain function. When we started working on, what would become our fully hands-free reader, after the first version was out, I was grappling with how using a voice-only interface requires a different mindset. Furthermore, publishers can simultaneously publish their content in audio without additional costs or needing time to prepare it for audio.Īnd I can wash dishes and listen to the newspaper, hands-free! Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your company?
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You now don’t need to know how to read or need to be able to look at a screen or touch it to access much of the Internet’s vast amount of information. Today, my tech startup has the only truly hands-free audio news and content reader that offers hands-free access to many popular websites.įurthermore, we have created something that easily voice-enables websites, both from the hands-free control aspect to the audio playback of its content as text-to-speech. The key motto that kept me motivated came from an email of my spouse’s boss which discussed perseverance. Despite being a computer consultant, I didn’t know anyone who did computer programming. Several years in, I would meet with various people in an effort to get my tech venture off the ground.
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I went so far as to take a picture of a hand lotion bottle, turned it into a black and white picture, saved it as a PDF file and ran the file through an OCR program to recognize the text - and it worked! I now had a small proof of concept. IDR would also be able to scrape the text of the ingredients off a cereal box and look for those that someone might be allergic to or to read the medicine and directions on a pill bottle.
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I even anticipated having the future system running on a robot where it would recognize the keypad on a microwave or dishwasher and be able to fetch the instruction manual from the Internet, so the robot could learn how to work the appliance.
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IDR would work with everything that has text: a webpage that could be brought up by voice-control and read aloud, hands-free cooking with a recipe on a computer capturing a phone number off the TV screen and banking on a website using voice. I called it the Interactive Data Recognition system, and this was before Siri. What I mean by voice-enabling text in the world around us is having a computer recognition system that would recognize the text that we see when we look around (like the keypad on a microwave, road signs, the on-screen TV cable guide and books titles on the spines of books on a bookshelf) and be able to act upon it. I have also found that having a ringside seat to the commercial advent of the Internet to be profoundly impacting.Ībout 10 years ago, it occurred to me that we had existing technology to voice-enable the text in the world around us with huge implications on society. The Mac, its interface and Apple’s approach to technology while having a “human interface design philosophy” has been the model for me. I love technology and have been a computer consultant supporting Macintosh computers for almost 30 years. Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?