With Sight Village Central now less than a week away, Stuart is joined by our Head of Sales and Marketing Stefanie Davies to unveil some special, limited-time offers, which are available from July 1st and do not require attendance at the Sight Village event. These promotions include:

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.

Welcome to another episode of the Sight and Sound Technology podcast. We're gearing up for Sight Village Central, taking place this year on July 7th and 8th in Birmingham, and, on this, the first in a couple of episodes that you'll hear over the next week, we're unveiling some new and exciting technology that will be on our stand during the show.

We're delighted to be joined by friend of the show Pierre Kegels, and his colleague Karst Hoogsteen, who are with Stuart to talk about Luna Glasses.

Designed by Karst, who has retinitis pigmentosa, these inconspicuous smart glasses offer a life-changing solution for night blindness and low-light vision. They use a special camera and in-lens projectors to display brighter, colourized reality in real-time, boosting confidence without stigma.

Then, it's another friend of the show, when CEO of Kapsys Aram Hekimian makes a welcome return. Aram is with us to introduce KapX, a new wearable device for orientation and obstacle avoidance. Ideal for those needing confidence in outdoor navigation, KapX uses a lightweight headset with a camera and a pocket-sized computing unit. Its on-board AI provides real-time environment analysis, offering orientation guidance via TTS or 3D sound, notifying users of points of interest like crossings, and crucially, detecting and helping avoid hidden obstacles (like low branches or parked trucks) even if not specifically chosen by the user.

Liam Geschwindt is the co-founder of TouchPulse, who are developing Navis, the first personal navigation companion for the visually impaired.

Stuart re-connects with Joe Said, from Tactile Engeneering, the people behind the Cadence multi-line Braille Tablet.

Stuart catches up with /Dave Williams, RNIB's Inclusive Design Ambassador, to learn about his work and the work of the Inclusive design team.

This week Sight and Sound Technology are attending the 40th CSUN Assistive Technology conference in Anaheim, California. Stuart introduces the series and gives us a sense of what to expect.

February is a busy time for our friends at RNIB and specifically in their Northern Ireland team. Two events of note are running across two days.

On Tuesday February 25th the RNIB Braille and Beyond library tour comes to Lisburn City Library, from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm.

On Wednesday February 26th RNIB Northern Ireland's Technology Fair, now in its second year, will be taking place at the Lagan Valley Island, also in Lisburn, from 11:00 am to 4:30 pm.

Stuart catches up with RNIB's Jackie Brown to find out more.

Welcome back to another episode of Sight and Sound Technology's podcast. This time we're talking all things AI.

Envision have recently launched Envision Ally on their smart glasses as well as putting the Ally app for iOS and Android into public beta. Stuart is joined by Envision's co-founder and CEO Karthik Mahadevan to tell us more.

You can give the Envision Ally app a spin on your platform of choice if you wish by using the links below.

iOS:

https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ally.me%2Fbeta%2Fios&data=05%7C02%7Cstuart.lawler%40sightandsoundtechnology.ie%7C5e499efbe8454c7763e108dd317b730e%7C9d76d91d0dda48c3aa025a7a6056bfc0%7C0%7C0%7C638721128478320082%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=sAm8xDvDxd8kOTkfRFEHv%2BfJqXCbrxVMr%2Fh31YOKSlI%3D&reserved=0

Android:

https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ally.me%2Fbeta%2Fandroid&data=05%7C02%7Cstuart.lawler%40sightandsoundtechnology.ie%7C5e499efbe8454c7763e108dd317b730e%7C9d76d91d0dda48c3aa025a7a6056bfc0%7C0%7C0%7C638721128478347137%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=l0%2FOG72Jaaf3tvPpvZT02w3Ys1ObCQTB%2FeUxsr%2FTY4Y%3D&reserved=0

Our friends from Blazie Engineering have just released a new and exciting application called Blazie Agent, that allows you to use Chat GPT from anywhere on your computer, as long as you have the JAWS screen reader running. Stuart is joined by Blazie's Kelvin Duncan to learn more.

As we join in the world-wide celebrations of 200 years of Braille here at Sight and Sound Technology, we’re delighted to introduce another Braille device to our portfolio. Paige Connect transforms the classic Perkins Brailler for instant translation and gamified learning on any device.

Stuart meets with Gregory Hargraves from Paige Braille to find out more.

Alan Taylor has recently joined our Scottish team to head up our training function north of the border. Stuart meets Alan to find out a little about him and his role.