We're continuing our catch-up with old friends in advance of this year's Sight Village Central event, in Birmingham.

Stuart is having a long overdue chat with Jenny axler from Selvas. Jenny and the team have had an incredibly busy year and have lots of news about some current and soon-to-be released features for the BrailleSense 6, including a new web browser, offering modern Chrome functionality for shopping, embedded media, and form filling, while preserving the familiar Braille Sense interface and streamlining keystrokes for easier use. There's a significant update coming to the word processor, offering improved reliability and advanced formatting like bullets, numbering, tables, and footnotes, making it a true productivity tool that integrates well with Word. Selvas have also developed a new Braille Practice application designed to help users practice Braille at various learning stages, providing feedback and supporting phased Braille learning . Jenny also highlights new features such as shortcuts for global hotkeys for Android apps to improve efficiency, a video search application for easier YouTube navigation, and a new podcast AI search powered by ChatGPT.

Stuart also sits down with our good friend Vanessa Vigar, Chief Marketing Officer with Envision. Vanessa tells us about Ally, Envision's powerful AI app that recently rolled out publicly. Ally is unique in leveraging multiple language models, ensuring it selects the best AI for tasks from visual descriptions to document reading. A key feature is the customization of Ally's personality and communication style, allowing users to input preferences for a highly personalized assistant experience. Vanessa explains how Ally now provides improved print reading with OCR, offering detailed audio feedback during the scanning process before reading the document, and enabling users to ask for summaries, translations, or specific information.