ATU745 – Ally Updates and More from Envision with Karthik Kannan

Hi, this is Karthik Kannan, and I am the co-founder and CTO of Envision. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to episode 745 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on September 5th, 2025. Thank you so much for listening, folks, and let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Listeners, we are super excited to welcome Karthik, CTO and co-founder of Envision, back to our show. Now, Karthik’s been on a few times and he’s been nice enough in the past to talk about Envision and the updates and advancements that they’ve been making. Well, there’s a lot to catch up on today and we are excited to learn more. Karthik, welcome back to the show.

Thank you so much for having me here, Josh. Super excited to be here and talk about all the things that we’re working on.

Oh, I am too. I am too. Before we get into that, for listeners who haven’t heard you on here before, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

So, my name is Karthik. I’m the co-founder and CTO of Envision. We basically build tools with AI that help people who are blind or low vision to live more independently. We’ve been, over the years, working on the Envision AI app, which a lot of you might be aware of. And then we introduced the Envision Glasses, which basically is a pair of smart glasses with a camera and a speaker on it that helps you to take pictures of things around you and describes them to you in a hands-free manner.

And this year we launched the Ally app. Ally is a free app, it’s available on iOS, Android, and the web. It helps you to, again, read things, get descriptions of what’s around you in a very accurate and detailed way, recognize spaces, recognize objects around you, look up the weather, help you with organizing your calendar, and search the internet for you. And you don’t have to do anything more than ask Ally to do these things for you.

The beauty of Ally is you just hit a button and you ask Ally to do something for you and it does to you, and it answers your question. So, Ally is a very simple conversational AI assistant that responds to your question, picks the right tools behind the scenes, and so on. And yeah, we’re going to be talking about something completely new today, basically an extension of Ally. So yeah, that’s basically what we do.

Awesome. And just to talk about Ally just a little bit more for folks who don’t really know, you mentioned it’s conversational. Can you explain how the conversation works a little bit?

Sure. So, it’s just like talking to any other human, right? Except that this is not a human, it’s an AI, and that part is pretty obvious when you start talking to Ally.

What happens essentially is that you’ve got the Ally app, and within the Ally app you just have two buttons. You have Talk to Ally and Text Ally, and you can hit the Talk to Ally button and it just connects to a call, quote, unquote, “a call.” And it’s an AI assistant, Ally essentially on the other side. And you can just have a conversation. You can say, “Hey, Ally, can you tell me what’s around me?” Or, “Hey Ally, can you scan this menu and tell me what the vegan appetizers are?” Or, you could show it a letter and ask Ally to summarize it for you. If you’re outside, you could use Ally to read text. You could use Ally to get descriptions of things around you. And Ally is extremely detail oriented, so you can go ahead and ask it to give you very detailed descriptions of what’s happening around you in real time.

So, all of these things happen really fast. So, just like how you and I are having a conversation, the delay is as minimal as possible. And apart from using voice, you can also text Ally. So, you can talk to Ally by just sending messages back and forth, pretty much like what you might do with something like ChatGPT.

Awesome. Awesome. And Ally kind of learns from you and becomes a little personalized as you use it. Is that correct?

Yes. So, the beauty of Ally is that you can give it a little bit of a biography about you, give it a backstory saying, “Hey, my name is Karthik and I live here. And I’m somebody who likes to play sports. And I’m vegan, and I’m…” So on and so forth. You can go into a lot of detail and Ally always remembers that, and you could keep adding to that as much as you want.

And the other part of Ally is you can also give Ally personalities, and this makes using Ally really fun. So, you can create as many Allies as you like, right? And each Ally can come with a very distinct personality. Like, when I’m at home or when I’m outside or outside of work, I have an Ally who’s called Dali, and he’s a foul-mouthed, British comedian from the ’30s who’s always drunk. And he says things which you do not want to hear in a workplace.

Sure.

And in the workplace, I have somebody who is modeled after Alfred from the Batman comics. He’s more demure. He’s got this British accent and he’s got this warm tone in his voice. And when the day gets really chaotic, I can just rely on Alfred to keep me on track, you know?

Yes.

So, I can go ahead and use Ally that way. So, people have created wildly different characters. I know people have created characters inspired by Bart Simpson, and so on.

And the beauty of Ally is that not only does it respond to you, text in terms of the things it says, but in also the way it says is adapted to the personality and the communication style as well. We just pushed out a recent update where the voices also start to sound more like the personality. So, you’ve got about 10 different voices that you can pick from, right? And these voices take on the character that you give it. And this has been a recent advancement in AI that we’ve been able to make use of.

So, the text-to-speech engines don’t have a flat tone when they speak to you, right? When they deliver the text. It just starts to adapt. So, if you have a pirate, it takes on a slightly more raspier tone of voice. If it’s, like I said, Alfred from … An English butler type, then the voice gets a bit more baritone, gets slower and deeper, right? And it speaks in a very unhurried fashion. So, these are things that we launched recently and people are loving it. Yeah.

Most definitely. Well, I mean, because you brought up the conversational style of it, so yeah, being able to have an actual personality, not just … Even if something does know you, but it always kind of talks in the same voice and maybe doesn’t have the inflection in the other pieces, just what an extra level to add for something that’s super helpful as well.

Yeah. No, I think it’s something that I thought would be a bit of a gimmick. In the very beginning, this whole personalization felt like, oh, we are trying to do something to just set us apart, but I’ve realized over time that people actually like this. It adds not just a sense of realism, but it just makes it more dynamic. Every time you open your Ally, it always greets you differently. It’s not the same, “Hi. Hello. How are you doing?” Kind of a thing that you might get with other AI assistants that are more generic. This can be very dynamic in the way it responds to you, and it always sticks to the personality that you give it.

So, it’s something that I think people come to enjoy, the dynamism, the fact that, well, every time I open the app and I want to talk to Ally, and even if it’s something as mundane as reading a document or trying to translate something for you, just having it personalized makes it a bit more interesting, a bit more nicer to use.

Oh, most definitely. Most definitely. And so, you’ve been using Ally with some museums. Can you tell me where the idea behind this came from?

Yeah. I think from the very beginning, I think I’ve heard a lot of people ever since I started working on Envision about eight years ago, there have been many places that are inaccessible for a blind or low-vision person without sighted help, right? And museums are one such places, because if you are somebody who’s blind or low vision that want to go to a museum, you’re often kind of isolated from the artwork in a big way. Right? You need to have somebody to either tell you about the artwork or you buy one of those really expensive audio guides, and there’s really no sense of interaction with the artwork when you use those audio guides, right? And many of these audio guides are not even programmed for accessibility, they’re not built for accessibility. When they describe a painting or when they describe a piece of art, they usually miss out on details that are important for a blind or low-vision person. Right?

And that’s when as Ally became more and more popular and more people started to use Ally, it became apparent to us that, wait a second, we can take the same things that we have actually built for a general audience and go to museums and say, “If you give us descriptions of your artwork, we will work with expert blind and low-vision groups and we’ll convert those descriptions into accessible audio descriptions and then build them into Ally.”

And so, now what happens is a blind or low-vision person will walk into a museum, scan a QR code, get Ally on their phones, right? They don’t have to install an app. They don’t have to sign up. They don’t have to give any of their details. It’s just a simple app that opens inside your Safari or Chrome on your phone. And all you have to do is just point at an artwork and say, “Hey, can you describe this for me?” And Ally looks at the artwork, understands what artwork you’re talking about, recognizes it for you, and then gives you a description, and you can have a back-and-forth conversation about the artwork, right?

That’s nice.

That stuff is very special, because all of a sudden you have accessible audio descriptions, right? But at the same time, you can have a really rich experience in a museum without any kind of sighted assistance. In fact, you will probably have a richer experience in a museum than a sighted person might, right? Because you’re able to just have this back-and-forth conversation and get all of this additional information you want about the artwork, right? And all of a sudden, museums just don’t have to be a place you should avoid going, right? When there’s a new exhibit in town, you could just go into a museum knowing that Ally can actually do these things for you, right?

And we work with museums to enable this. And that’s basically the starting point for Ally. And we’ve got two pilots today in the San Francisco Bay Area. So, we’ve got one with the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, and the other with the Asian Arts Museum that is live as of now. The people can actually go out and try this experience fully for free. There’s no need to pay for this stuff at all.

Nice. That’s awesome. And Karthik, you brought up a good point. You said this is probably a richer experience than sighted individuals would really get as far as the information and everything else. So, I have to assume that while Ally was made by Envision and had folks who were blind or low vision in mind, this is probably pretty helpful to anyone in the museum. Is that correct?

That is correct. I think the beauty of building accessible products is that they’re not just accessible for people with certain disabilities, but for everybody as well, right? And that’s essentially what Ally for Museums is. It’s a tool that anybody and everybody can use, because we all want to know more about the artwork, we all want to ask questions, we all want to dive deeper. And now it’s completely possible to do that. Right?

Oh, yeah. I absolutely love it. That’s great to make those more accessible for everybody.

Well, we also had you on because you’ve got something else really cool coming out, and that’s Ally built into Solos glasses. Can you tell us about these?

That’s actually another thing that I’m very, very excited about. When we launched the Envision Glasses five years ago, it had a bunch of discrete … It was like a Swiss Army knife of sorts for AI tools, right? So, within the Envision Glasses, you had a menu and you had to scroll through the menu and you activated different functions on the glasses individually, right?

It was a hands-free experience, but the recent advances in AI, especially after the whole ChatGPT revolution came out, it became very apparent to us that this can be made simpler and more powerful at the same time. Right? Usually, when you make something simple, you kind of give up a little bit on how capable it can be, but this is actually the one time where you can make something dramatically simpler but also more powerful. And that’s when we started to look at other wearables, right?

And we had a few things that we wanted to hit. One, the cost of the wearables should not be more than $500. We wanted to ensure that this technology gets accessible to more and more people. When we launched the Envision Glasses, we were 50% cheaper than what was the closest possible competition at that time. Right? And now we wanted to slash it down even further. So, the Ally Solos glasses starts off at $399.

That’s niece.

Right? Secondly, we wanted to have much better cameras than what we currently have on the Envision Glasses. So, these are full HD cameras, and they’re super lightweight. They’re about 42 grams, which is about one and a half ounces. And they come with an all-day battery. So, they come with about 10 hours of battery built into them.

Nice.

Right? And third thing, you should be able to connect to your smartphone easily, and that’s it, right? The only thing you’ll have to do when you first put on a pair of these glasses should be just connecting to a smartphone and then not worrying about it anymore, just like how you connect your Apple Watch to your iPhone, or you connect to AirPods to your iPhone and then you forget about it?

Mm-hmm.

That’s essentially what we wanted to do here, right?

Nice.

So, with the Ally Solos glasses, you can just put them on and then you can just pair it with your phone once and you could go ahead and use Ally after that completely, right? And there are no menus for you to learn. There is no complicated way of setting it up. And you don’t have to connect separately to the hotspot or to Wi-Fi on your device. You don’t have to worry about losing connectivity when you’re outside. As long as your phone is with you, the glasses will work, right?

And you can just put on the glasses and literally have a conversation with it. So, when you’re outside at the supermarket, you could just say, “Hey, Ally, can you read this for me?” And Ally will go ahead and read it for you. If you’re outside, walking, and you want to get descriptions of what’s happening around you, you can just say, “Hey, Ally, describe what’s happening around me in detail.” Right? Or, you could simply go ahead and even you have a document in front of you, you could say, “Hey, Ally, just summarize this document for me.” Right? And you just ask it to do things and it does it for you, and there is no menus and buttons and those kind of things that you have to worry about.

Nice.

And that is basically what the Ally Solos glasses are, and they’re available … We started pre-orders on the 14th of August, and people can go ahead and purchase them right now, and we start shipping towards the end of September.

Perfect. No, that’s absolutely great. How does the sound get from the glasses to my ears, so that I can have the conversation with Ally?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, the Ally Solos glasses have two cameras on them, and next to your ears are two high-quality speakers. Right?

Nice.

And the glasses do come with mics built into them as well. So, you can hear what Ally is saying and you can also speak to it.

Nice.

And these headphones are special in the sense that you could be sitting indoors and you could still listen to the sound that’s coming out from the speakers, but then they are private to you alone.

Oh, nice.

People around you won’t be able to listen to them. So, there’s a special technology that the Solos team has worked on called Whisper Technology, where you still get high-quality audio from these speakers, but you don’t have to worry that people around you might be able to listen to it, right? And that’s a pretty special piece of technology.

And the cool thing about these glasses is that you can also use them as headphones. So, you can use them to make calls, you could use them to listen to music.

Nice.

And you can hook them up with your Siri or your Google Assistant and then operate your phone that way as well.

Cool. No, that’s great that I can still do all those things still with keeping my phone in my pocket or not having to have it in my hand and everything else. And then, I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this, but pretty much all the features of Ally that we talked about, if I have my glasses on, I can access all of those just straight from the glasses, is that right?

Definitely. Definitely. I think you can … Right from being able to scan documents to being able to take pictures, to looking up your calendar, to anything under the sun, right? Asking you to search the weather for you.

Everything that Ally does today and what Ally is going to do in the near future, the Ally Solos glasses can do. It’s just making sure that you can get things done without having to worry about learning how to use a new app and setting up an account and doing all of those things, right? Those are the things that we are really looking for basically.

Well, and I love because I mean, it is high-tech, let’s not lie, which is usually adopted more by younger folks or things like that, but with the ease of it, I feel like an older individual could pick them up. And I mean, with the exception of maybe pairing them, although I figure most people can probably do that these days as well. I mean, after that it’s just, like you said, there’s no menus, there’s no buttons, there’s no anything like that. It’s paired and I just ask what I want and I get it.

Yeah, no, that’s exactly the thing. And we did extensive testing with older adults who find things like smartphones and apps complicated, but even older adults who do use these technologies, right? I mean, there are older adults who really are well versed with using smartphones and technology. And so, we tested it extensively with both these groups and the current design of the glasses and the current design of Ally on these glasses is keeping in mind older adults as well, right?

So, it’s not just for people who are blind or low vision. It’s just even for the elderly who want to get things done, but without complications of having to do it all with an app, right? Because at that age, you don’t have time for these things. You just want to cut through the clutter and say, “Hey, if I have a document in front of me, can you just tell me what it says?” Right? If I’m looking at a menu, just tell me what I want to know. Or, if I’m outside at a train station, just tell me if you see a train in front of me or what is a platform number? Right?

People just want to have access to information as quickly as possible. So, this is our attempt at doing that. Right? We’re saying, “Hey, with these glasses, you can just put them on, ask questions. Doesn’t matter if you know how to use a smartphone or not.” And even the pairing process is kept very, very basic. You just have to turn the glasses on, and then when you turn the glasses on for the first time, you put them in pairing mode and then you can just open the Ally app, just go through three steps and then you’re done.

Nice. Karthik, I think I always ask you this and you always give me some good ones, but can you tell us a story or two about someone’s experiences using Ally in some kind of way or maybe one that really sticks out with you?

Yeah. No, I think one of the things that was really touching for me was the fact that we had someone who was about 85, 86 years old. Her son sent it to us after she had passed away, and she mentioned that about how she had Ally for a few weeks, right? And she was somebody who was extremely averse to using smartphones, and she still lived in that Nokia double-one, double-zero era of having button phones. So, she was most comfortable with that, but her son wanted her to try Ally and to use it.

And he mentioned about how she was initially skeptical, but she’d gone to a restaurant that day, her favorite Greek restaurant and stuff. And this was after some knee surgery that she had. She went to this Greek restaurant and she was talking about how she wanted to try out Ally, and she did not need the waiter to come and tell her what the dishes were in the menu. She just picked up the menu. She asked Ally a few questions, had a little bit of back and forth. And her son had programmed into Ally that she’s diabetic and she should be watching her sugar. So, Ally basically picked out dishes that might have worked for her, like salads or fruit salads and stuff like that. And it gave her a full list.

And she was like, “For the first time in over 20 years…” She started losing her vision slowly over the last 20 years. And she was like, “For the first time in two decades, I’m actually able to sit in a restaurant that I’ve gone to before, and just order by myself without having to tell or ask for help.” Because they keep changing the menus and she’s like, “Ah, she asked for this dish, but it’s not there,” and so on. But it’s the fact that she could just do that by herself. And she felt that in her last days, she had a lot of independence with Ally. That’s one thing.

I think another is, for me, what’s very interesting is Ally in workplaces, right? I often hear about people when they get presentations, right? They have these office presentations sometimes, and what often happens is it’s a PowerPoint slide and you’ve got this PowerPoint slide, and you basically have to go through the PowerPoint slide beforehand if you want to actually participate in discussions as a blind or low-vision person, right? And these PowerPoint slides aren’t the most accessible.

So, we’ve had users tell us about how when they get these PowerPoint slides sent, and it does contain things like graphs and charts and images, they just are able to send that over to Ally, get a proper … With Ally, we’ve got this feature where you can just ask it to read the document for you and it just reads everything, including giving you all text descriptions of tables or figures or charts, right? And they were able to read through slides by themselves without having somebody else to step in and help them.

Nice. Nice.

And I think lastly is the fact that we’ve got a few people who are quite addicted to playing games with Ally. So, Ally has a few built-in games, right? And there’s a trivia game, there’s an adventure game. And I often hear about how despite the work and all of those things, right? They just are able to put on these glasses or just use their smartphone app and play an actual interesting trivia game with Ally, right?

And Ally can create a trivia game about any topic under the sun. It just looks up the internet … Even if you give it a very niche topic, it looks up the internet for you, does some research, and then puts together 10 trivia questions and acts like a game show host, hosting the game for you.

Nice.

And for a lot of people, that’s something that they find fun.

Oh, definitely. Definitely. Well, Karthik, if our listeners want to find out more, what’s a good way for them to look that up?

Yeah. The best way to go ahead and know more about Ally Solos glasses is to go to ally.me. That’s A-L-L-Y.M-E/glasses, G-L-A-S-S-E-S. So, just to repeat, again, it’s A-L-L-Y.M-E/glasses. You can know more about Ally Solos glasses there. You can place a pre-order. It starts off at $399, and we’ll be shipping worldwide at the end of September.

You can also install the Ally app for free, no strings attached. So, you can simply go to App Store or Play Store and just search for Ally and you can go ahead and install the Ally app on your phones as well. And yeah, we’d love to know what you think. You can stay tuned with the Ally app on updates and stuff.

Yeah. And once more updates come out, we’ll definitely have to have you back. But Karthik, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us about everything that Ally can do with the new glasses, with museums, and with everything else that you’re doing with the personalities and all the great features that you’ve built in. It’s been really fun to watch this thing grow and can’t wait to see where it goes in the future. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much once again, Josh, for having me. And super excited for everyone to check out the Ally Solos glasses and talk to you soon. And thanks for hosting a great show.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAproject.

Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com.

A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host.

This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.