Unmute Presents Ben.Vision Apps

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00:04.680 –> 00:22.822
Hey, all. Welcome back to another unmute. And today we have something special for you. We have the guys from Ben Vision here, and they’re going to tell us all about what their company is, what they do, the apps they’re developing, what’s out in public beta as of now. And so, Patrick, how you doing?

00:22.998 –> 00:25.238
Hey, pretty good, Marty. Thanks for having us on.

00:25.326 –> 00:30.084
Yeah, no problem. So, why don’t you start out by introducing your developer?

00:30.244 –> 00:35.612
Oh, yeah, yeah. So our CTO is here on the call with me. His name is Vaze.

00:35.788 –> 00:37.788
Hey. Hi, everyone. Nice to meet you.

00:37.916 –> 00:47.860
So, Patrick, why don’t you just start talking about and letting people know about the company as a whole and what you guys do and how you got started and all that kind of good stuff?

00:48.012 –> 03:19.074
Totally, yeah. So we were originally, we were a hackathon project at the MIT reality hack 2023, the prestigious one and only. And so the reason that we’re called Ben Vision actually ties into our product. So Ben Underwood was our inspiration. Ben Underwood’s a man that. Well, he’s dead now, unfortunately, but he was a young man that taught himself how to use echolocation after cancer took his eyesight away. And we thought that if the human brain already has this capability to learn a technique like echolocation, couldn’t we use this amazing technology we have at our hands to meet the brain somewhere halfway and allow people to extrapolate information from maybe more intuitive cues, rather than just beeps and clicks? We thought, what if we used music? And what if we communicated information about objects through music? That was sort of our hypothesis for our hackathon project, and it turned out it worked better than even we expected. So we picked up an award from the MIT reality hack Gelda, working together for inclusion and equity. And because of all the excitement surrounding that, we decided to continue the project. And eventually we made it a startup. And so that’s our flagship product. It’s called Ben, the binaural experience navigator. And we’re still working on that one. That one’s still enclosed alpha. And we’re doing testing right now. We’ve been testing it all around the states in focus groups at different charities for the blind. But right now, what we’ve just released is a beta of an ancillary product that we call Speakaboo. And speak a boo is similar to some other products or features and other products that are already out on the market, where you essentially have AI assistant in your pocket that you can ask it questions about your environment, and it will reply to you. One of the things that’s really special about speak a boo is that it’s lightning fast. It replies within 3 seconds or less. And I understand that both you and Michael, Marty, you guys have both had a chance to try it.

03:19.414 –> 04:13.754
I did, yeah. I have been playing with it and I will say a couple things that stand out right away to me is definitely the speed of the app. It’s really fast. So that’s really cool. And the second thing that really stood out to me was there’s a lot of apps that do a very similar thing out there, but they’re always in some sort of an app that’s like a swiss army knife. It has, you know, a bunch of things in the app and they all do those things. Okay. Not any one thing. Absolutely amazing. So I respect the fact that you guys are taking one thing and making it work fast and trying to make that just a standalone app that does one thing really well. Instead of a swiss army knife, that makes things like a bunch of things that you could do, but they just do them. Okay.

04:15.134 –> 04:50.624
Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. One thing I think that sets us apart from other teams is that we’re very design centric. We’re a team of designers before we’re developers. We’re designers first. And especially vase. He’s taken a very user forward approach in developing this application. And we want our products to feel like you’re not even using an application at all. It should just feel like it’s already integrated with your daily life. And so that was sort of our thinking behind that.

04:51.284 –> 05:16.264
And is it make you at all nervous or maybe it’s a little bit scary to put out a product that’s so similar to so many other products out there. How do you feel when, okay, we’re going to do a product that we know there’s already very. A lot of similarity to a lot of other apps out there, but you’re going to just go for it anyway. I mean, where was your mindset on that?

05:16.384 –> 06:30.444
Oh, Marty, everything makes me nervous. But yeah, I mean, obviously we don’t want to do like shops fired or anything on any of the other great solutions that are out there. You know, there’s things that are great about those guys as well. But what we, we tried the other applications that are out there, this feature on other apps, and we found that a, the wait time just didn’t really make sense in some cases. I was waiting like 30 or 60 seconds for a response and like, what are you supposed to do in that time? Like you could get hit by a car in that time if you’re standing in the wrong place. The other thing is that, yeah, the user interface, we thought it could use a couple of improvements. For example, we realized if you’re using an application like this, that’s giving you information about your surroundings, you probably want to be able to see as much of your surroundings, or you want the app to be able to see as much of your surroundings as it can, which is why it defaults to the ultra wide lens, for example. And perhaps vase could speak on a couple of those other points that differentiate us from the other products.

06:30.984 –> 08:43.674
Yeah, those are great. Two things to talk about, definitely. Ultra wide lens helps a lot to have as many things as you have in the environment for the AI assistant to see and help you with. But in general, it’s like what you are seeing about swiss army knife and being like a lot of features. Then you have to kind of dig down the app, try to understand where all the features lie. It seems like there’s a very different approach to an interface design, where it’s pretty clean and it’s a seamless integration into how you use the app, but for a lot of different use cases. So we were very, very excited to launch this with the specific use case of asking questions about your environment or getting a quick, quick understanding of what’s around you. But we are also planning to do a lot of different things, but trying to keep in mind that it has to be going through a single interface design. So we don’t want everybody to be confused about navigating through the app and finding different functions. So I think a lot of apps previously did, like optical character recognition, like OCR, or object detection and things like that. Those are all very separate. But what makes this visual assistant agent very special is that it can. It has a somewhat understanding of all these different and different characteristics of an image, and it can combine them in an intelligent way to help you with something which these different features might not be able to. For example, trying to understand the layout of an elevator buttons, or trying to ask specific questions about different information, which might be like in a visual chart, or like asking questions about object when you’re trying to purchase something at a grocery store. So it’s more like it’s kind of mix and match of a lot of things which visual information can provide with you, but rather than going through each and everything, you can ask a question, and it could intelligently provide you with the information that you need.

08:44.734 –> 09:05.094
So when you guys started, the first app, which is the flagship app, which is not quite out yet for beta, but you guys are working on it. What made you decide to keep accessibility in mind with all of the rest of the apps that you’re doing and just stick completely in the accessibility space?

09:05.634 –> 10:57.834
Yeah, yeah. That goes back to the original hackathon project. We had all sort of banded together, wanting to do something that would be for the better of the world, something impact related. And this hackathon in particular, it was all in dealing with virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality, spatial computing. There’s a million names for it now. But what we realized was a common trait of this industry is that largely the visually impaired community was being left behind when it came to these applications or these games. And it wasn’t for nefarious reasons. It’s just a very visual centric medium. You’re wearing this pair of goggles strapped onto your face. It’s all very focused on what your eyes are seeing. And so we realized that there’s a gap there, that there’s an entire section of the US population that’s not being considered when these applications are being developed. So we wanted to. Our initial idea was that we just wanted to create something that a blind or visually impaired person could enjoy. We weren’t even concerning ourselves so much about the functionality at that point. We really just wanted to give them a reason to want to put on an XR headset. And now, as you know, now it’s graduated to a mobile app, so that’ll be more accessible for more people. But, yeah, that was sort of our initial idea, was we just wanted to create something enjoyable. And by accident, almost, when we showed this to our advisor, who visually impaired himself, he told us that he thinks that we should try to take it to market because there’s a huge. Not only is it enjoyable, but it could actually help a lot of people in terms of navigation and mobility.

10:58.254 –> 11:43.054
Yeah, it’s really cool. And you also save a ton of money for both sides of it. So for you guys as developers, and also for the community, if it’s not having to worry about any kind of hardware, like you were saying, with the glasses or goggles type things over your eyes, this makes it a lot more accessible to a lot more people by, you know, everyone already has a phone already, so you’re already way ahead of the game and you’re not needing to worry about managing hardware and all that stuff as well. So I think it’s really great. It also keeps the cost down, too, for people who need a tool like this without having to spend all that money on hardware.

11:43.434 –> 12:00.154
Absolutely. Yeah. That was one of the first things we learned through our research is that if we actually want to reach the community that we’re trying to reach, we need to find a way to bring it to them and not, not force them to buy a couple thousand dollars piece of hardware. So I appreciate that.

12:00.614 –> 12:13.674
Yeah, definitely. So with the current app that’s out now, Peekaboo, which just launched into public beta, why don’t you talk about that? And if people want to get involved and try it out, let people know how they can get involved.

12:13.974 –> 14:32.014
Yeah. Yeah. So speak a boo is it is now in public beta. You know, some of, some of my favorite ways to use it is if you’re trying to find, like the entrance to a building or if you’re at a hotel and you want to make sure that you’re standing outside the right hotel room, really good for that kind of stuff. If you’re, like, looking at a menu and you want to know if they have your favorite menu item, like, what’s great about it is that it contextualizes all your information. Right? It doesn’t just read it to you front to back, but it actually understands the context. So you can ask it very more specific things. You could even get opinion related answers out of it. For example, if you’re trying to pick out an outfit for the day and you want to know which pair of shorts goes best with the stylish shirt that you’re wearing or something, it can help you with that. So the greatest thing about it is also one of the biggest challenges is that there’s so many possibilities that it kind of creates a little bit of a fire hose effect. And sometimes it’s a little bit is a little overwhelming to try to think of a question to ask it, which is why there’s also a basic feature where you just tap the button, or you double tap the button if you’re using voiceover, in the end, it just reads out a simple description to you. But anyway, so, yeah, speakaboo is available today as open beta. So all you need to do is head on over to our website. That’s Ben vision. If you add the extension. If you do Ben vision speakaboo, then that’ll take you straight to the speak a boo landing page where you can find a button to fill out a short form to gain access to the beta. And yeah, we’re just trying to get it out into the hands of as many people as we can because we realized that with this app, we’re actually filling, we’re filling a small gap that’s been left behind by some of the others. So we think, and we hope that this could help a lot of people while we ready beta ban for its next public release.

14:32.554 –> 14:54.034
Awesome. Well, if you guys are interested in being a part of this and trying out the beta, go fill out the form on the website and reduce your feedback. And hopefully we can make this app really, really great with the help of the developers as well as everybody in the community. And we appreciate you guys coming out. And thank you so much for being here.

14:54.454 –> 14:56.390
Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

14:56.582 –> 14:57.554
Thank you.

14:57.894 –> 15:09.974
Yeah, no problem. And hopefully we’ll have you back on again as the other apps become public beta and then come out of beta as well. So, thanks everyone. We appreciate it, and we’ll see you next time.