ATU790 – Lumin with Sriram Ganesh

Hi everyone. I’m Sriram. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Luminate. We’re building Lumin 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 790 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on July 17th, 2026. On today’s show, we’re excited to welcome Sriram from Lumin on the show to talk all about it. And also welcome back our friends from Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning.

If you happen to have questions about Assistive Technology, we have Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions or ATFAQ. The show is hosted by Brian Norton and features yours truly, along with Belva Smith as we all talk about assistive technology with questions that come in from email, phone calls, and other means. We also don’t always know the answer, so it’s very important that we have listeners that can help us out with some of those questions because while we like to think every once in a while that we may know everything, we’re proven wrong almost daily on that one. So if you’re looking for more podcasts to listen to or if you have questions about assistive technology, make sure to check out Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions wherever you get your podcasts. Listeners next up on the show, we’re very excited to welcome back Ale Gonzalez from Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with Bridging Apps and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Purposeful by Kumanu. Purposeful by Kumanu is a wellbeing app designed to help users build healthy habits, manage stress and stay motivated through daily reflections, mindfulness activities, and personalized goal setting tools. The app encourages users to focus on small, meaningful steps that support emotional wellness and daily routines. Purposeful also includes daily prompts, meditations and habit building tools that can help users create routines and maintain motivation over time. Our favorite features were the daily check-ins and supportive approach to habit building. The app is simple to navigate and can be especially helpful for individuals who benefit from reminders, structure and encouragement throughout the day. Purposeful is available for both Android and iOS devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit www.bridgingapps.org.

Emails, we probably all have them in some capacity, whether it’s for work, social communication, or maybe just somewhere to store the never ending cavalcade of spam and ads. Emails are very useful and helpful means of communication. Our guest today is here to tell us about Lumin and how it is making email more accessible for individuals with different disabilities. And needs and I am interested to find out a whole a lot more. Sriram, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Excited to be here.

Yeah, I am excited to get into talking about Lumin. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, sure. Hi, everyone. I’m Sriram. I always like to start by saying that the first time I saw a computer back in India when I was growing up there was when I was 13 years old, and ever since I’ve been in love with computers. I started by playing video games and that’s how I started my career, designing video games. I later spent a bunch of time building AI products over the last decade. Most notably my previous company, Whodat, built AI products and we eventually sold that business to a large education company. And I had the privilege of working with young children and building educational products for them that were at the intersection of AI and gaming, which was very exciting. We were also large partners with Disney and we got to bring those Disney characters into the children’s curriculum, which was a lot of fun.

In parallel, I found out that my previously diagnosed myopia was actually a retinal condition called cone-rod dystrophy. And that really changed my life because something that I was so used to visually designing and looking at things and comprehending things, it became a really large challenge. And as I was thinking about what to build next, I couldn’t think of anything better than to try and build something that I could use myself that could also be beneficial to millions of other sufferers out there who may be losing their vision later in life. And that’s the mission that we are on right now.

Nice. And you led me right straight into Lumin. So I guess you kind of told me where the idea came from. What is Lumin?

Lumin is a voice assistant that you can speak to, that speaks back to you, and you can also get your work done. And I’ll definitely have a demo sometime later if this sounds a little ambiguous. But the whole idea with Lumin was what if Siri or Alexa could do a lot more? We’ve all been fascinated with these tools around us, but we’ve also all been frustrated about how limited they’ve been. We use Siri to set an alarm or to set a reminder, or maybe if you’re cooking something, you might want to have a timer, but that’s pretty much been it. And the thought process was what if we extended that interface so that you can actually do real-world tasks like email, just by listening and speaking instead of reading and writing? That was the whole inception point of Lumin.

Excellent, excellent. Yeah, we’ll definitely get into demonstrate in here in just a minute. But before we do that, I guess Sriram, who could this assist? I know we talked a little bit about vision, but this could probably help folks with some other needs.

Absolutely. And I started working on this just because as my central vision started becoming weaker, the first thing it impacted was my ability to comprehend text on the screen. And as a lot of us know that most of the information within computers is text, whether it’s emails, messages, documents, and the list goes on. And if you lose your ability to read, you also lose your ability to work, to communicate. And it has an impact not only on your confidence, but really on your agency and independence. Things that you were able to do by yourself had become so much more challenging. And I took that core motivation and I also realized that voice or speech tools had become my friend, just like a lot of other visually impaired people also think of Voice as a friend. And so I just started building this for myself.

And very quickly I realized that especially for people within the visually impaired community who are losing the vision later in life, where you were used to doing something visually and then that ability gets taken away for some reason and then you have to learn a new skill. And while assistive technologies like screen readers are phenomenal, they are also quite challenging. They’re not the fastest tools to learn. It takes time. And I really stumbled and power to the ones who are able to use it really well, but it wasn’t for me. And so I started thinking about how can we design tools that feel incredibly natural so you don’t need to learn it, you don’t need to go to a training or read a documentation to learn it. And as we started designing that, we started realizing that there were a lot of other communities who also found it to be very valuable, starting with ADHD and dyslexia.

We have a lot of neurodivergent users within our wait list. We have elders who may not necessarily have a visual impairment, but they just find technology to be incredibly challenging and they just want something easy to use. We’ve also had paraplegic users who’ve been very interested in using our product. And so essentially anyone who does not want to stare at the screen or cannot look at a screen and comprehend content, and find speaking and listening a much more intuitive interface could benefit from our product.

Nice. And I think you probably just scared a ton of our listeners to find out that a computer programmer and an inventor and a founder found screen readers hard. So yeah, but I will admit there is just such a learning curve, especially if you’re used to doing something a certain way. So I love that there’s a tool out there that is going to make things a little bit easier. Well Sriram, right now is probably a perfect time. Could you give us kind of a demonstration of Lumin?

Absolutely. Let me just open it up.

Yeah, take your time.

Morning, Sriram.

Hey, Lumin. Can you please tell me what’s new in my emails?

Seven new emails in your work inbox since yesterday evening. One, Rahul Vohra at Superhuman, sharing a batch of product updates. Two, linear with 11 unread notifications on Luminate. Three, your own note about gaps in Lumin email workflows.

Lumin, could you please turn your speaking speed to normal? You’re speaking a little too fast right now.

Back to normal speed.

Yeah, let’s keep going.

Sure. Buy by Surface from Rahul at Superhuman with product updates, linear with a pile of notifications, your note on gaps in Lumin email workflows, another self-thread with model comparisons, and an Upwork promo below that. Where do you want to start?

Tell me about the Upwork promo.

Sure. The promo’s from Upwork. It’s basically nudging you to use your referral link and try to get it working. So this looks like straightforward promotional email, not something that needs a reply. Archive it or hear the full thing.

Yeah, that makes sense. Please archive it.

Archived. Next up, Rahul at Superhuman send a product update note with six smaller feature improvements. Do you want to hear it or skip?

Why don’t you read it out to me? Maybe there’s something interesting.

Sure. Rahul’s saying Superhuman has a handful of smaller workflow updates aimed at speed and inbox flow. The main ones are quick reply for mobile notifications, reminders split inbox, hiding empty split inboxes, reordering split sections, syncing drafts with Gmail and Outlook and faster AI drafting. There’s also-

This does seem interesting. I don’t have time right now. Could you please forward this email to Mikhail?

Draft for Mikhail. I’ve prepared the draft. Do you want to add a note or send it as is?

Just add a note saying, “Hey, I think you might find this interesting.”

Draft for Mikhail. I wrote, “Hey, I think you might find this interesting.” Ready to send?

Yep.

That’s sent. Back in your inbox [inaudible 00:11:46].

Lumin, I’ll talk to you later. Could you please end the call right now?

Okay. Ending the call now, talk to you later.

Yeah, Josh, that’s the demo.

Very, very cool. So yeah, it sounds just very intuitive. You were essentially, not to use the word assistant, but it sounded like you were just talking to an actual assistant, giving you kind of an overview of the emails, not getting into them completely unless you ask. So I like that it’s really giving you a briefing basically. Then you can dig in further. And I even like the way that it kind of told you with the one, not that it’s spam, I don’t remember exactly which word it used, but this is kind of maybe something you don’t really need to deal with or worry about. You want me to go ahead and archive it. So I love that it’s even giving you that kind of information.

Yep. It learns from you and it tries to… Emails are mostly, it’s not something that we look forward to. It’s just a communication meeting. It’s not like no one wakes up going, “Oh my God, I’m so excited about doing emails.” And the job is help me find things that I’m interested in. And if I have obligations where I have to respond to someone or I need to take care of something, let me be able to do that. And then there might be some newsletters that I might like to read, but there’s also a whole lot of spam that I may just want to archive or get rid of. And Lumin tries to figure out what that means for you, which emails are you interested in and it slowly tries to nudge you in that direction with the hope that, “Hey, I just want you to get through all of these things.

And later, if you want to just spend time reading newsletters, that’s great. But I don’t want you to spend a lot of time going through it.” And that’s where it helps to get a summary and just take actions on it.

Yeah, no, and I like that. I’m sitting there thinking of I get a lot of emails and it may need to go to another team member. I’m guessing it could probably almost guess, “Hey, this asks about such and such. Does that go to Nicole or do you want me to send that on to somebody else?” Just as I continue to do it, it probably just gets smarter and we’ll almost probably ask those questions kind of as they come up. Is that kind of correct? Am I getting that right?

Absolutely. For example, I send… As you may imagine, I run a company, so I get a lot of invoices that I need to send to a finance email. So it just knows right now where in my work inbox, if I get an email that generally has to be a receipt, the first thing it’ll be like, “Hey, this looks like an email. Do you just want me to push it to finance?” And so most of what I end up doing right now is just like, yes, no, and I just give it the approvals. And over time it just gets smarter and smarter and I have to speak less things, which is fantastic because I don’t want to have to keep explaining the same thing again and again. If you notice that I send a lot of these emails to someone, then just recommend that I do that and I just say yes.

Yeah, exactly. Just really streamlines the workflow as well as making it accessible at the same time.

Absolutely. Now as someone who has low vision, it doesn’t just help me because of that, but I find this to be such a great way to get through my clutter, especially when I’m traveling because even when I did have my eyesight, when you’re walking down the street as when I had my full eyesight, walking down the streets… And a lot of people stare at their phone when they’re walking down the street, it’s not the safest thing to do. You could absolutely run into a poll or something and we don’t recommend you do that. But with Lumin, I just have my AirPods on. And while I’m walking to work or if I’m walking to public transport, I just talk to it and by the time I get to work, my emails are done and then I get to actually do real work rather than just reply to emails. And it’s been a great relief for me from that aspect.

Yeah, no, that’s awesome. So Sriram, in order to have Lumin work, what kind of system? Does it work in all emails, certain ones, or is there certain components or places that it would work?

So Lumin today is an iPhone app. We are currently in a beta process. We’re working with hundreds of early users and largely people with disabilities within the vision impairment and ADHD and dyslexic community. And that’s what gives us the confidence now that the product is ready to go out. And so we’ll be available on the iOS app stores pretty quickly. But we also intend to… Because it’s kind of a voice interface, it should sit on the device that you’re using the most. And so we will expand this to other platforms like Android or Windows or Mac in the future. Today it works by connecting your Gmail account. So you get into the app, you just connect your Gmail account and then it’s just a single button that says call. That’s it. So think about it like you’re just getting access to it and then you can call it.

We’ve now added support for multiple accounts so you can add people have a personal account and a work account, and people have two or three accounts generally. So now you can add up to four accounts within Lumin and the next one that we’re launching is support for Calendar and Outlook.

Oh, nice. Very nice. No, I can see how Calendar would be super helpful to be able to have that in there to either move appointments over there, be able to check your schedule, move things around. I could see how that would be great.

Absolutely. And that way you can get a… As in you use this word briefing and we are really excited about how Lumin could do that. So imagine first thing in the morning, Lumin just… A lot of other apps send you lots of push notifications. Lumin tries and sends you one. And the whole reason why it’s trying sending you one is it’s trying to say, “Just spend 10 minutes with me and you’ll get your daily briefing done.” And you don’t have to keep coming and checking multiple times and you can just get through it and people use it during their commute, people use it during having breakfast. They use it while making breakfast because they don’t have to test their screen. And so we found all of these additional use cases that we never thought were even true. But once we add calendar and multiple emails, you essentially start building towards this worldview of a real assistant who kind of calls you in the morning and you don’t have to pay this assistance thousands of dollars.

You can call it in the morning or it can call you in the morning and you just get a structured briefing of, “Hey, here are things that matter to you. Here are the meetings. Here’s how your day is looking like.” By the way, you can also give it your priorities. And so it can say, “Hey, you wanted to work on these things, but I don’t see any time on your calendar. So should I try and block some time for you to do your own work so that your calendar doesn’t get hijacked?” And the whole agenda here is everyone’s trying to get in touch with you, whether it’s important people or spams or newsletters, everyone’s trying to take over your inbox. Lumin’s trying to find what really matters so that you don’t have to drown in that stuff and miss important things.

Yeah. Well, and for the population you’re making for… I could say how this could help anybody, of course, but I know that’s a complaint in some of the folks I’ve worked with who are blind or low vision, especially if they do get a lot of emails because yeah, it’s just such a cognitive load to go through all of these emails. Have them all read to you, try to figure out which ones are important. So just being able to cut some of that down, especially in that conversational way has to be just a huge help.

Yeah. Every person that I speak to the first time, if I talk to them and they say, “You know what? Email’s not a problem? Why is it a problem?” And then I’m like, “If you show me your inbox, I can just see that there are 2,000 unread emails.” So I guess it’s like, is there anything important that you’ve missed within that? I’m sure you have. I’m sure you’ve missed appointments or you’ve missed commitments because important stuff just gets buried in a lot of stuff that you don’t care about. And so it’s like absolutely there’s so much… I haven’t met someone who has an inbox zero in a while. And that just tells me that while Gmail is incredibly convenient and we are all used to it, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, flagging emails always seems like a great idea till you have 3000 flagged emails and try to remember which ones were really important and you needed followed up, and which ones it’s been long enough to just let them fall off. Well, Sriram, I know you’re in beta testing, you got some folks out there using it and learning from Lumin and I’m sure you’re learning from them. Can you tell me a story about maybe a use case that maybe surprised you or something you kind of got feedback that has been built in now, maybe something you weren’t expecting?

Oh, absolutely. Something that we added quite… I can actually tell you a couple of interesting use cases. We added the ability for Lumin to recognize image attachments within your emails. And we initially added it because I had a bunch of, a lot of us had scanned my passport and sent it to myself just so that I can get access to my passport numbers or my details from time to time. Similarly, I’d scanned many documents and these are photos that I had taken and just sent it to my email. And I’ve always wanted to have a feature where I can just say, “Hey, can you go find that image of mine and that has my passport number? Can you tell me to me?” And that’s why we released it. But very soon what we found for especially users who are fully blind or nearly blind, one of our users started using it as a way to get pictures described to her.

And because Lumin can describe it in different levels of detail, she almost used it as a way to share photos. Whenever someone from her family sends photos, they send it directly into her email. And now she uses it as a way to almost understand exactly what’s happening in the photos, and then she can reply back to the same email after having gotten. And she was never able to do this before because her photos weren’t accessible to her. And now she is actually running these workshops where she calls in other visually impaired kids and older adults, and they go through this experience of experiencing different photographs of either sceneries or other things within their neighborhoods. And they all sit together and they listen to Lumin describe these features in detail. And the exciting thing here is because it’s built into the email, they can also respond back to the same thread.

And so they can have a constant dialogue communicating, looking at images all by voice, which I would’ve never thought of that as a use case. But I guess for someone who loses their agency to do something, it could be an absolute superpower. The other thing that was also very surprising is that we release the ability for Lumin to understand long PDF attachments. We’ve all gone through this. Even if you’re fully cited, it’s not fun to… If someone sends you a document or a text document or whatever that may be that just has 20 pages, going through a 20-page document is not something that people look forward to.

But when you talk to Lumin about it, Lumin can summarize it, you can actually have a back and forth conversation and all without leaving your email. And that’s the exciting thing, which is it’s not like I need to take this document, I need to put it into Gemini, and then I need to get that read out to me, and then it’s still in text. And then once it’s in text, I still need to ask questions to it. Here, you just talk to Lumin and you say, “Hey, that PDF that’s open there, can we open that?” And so it’s almost like an interactive podcast where we’re talking to you about a particular document, which is also something that I found very fascinating and I didn’t think about it that way.

Nice. No, that’s great. It’s amazing how just in doing this for a while, how sometimes the users can just, I don’t know, find the absolute coolest uses. And just really, really expand on the product and what you’re bringing out in so many cool and new ways. Sriram if our listeners want to find out more about Lumin and figure out how to maybe try it for themselves, what’s a good way for them to do that?

You can head down to lumin.email. That’s L-U-M-I-N. E-M-A-I-L. That’s our website and it’s a pretty simple website. You can just join Early Access. And as part of Early Access, we are currently on iOS and we support Gmail and we use Apple’s beta program called TestFlight to enable early access. And the product is free for anyone who joins early access and all we ask for in return is just some feedback to make the product better. And so please come on to our website and sign up.

Excellent. We’ll put a link to that down in the show notes so that folks can easily find it. Well, Sriram, thank you so much for coming on, for telling us about Lumin and just what a cool product. And again, I just love anything that you can just turn on and start using. You know what I mean? Like you said, there’s not that kind of barrier to access and to learn all these new keystrokes or swipes or other kinds of ways, but I can just get access to my email and maybe even free up some of my day at the same time.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. This is great.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an 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 Nikol 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 or 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.