Alexa’s Got Attitude: A Funny Blind Level Tech Roundup on Apple, Spotify, Windows & BrailleSense 7

Aftersight Host (00:00.398)
This is Blind Level Tech, where accessibility, innovation, and humor all come together like a nice sandwich. I'm your host, Evan Starnes, and it is the fourth Wednesday of March already, which is for me hard to believe personally, but as you all know, by this point, on the last Wednesday of every month, I like to go and collect a few different tech news stories, both from the

mainstream and assistive technology worlds and highlight them and get, you know, put a little BLT spin on these particular stories. And I say this because I don't want to, because I'd also like to mention an audio edition that we've had out for a while now and audio editions effectively are volunteer read newspapers, magazines, know, print material that

traditionally would be inaccessible if you're blind or have low vision. And it's, you know, it's our main service that we've been doing for, well, since the beginning in 1991. And I'm sure a lot of people know that, but if you just happen to discover us on a podcast platform and, know, maybe this is one of the first podcasts of ours that you're listening to, that is another service that we offer and it's been our main one. So.

I only say that because I'd like to highlight a program that we've done called Tech Pulse.

Top Tech Tidbits, Wired, CNETS, and a couple of other tech news sources. the difference is, know, we're talking about different pieces of tech news. This is more actually articles and read content. So if you wanna actually hear some of what is covered on this show, but you wanna hear the original source content, Tech Pulse is definitely a great place to get some of that. And it is available on our website.

Aftersight Host (02:05.918)
and major streaming platforms. Okay, that aside, we've got a lot of tech news, especially mainstream to talk about. So let's just go ahead and jump right in so that we don't end up with a super long episode. And let's go ahead and start in a nice alphabetical order with mainstream tech and Amazon because recently Amazon just unveiled

a new feature for Alady Plus and that is the ability to change its personality style. You may have seen this if you've been a chat GPT user for some time now as they kind of rolled out a similar feature a couple of months ago, but Amazon's feature allows you to change your personality from the original to a chill personality, a more short personality that doesn't talk as much, a

Sweet personality that's a lot more positive and a forming and my favorite a sassy mode, which I am excited to try. And the sassy mode is a little different than the others because well, number one, you have to prove that you are over 18 in order to use that feature. So if your Echo is connected to an Amazon account and if Amazon kids is enabled on it, well, you can't really use that personality type.

And the reason is because this personality, well, you know how Alexa is, or you know how a lady typically can be as far as, you know, she'll answer your questions and she has some humor, but you know, she's generally pretty professional in a sense. Well, this completely flips the script and she's a lot more sarcastic, a lot more sharp.

She'll still answer your questions but might add some occasional remarks or maybe she'll roast you. You can roast her. But of course, the reason that they are making this an 18 and older type of personality is because, well, she might occasionally swear. And I have from the videos I've heard it isn't too excessive, but it's definitely not something you would want your kids to accidentally discover and enable.

Aftersight Host (04:30.766)
I will be trying this feature out though and if I find anything of note I'll be sure to talk about it or I don't think we could do a BLT byte on it unfortunately but either way if you like if you are a user of a lady plus and you want to change your smart speakers personality just say a lady or your wake word change your personality and she will give you all of the different options that I just discussed

I'd be interested to hear you all's results from messing around with this feature. It's always fun to hear any sort of tech observations or stories or things that you might have discovered. if you have anything notable to share, especially related to Alexa or any sort of tech, just a reminder, always send an email to feedback at aftersite.org or leave it in a voicemail at 720-712-8856.

but it is nice to see that Amazon is giving you the option to really tailor your A-Lady Plus experience even more so. Apple has recently had a pretty heavy focus on the business and education market. You may remember a few weeks ago, us talking about the MacBook Neo that just released, the $600 MacBook with an iPhone chip inside, and that computer has had a lot of good

You know, it seems to have had a lot of positive feedback. I have confirmed that it does in a lot of cases outperform the original M1 MacBook released in 2020 and

It's also very repairable, you know, for IT departments. It's still not quite the easiest. It uses like proprietary pentalobe type screws, but it's a lot easier to, you know, open up and replace parts in compared to some of their older MacBooks. And honestly, if you're just, you know, the average user writing documents, maybe working with spreadsheets, browsing the web, even doing some light productivity work, I think, you know, it could handle logic.

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Somebody actually did edit a 4k video on it if you're doing stuff like that I mean this Mac, you know if you're in the market for a new MacBook This is a very very solid option for the price and I'm really hoping that they'll you know I imagine that they'll they're trying to you know kind of take some of the pie from Google because you know Chromebooks have basically dominated classrooms for years now, so would be interesting to see if maybe Apple kind of starts to

get into that space a little more. They used to be, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, Apple computers were in all sorts of classrooms and computer labs and things, yeah, hopefully, yeah, we'll see if they end up taking back the education market. But also, if you are a business owner and you're looking to switch your suite for, you know, your suite of business tools, like, you know, document, email, et cetera, Apple business is now free.

And that includes things like having a business email domain. you know, like after site.org, you know, all of the I work tools like pages, numbers, keynote, iCloud, all are all now free. So if you're starting a small business or you're looking to switch your software tools, now is the time and you've wanted to go the Apple route for a while. Well, now is the time to go ahead and do that because

They didn't list if it's going to be free indefinitely or if it's just kind of a temporary promo, but either way, it is cool to see, you know, they are really trying to help promote businesses. And in fact, they're doing this even more so through a thing in Apple Maps that if you hear this now, you know, it might sound, you know, there might be a bit of a negative connotation, but Apple Maps is also going to be rolling out

advertisements but these are advertisements that are local ads so they won't pop up if you're in the middle of trying to navigate to a destination but you know you will see maybe a sponsored result here and there if you're searching for a business or there's going to be a new tab that can recommend places nearby to you and in that tab there will at least be one or two sponsored results by local businesses but

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This gives local businesses the opportunity to both promote and also track their effectiveness of their advertising. So if you're a small mom and pop business and you want to promote yourself to any locals, you can create an ad and have it set up to pop up in the Apple Maps app. You can track how many people click on it. You can even integrate options such as if you're a restaurant, you can have hyperlinks to allow you to order or reserve a spot.

there's a lot of flexibility with this program. you know, initially my thinking was that it would just be all sorts, you know, it'd just be like pop up ads and stuff, but fortunately that is not the case. So, and Google maps has been doing this for a while now. So I, it's not, so if you've used Google maps, it should look, you know, it, should be pretty familiar. Apple recently also announced the new AirPods Max 2.

and they did announce a USB-C version of the original AirPod Max's a couple of years ago, but they have finally upgraded the original AirPods Max 2 with a lot of the new features that you would find in the second gen and newer AirPods Pro, including live translate, camera control, better noise cancellation, and the thing I'm really excited to try out, studio mics. And

I'm not sure if I'll be able to get a pair of these headphones, but maybe it's time to finally upgrade my original lightning pair of AirPods Max. Maybe, but they're, selling for the same price price point as they did before. And of course they are USB-C. It would be, I don't know why they would make a lightning version, but they have similar designs. So you still have the, the digital crown and the long

flat button used to cycle between noise cancellation, transparency, and off. And I believe there is now the adaptive transparency mode that was found in the AirPods Pro second generation. Spotify just recently introduced what they call song DNA and it is a beta feature, but it is accessible to anybody that to to all Spotify users and to access it.

Aftersight Host (11:32.054)
If you're listening to a song, tap the now playing view at the bottom, which will expand your little, your playback controls. And if supported, there will be a song DNA button. And if you tap that, you'll get information not only about the artist, but any artists that may have collaborated with said artist, or maybe if the song that you're listening to is somehow based off of another song, or if it samples part of another song or interpolates it.

so.

So it kind of helps connect that particular song that you're listening to together with other songs, with other artists. And if you want to learn more about an artist or if you want to, if you're curious why a song you're listening to sounds so familiar to you, but yet you can't quite trace it, this feature will definitely answer some of those questions. At least for me, it probably lead to hours spent on Spotify.

Windows 11's from Microsoft has been, well, a little bit rocky. But Microsoft has announced some features that I'm sure the tech community will love, including things like rolling back copilot integration in apps like Notepad, widgets, snipping tool, and photos, and being more intentional with where they would like to insert AI.

They are reintroducing the movable task bar, was originally removed in Windows 11. This was more, you know, if you're a low vision user, being able to move the task bar out of the way or to the top of the screen or wherever you'd like it. I could see it would be a pretty beneficial feature. that is, they they will read, they are reintroducing that feature and they will be lessening the force restarts.

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due to Windows updates as well. if you're in the middle of something, you shouldn't get the, it's time for an update message nearly as frequently. They're also promising faster performance and more stability across all apps and services in Windows 11. Lastly, in mainstream news, the, this is a pretty big one. The FCC has just recently issued a ban on the sale of all routers

not made in the United States. And they're doing this for, the reason they're doing this according to them is for national security. If you already have a router that was not made in the United States, no worries at all. You can still keep on using that router. There's nothing about it will be affected. It's more of a matter of if you're buying a brand new router.

And I'm not sure how many routers are made here in the United States. So I'm, I would be curious to see what this does as far as, you know, the ease of acquiring a new router. And usually a lot of people, myself included, get routers from your internet service providers. So I don't know if this means there'll be more of a cost to acquiring routers, but either way.

They just issued this ban Monday. now jumping over to assistive technology news. Remember the HABLE or the HABLE-1 device that we talked about a while ago? If not, that's completely okay. You know, and just as a refresher, was a, or it's a little handheld Braille Bluetooth keyboard that you can connect to your phone and you can type or navigate around the screen and do voiceover commands with it.

but now the same company has unveiled Speakable. And Speakable is an app that allows you to use either NFC or QR code tags and record voice labels on them. And the voice labels are stored in the cloud and they're tied to your account. But one thing that differentiates this product from others like it is that you're now able, is that you're able to set these particular voice labels

Aftersight Host (15:50.794)
as public and that means that if anybody with the speakable app comes up to your voice label and identifies it, they'll also hear your recording. So this is definitely ideal for public buildings, schools, museums, know, any place where you might want to have information in an accessible form.

but you don't necessarily want to, you know, put it in braille, this is a good alternative. And the sticker packs are about 20 to 25 dollars a piece.

and everything is all just done on the phone itself with the speakable app. BMIOS has also recently announced a new partnership with Meta to help train their multi-modal AI models to be more inclusive and to work better for the blind and low vision community. And this last one is pretty, it's pretty lengthy, but if you do remember the last tech news episode we did, I

briefly mentioned the BrailleNote Evolve and I'd also mentioned the Hymns Company or Selvis BLV, the makers of the BrailleSense, mostly because I was kind of curious, are they going to come out with a competitor to the BrailleNote Evolve? Are they going to come out with a BrailleSense 7? And no less than a few days after releasing that episode, I heard the news and actually one of my friends that attended CSUN got to play with a BrailleSense 7 and may have pre-ordered one.

to but so that means I might be able to demo it but the Braille sense 7 has a number of improvements from the Braille sense 6 one of them is a new 40 cell option previously you could only get the Braille sense 6 in 20 or 32 cells but that 8 cells does make a difference and I miss it myself you know having a Braille edge before you know like back in middle

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middle and high school. That was a 4D cell display and reading on that was a dream. They have a new feature in the Braille display as well called Active Responsive Touch or ARTS. What this does is allows the display to track exactly where your fingers are along the display and when your finger reaches the end, the Braille display will automatically refresh to the next line.

making it pretty similar to reading a standard Braille book. And they've also introduced a new scroll wheel, which the concept isn't new. We've had scroll wheels in things like the BrailleNote Apex and the Whiz Wheels that were found in the Packmate, but this is definitely a nice upgrade as it will allow you to quickly scroll through text, menu items, whatever you might want to scroll through.

or you're trying to read through a list very, very quickly, this should make that a lot easier. There's also new Google Gemini integration and to access the Gemini Assistant now, you can press and hold the home button on the Braille Sense 7. They've also integrated NVDA remote into the Braille Sense. So therefore that gives you remote screen reader control from your Braille note taker, as long as you're running NVDA that is.

There's also a new dedicated dictation button that uses Google's Gemini. We're now on Android 15 as opposed to Android 13. They've upgraded to 8 gigs of RAM and they've upgraded the internal storage from 64 to 256 gigabytes. It sounds like from what I read, they also got rid of the full sized SD card slot in favor of a micro SD card slot.

And if you're, so if you're like me and you're still using the same little SD card that you had in your Braille Edge from years ago with all your Bookshare books on it, you might need to consider moving all of that content over to either the internal memory or to a micro SD card. But honestly, I don't think it's a huge deal. Most devices out there nowadays don't even have a full-sized SD card slot really and pretty much anything from

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Android tablets to cameras and recorders and even laptops have a micro SD card slot on it. And this is exciting for me. When Selvis unveiled the Sense Player a couple of years ago, it had something in it that I was really surprised they didn't put in the Braille Sense or even the Braille Emotion, and that is a Taptic Vibrator. In simple terms, it's the difference between having a spinning motor versus having

a little thing that oscillates back and forth. And the exciting part about this now is that you'll be able to get Taptic feedback on your Braille Sense and you can synchronize the Taptic vibrator with your music, which was a feature that was introduced in the Sense player. So it's really cool to see that this feature is now part of the Braille Sense as well. Lastly, they've included an optional detachable QWERTY keyboard. So

If you're not as familiar with the Braille keyboard or you just enjoy the Korty experience a lot more, then this keyboard will attach directly to the Braille Sense 7. And I'm really happy about this mostly because they, know, in previous years, was, Hymns did have several different iterations of some of their Braille senses, especially the U2. They had the Braille Sense U2, the U2 Mini, and those had

the Braille 6.Braille keyboard, but they also had a BrailleSense U2 QWERTY. But then when the Polaris and the 6 came out, they only had the Braille models. And it had always perplexed me because, you know, I know that there are some people that still do want to have that, the ability to read Braille and work with it, but they don't necessarily want to type or interact with the device using the Braille keyboard.

So this is a welcome improvement and I'm not sure if it comes standard with your BrailleSense or if you have to get it as an accessory. Anyways, with that being said, we have come to the end of our tech news and updates for Blind Level Tech. And if you've got any particular stories or tips that you picked up or that you would like to share with us, as I said, you know, please leave it.

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at feedback at aftersite.org or if you'd rather leave it in a voicemail form, you can do that by calling 720-712-8856. I hope you all enjoyed listening to this episode of Blind Level Check. Thank you guys so much for coming back every single week and giving us a listen, giving us your feedback. You know, if you've been on the show, it's been fun to have you on. And with that being said,

I've been your host, Evan Starnes, and I'll see you in a future episode.