In this special, join Dave Wilkinson, Business Development Manager, as he discusses a number of reading options from HIMS including the new Smart Beetle 14-cell Braille display supporting connections to multiple devices simultaneously. In addition, Dave discusses the Blaze EZ and ET portable DAISY players including OCR support. We thank HIMS for their generous sponsorship of our CSUN 2015 coverage. To learn more about the latest from HIMS, you can visit the HIMS website, and you can also follow HIMS on Twitter and check out their Facebook page.
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Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed by Kayde Rieken
Welcome to BlindBargains.com coverage of CSUN 2015: the biggest names, provocative interviews, and wall-to-wall exhibit hall coverage. Now, here's Joe Steinkamp.
Joe Steinkamp: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another presentation from CSUN 2015. This time out, we have Dave Wilkinson from HIMS, one of our proud sponsors of our CSUN coverage and other podcasts that we are doing. He's going to talk to us about the Blaze and Smart Beetle; so let's take it right to the audio from San Diego, California.
Dave Wilkinson: All right. Sorry we're a little bit late — my fault. Actually, it's my boss's fault, since we're being recorded.
[Audience laughs]
DW: He held me in a meeting that was too long.
Audience Member: He will like that, Dave.
DW: Yeah, he will like that. We'll see now if he listens to the archives or not. This is all sort of a test to see what happens.
You all are at the session in — what is this? Cortez A?
Joe Steinkamp: Yes.
DW: Something besides an iPhone — we're blazing a new path in E-readers. So if that's not what you wanted, now would be a really good time to go.
Audience Member: [Laughs]
DW: Otherwise, stay right where you are. We — my — my name's Dave Wilkinson. I'm a regional manager at HIMS. I travel all over the place. Been with HIMS about a year and a half now, and I think I'm at 31 states and Canada as far as where I've been. So I don't get out much. [Laughs]
Audience Member: [Laughs]
DW: So — but has anyone in here never heard of HIMS? Anybody ever?
Audience Member: Never heard? No?
DW: Never heard of us?
Audience: No.
DW: There has to be someone. There you go. That's what I'm saying: We make great products; we just haven't figured out some of the marketing stuff. That's why we have Michelle right here. She's helping us figure it all out.
HIMS is based in Austin, Texas. We've been in the U.S. for about five years. We are, ultimately, a Korean company. Our — our international offices are in Daejeon, Korea. If you happen to be in the neighborhood, drop by. We — we pride ourselves on having truly unique products. We try to — we listen to a lot of — we listen to our end users. Most of us, including our president, are assistive technology users ourselves. So we're in this not only because we'd like to sell you lots of cool stuff, but also because we need the stuff we're making. Our offices are in Austin, Texas. All of our products are sold from Austin, Texas. Anytime anything goes wrong — not that we want anything to go wrong, but the repairs are done in Austin, Texas. And this is worth a door prize: What is our average turnaround time for repairs if something comes in to us?
Audience Member: Three days.
DW: That is correct! I had to — 72 hours. I had to do the math. You get either a milk chocolate chocolate bar or an intense dark chocolate sea salt and almond chocolate bar.
Audience Member: Oh!
Audience Member: Whoa.
Audience Member: Wait — what do — how do we —
[Audience laughs]
DW: You answer random questions that Dave throws out.
Michelle: Participation is rewarded.
DW: So what would you like, a dark chocolate or a milk chocolate chocolate bar?
Audience Member: I'll take the one without the sea salt.
DW: Okay. I might also be able to find a piece of tofu jerky around if you really don't want chocolate.
Michelle: There you go.
Audience Member: Thank you very much.
DW: So our average turnaround time, if products need to be repaired, is 72 hours. And he made me do the math by saying three days; and so I took 72 divided by 3, and 24 — that's the number of hours in a day, which I could have used the calculator on the Blaze ET for; but we'll get to that later on. So it usually takes longer for the mail to get to us and from us than it does for us to be able to actually fix things.
We've had a number of new products this year. Come by our booth, which is 705 and 805. You can tell that it's the HIMS booth because we've got the HIMS — Big E, our robot. Have all of you guys met Big E?
Audience: [Subdued murmur]
DW: You're so quiet!
[Audience laughs]
DW: We need verbosity here! No head nodding or anything.
Audience Member: We're hungry, maybe.
DW: You're — well, then, hang on for more questions.
[Audience laughs]
DW: See, this is what I like — not only an attentive audience but a slightly desperate one.
[Audience laughs]
DW: [Laughs] I'm not proud. So — but we — we do have a robot that you can come and have a selfie taken with in the booth. If you do a hashtag #HIMSROCKS and put it on your social media account, you enter into a chance to win a gift certificate which will let you buy lots of food.
So we have a number of things we've done first. I'll skip all that stuff for you, and we'll go on to the Blaze EZ and ET. These are digital book readers. Everyone in here is familiar with the concept of digital book reader, right?
Audience Members: Yes.
DW: Okay. Well, you know what? I — I never take anything for granted. And that was a very good auditory response. Because, see, here's the thing. If I actually see the hands go up, I am out of here and I'm on tour and I'll be making a hell of a lot more money. So we — we, for a long time, had the BookSense. You guys remember the BookSense?
Audience Member: Yes.
DW: Yeah. There you go. See, this is working!
[Audience laughs]
DW: You get a chocolate bar just because you were loud. You want the sea salt or the white one — or the — the milk chocolate one?
Audience Member: I want the milk chocolate.
DW: The milk chocolate one. Michelle will bring that to you in just a second. She just didn't know it.
Michelle: I'll get there.
DW: Okay. So HIMS, for a long time, had a — a digital player that was called the BookSense. It read books, it did music, had an FM radio, had a recorder. But there was one format that — that digital book readers continually forgot about when they were developing — when they were looking for new file formats to take on. Anybody know what that file format was that they forgot?
Audience Member: DAISY book?
DW: Huh?
Audience Member: DAISY?
DW: Not DAISY.
Audience Member: PDF.
DW: Not PDF.
Audience Members: EPUB?
DW: Not EPUB.
Audience Member: MP3.
DW: Print!
Audience Member: Print. Right.
Audience Member: Oh. [Laughs]
DW: The printed page!
Audience Member: Okay. Well, we're all trying to make this too complicated.
DW: I know. See, that's the — and that's the beauty of HIMS. We make things simple. Print. We all forgot about print. You could get anything electronically, but there was no way to actually scan a page of print. So we went back — we — we figured old school is cool; and so we introduced, with — with the Blaze, which we're going to be showing you, and we have two different models — we introduced a digital book reader that has a camera in the back that can snap a picture of a printed page, and it can read it back to you. So we went back to sort of the — the first format. I guess that'd be close to the first format. In addition to being able to have the — the new file format known as print, we also do have — you know, we have DAISY; we do all of your — your media formats. I think somewhere we've got a — a slide later on that has all these formats that drive me nuts. But — you know, Ogg, FLAC, MP3, WMA — just make up initials, and we do it. Okay? Text, RTF, DOC, DOCX, PDF, EPUB ...
Audience Member: DW?
DW: DW, yes, for downright weird.
Audience Member: Those are your initials.
DW: Yeah, I know. I know. For — that's why it became downright weird. So — but — and — and part of the beauty of this is that, with other digital book players, you always had to have things parceled out to where you had the music in one folder, the books in another folder, the documents in another folder; right? Well, we don't. We've just got it all chucked together, and we sort it out for you. So we don't care about folder structures. You can use folder — folder structure if you want, or you can just sort of dump everything together. So you're going to be able to use this for your — your documents, music, podcasts; you're going to be able to record; you're going to be able to listen to your DAISY books on here; and you're going to be able to scan and read print. And we're going to prove it for — to you in a little bit. The beauty of this is that we try to keep everything easy to use; and with the Blaze EZ — which I think we have a picture of on the screen here — you'll notice that there's very few buttons on this bad boy, right? There's, like, what, one, two, three — there's, like, arrow keys — they don't really count — and then there's, like, six other buttons.
Michelle: It's the white one.
JM: The white one. Thank you. I'm not very good with colors. You can also see it now being held up in the air. And what's really cool about the Blaze EZ — and we'll get back to the PowerPoint. Poor Michelle puts these PowerPoints together, and then I go on a random tangent and do whatever I feel like anyway. But she'll do really good at — at keeping up with this whole thing. The beauty of the Blaze EZ — it's worth a chocolate bar. Why is it called the Blaze EZ?
Audience Member: It's easy.
DW: There you go! Easy! Excellent! Excellent!
[Audience laughs]
DW: Michelle's on her way.
Audience Member: Oh, which one: dark chocolate with nuts or caramel? Oh, geesh. I — [Laughs]
[The Blaze EZ makes its powering down sound.]
Audience Member: Oh, lovely!
DW: Wasn't that cool? It was a serenade just for you.
Audience Member: Thank you.
DW: It's easy. Now, we'll get to the other one in a second. If you can guess what ET stands for, I don't have an appropriately complicated door prize.
[The Blaze EZ makes its power on sound.]
DW: But it's easy to use. And so we've got very few buttons —
[The Blaze EZ announces the time and date.]
DW: So we have dedicated buttons for things like music; and so if I press the Music button on here, it's going to take me to all of my music files.
[The Blaze EZ reads out the title of the music file: "Sample Sound 1." It begins to play.]
DW: I have really boring music on here, but it's relaxing.
[The music stops.]
DW: Go away.
[The Blaze EZ announces "Explorer open" and announces the song title again.]
Audience Member: I thought you wanted us to be peppy. You've got to play peppy tunes.
[Audience laughs]
DW: Well, see, now we went overboard. I've got to — I've got to tone you back a little bit.
Audience Member: Oh, okay.
[The Blaze EZ announces another music file.]
Audience Member: You gave her chocolate.
Audience Member: [Laughs] Oh, no.
[The Blaze EZ announces "SD card, 1 of 2."]
DW: And so — see, this is what's really cool about this. I've got music on my SD card, and I just used my down arrows. Now I use my right arrow key, and it just finds all the music.
[The Blaze EZ announces another music file, then others as Dave scrolls through them.]
DW: So this is all the music on my SD card. Here you go. This is a little bit more peppy for you.
[A mid-tempo song begins playing.]
DW: Is that better?
Audience Member: [Skeptical noise]
[Audience laughs]
DW: I can't please anyone. I get it.
[The song stops playing.]
Audience Members: Sounds like hold music.
[Audience laughs]
DW: Sound like what?
Audience Members: Hold music.
DW: Hold music. [Laughs]
Audience Member: Is that what you play when you call — when you call HIMS?
[Audience laughs]
DW: All right. It's — all right. The next time I do this, we're going to — we'll — we'll have some Guns N' Roses on here.
Audience Member: There you go.
DW: [Imitates Guns N' Roses]
[Audience laughs]
DW: That'd be awesome. [Laughs]
Audience Member: Sweet.
DW: So come back next year, and we'll — we'll really rock out.
But the beauty of this is, all I needed to do to find my music — I hit the little button that conveniently has a Braille M on it for music. It's also high-contrast. I don't know what — one of you sightlings can tell me what color the Music button is. But — and then the — the Blaze just finds the music for me. I can do the same thing with books. I just hit the B for books.
[The Blaze EZ announces a book title, then begins beeping.]
DW: And it takes me to the last book that I had open, which was True Grit.
[The Blaze EZ begins reading the book.]
DW: We're going to hit Explore.
[The Blaze EZ announces "Explore open."]
DW: And the Explore is just this little bitty button. Can you guys hear that okay? Do you need more volume?
Audience Member: Yeah.
Audience Member: Maybe a little bit more.
DW: Maybe a little bit more volume? Let's see if — it's Bose. There ought to be more volume, right? Oh, I hit it the wrong way.
Audience Member: Do we win those speakers if we get the next question right?
Audience Member: Yeah, that'd be better than chocolate bars.
Audience Member: Yeah. [Laughs]
DW: Maybe — not from my expense account, it wouldn't be.
[Audience laughs]
[The Blaze EZ announces Volume 15.]
DW: [Laughs] They'd — I'm not — I'm not sure if they can reimburse me for that. I'll take it up with my boss.
But now, all I need to do, again, to find the — the books that I want — I'm just using my arrow keys to move up and down.
[The Blaze EZ announces book titles as Dave scrolls through them. He stops on the user manual. The Blaze EZ pronounces "EZ" as its own word rather than two letters.]
DW: Okay. The Blaze EZ user manual is boring, so we're not going to listen to that. We need to teach it to say "EZ." If I want to choose different file formats, I can just hit my right arrow, and I can choose different file formats, if I'm looking for text, DAISY, whatever. So — and then it's just looking at the whole unit to figure out where those types of files are. Does — does that make sense?
So for those of you who are using other products, where you've got to remember to use the Books folder or the Documents folder or whatever, I don't have to. The R is going to be for radio, and it's going to — it — we have an FM radio that's built in. I'm not sure why all products have to have an FM radio, but it seems to be a feature that we can't get away from. But we also have an Internet — we have Internet radio built into this, and we have an Internet radio database that you can also add to. And that means, if we have Internet radio built into this, we also have Wi-Fi. We also have Bluetooth, which is really cool. So — but Wi-Fi also means that you — you can download books from book services such as BookShare; in the extraordinarily near future, BARD, which we just became BARD — it's a long story, but we just got our BARD eligibility after lots of bureaucratic stuff, and so we're all excited. And when people updated to the firmware to get — to become BARD eligible, they did it online. They could do it just using their Wi-Fi networks. They didn't have to plug in any cables or use a computer or anything.
And all the buttons are different shapes. Like, the Record button is a circle; the Cancel button's a square with nothing on it; the Explore button's a little dot; the other buttons are labeled. So it's real simple, real easy to use. Just a few buttons, nothing really complicated.
Audience Member: Dave?
DW: Yes?
Audience Member: The synthesized speech — is it changeable? Is there — is there a —
DW: There is a male voice.
Audience Member: Okay.
DW: And actually, I — and I haven't downloaded it yet because the firmware is too new. But you can also now download — if you don't want an American male or female voice — this is Heather and Ryan — you can also now download Australian and Indian English-speaking A Cappella voices. So how was that for a good answer?
Audience Member: Great.
DW: I was impressed with it.
Audience Member: Get yourself a candy bar.
DW: Oh, God. That's the last thing I need, is to be more hyper. [Laughs]
Audience Member: How do you — how do you distinguish what books you have on there? Do you have to know the format that it's in to get to that book?
DW: You don't. You can use a folder structure if you so desire, so that I could use my arrow keys to go back to — you know how it's — it's like files, folders, drives, kind of like a tree structure on your computer. So if you wanted to look in a specific folder — otherwise, I'm just going to dump it in the root — the root of the SD card, right? So one of my choices is going to be to move up and down by folder if I want to use a folder structure. So I'm not eliminating the folder structure, but I'm just saying I don't have to use it. Does — does that help make sense, what I'm saying?
Audience Member: So you don't — if you don't have a folder, you have ten books in there, what do you do, just —
DW: You're just going to have it —
Audience Member: — jump from one book to the other to find out which book you're on?
DW: Right.
Michelle: It says the name of it, and then you can choose it. If that's the book you want, then you can click to open it. You don't have to open everything.
[The Blaze EZ reads a book title.]
DW: So — two of five.
[The Blaze EZ reads another book title.]
DW: So now we're just moving down my things —
[The Blaze announces documents.]
DW: And now I've — I've run out of my DAISY books, and so now it's wanting to go into different folders. So I'm looking at my documents. If I hit my right arrow, I'm looking at all of my Word documents. Does that help?
Audience Member: Yeah. Yeah.
DW: Okay. And obviously, you can put files on here. We've got 12 gigs of memory built in. You also do have the SD card. We take up to any size you can imagine. It just slides right in the side.
[The Blaze EZ chimes and announces, "SD card removed."
DW: It tells me when I take it out. It gets mad when I do that.
[The Blaze EZ announces the time and date.]
DW: And we'll put it back in.
[The Blaze EZ chimes and announces, "SD card inserted."]
DW: Now it's much happier. So it's — it — and the — the buttons on the side — you've got a wheel for the volume, which is kind of a cool old-school throwback; you've got the Record button; and then you've just got the keyboard lock. Record — you're recording in MP3 or WAV, and it's just storing the files as — as basically with the date and time for your number —
Audience Member: Can we hear the guy?
DW: Can you do what?
Audience Member: Can we hear the guy voice?
DW: Can we hear the guy voice?
Audience Member: Yeah.
DW: Yes. Let's go — now you're going to make Dave remember how to do it. We're going to go back to our — our — sort of our main menu.
[The Blaze EZ announces the battery status.]
DW: Now we're going to arrow to the right.
[The Blaze EZ announces the firmware version, then "Guide voice settings."]
DW: Now we're going to go into guide voice settings, and I'm going to hit Enter.
[The Blaze EZ announces the guide voice speed 9, then 10.]
DW: Oops.
[The Blaze EZ announces the guide voice pitch, then volume, then "Voice: female." Dave changes the voice to male.]
DW: Which — I know. And you — but — but the — the good thing is, if you put it together, it says "Voice mail."
[Audience laughs]
DW: [Laughs] But now, if we wanted to choose the male voice, we could just hit —
[The Blaze EZ announces the male voice again.]
DW: See, to me, he just sounds mad.
[The Blaze EZ announces the firmware version, then the free drive space.]
Audience Member: He sounds hot.
[Audience laughs]
DW: That's worth a chocolate bar. [Laughs]
Audience Member: She already had one.
Audience Members: Don't give her any more!
DW: Oh, you already won?
Audience Member: She already had it.
DW: Oh. Well, then — then you're on your own.
Audience Member: That's why she's making comments like that.
DW: Oh. Well, see, there — well —
Audience Member: I shared.
DW: You shared. Well, I'll give you a piece of tofu jerky after this is over.
[Audience laughs]
DW: You think I'm kidding. [Laughs] So we've got two different — we've got two different voices here. [Laughs] This has gone downhill rapidly. So which voice — which voice do we want to use for the rest of this demonstration, the male or the female voice?
Audience Member: Female.
Audience Member: Male.
DW: Oh, and see, now we're tied.
Audience Member: Female.
Audience Members: Female.
Audience Member: [Laughs] Whatever.
DW: Okay.
Audience Member: Female got the vote.
DW: Yeah. Female.
[The Blaze EZ announces the battery status. Dave scrolls to record settings.]
DW: Oops.
[Dave scrolls backward to guide voice settings. Then he scrolls to the voice option and changes it to female.]
DW: There we go.
Audience Member: She's much more pleasant.
DW: Heather's much nicer.
Audience Member: Dave, I have a question for you. You mentioned the issue of getting a — a license for BARD.
DW: Right.
Audience Member: One of the things that someone that just went through grad school is — for me — was equal access textbooks. Are you all going after the textbook publishers at all for licensing in order to get, you know, the ability to have books in accessible format?
DW: You have a wide variety of folks who are trying to get the textbook manufacturers to provide accessible textbook formats. That's a discussion that we — that would keep us busy through sometime Saturday. But you have a number of initiatives that are out there to gain equal access for textbooks.
Audience Member: Okay. But is HIMS, the company — your company — involved in any of those initiatives?
DW: I do not know of —
Audience Member: Okay.
DW: — what our level of involvement is.
Audience Member: Okay.
DW: What I can tell you is that we make products that will work with as many formats of books or audio as humanly possible.
Audience Member: Okay.
DW: So the question comes up, after all this — why do I need this? Don't — doesn't the iPhone do everything? Isn't it the — the end-all, be-all answer to the — to the whole universe?
Audience Member: No.
DW: Excellent. Why not?
Audience Member: I think sometimes — for me, this is easier for them to use. Battery life. I have a lot of students that use their iPhone, and their battery life ends up being a problem, especially trying to listen to their — their textbooks through that device. And the iPhone definitely does not support all the different types of formats that yours supports, so — in an audio output.
DW: Do you want to go on tour? [Laughs]
Audience Member: Are you going to talk about cost at all?
DW: We can — we're — we're going to talk about cost.
Audience All right. Yeah. Let's get to the nitty-gritty.
Audience Member: No SD card on the iPhone.
DW: No — no SD card on the iPhone. Absolutely.
Audience Member: Isn't that crazy?
Audience Member: [Laughs]
Audience Member: You have to move files through iTunes.
DW: This is true. This is true.
Audience Member: You have to move books through — or through other apps, but iTunes
DW: The other thing about it, realistically, is, some folks simply flat-out — contrary to what marketing gurus would have you believe — just don't want a touchscreen or have trouble navigating a touchscreen, you know, just haven't made that transition, whatever. So what I usually tell folks is that if you are comfortable using your iPhone for what this device will offer you, by all means, do it. There's plenty of people that are left over, and I'll go after them. If — if you want a device where you've got single-touch commands to go to different functions — like for music, radio, books, optical character recognition; if you're looking for something that has very definable buttons, lots of space around the buttons, that's a simple user interface, then this may be the ticket for you. And battery life is also a big one. Especially when you start using the camera on the iPhone, it takes a lot — your — your battery away. We're getting about 12 hours of battery life out of the Blaze. Your iPhone's simply not going to be able to do that. So I don't necessarily view this as a competitor with the iPhone as much as I do as an additional option so that people have a choice. Too often, in this industry, people make choices for us. They say, "This is what you have to use. This is what you're allowed to gain access to." I don't want someone to tell me what I'm allowed to gain access to. I just want to be able to choose on my own. The Blaze helps do that.
Audience Member: Another question.
DW: Yes?
Audience Member: Kind of back up on the textbook question, does it — are you able to access BookShare?
DW: Yes. Yes.
Audience Member: Okay.
DW: And you're able to access BookShare from — you can actually download books directly on to BookShare or — or from BookShare; or you can put them onto an SD card or transfer them from your computer. BookShare is actually one of the easiest things to get access to because, once you've got a username and a password, you're pretty much good to go. The — it's just straight DAISY, although we also do support their MP3 text and BRF formats.
So we were talking about this whole print —
Audience Member: Can you — sorry. I'm going to —
DW: It's okay.
Audience Member: — admit this is a stupid question.
DW: There are no stupid questions.
Audience Member: Oh, yes, there are.
DW: I doubt it.
Audience Member: [Laughs] I want to know if you can take your device, the — whatever you — Blaze —
DW: The Blaze.
Audience Member: — and then, can you take your — put it in your Braille display, take a — like, a document if you — into your Braille — can that be your storage unit, and then —
DW: I wish. Here's as much information as I can tell you on that. You are now at the back of a long line of people who have asked for that. it has been a — I do not know, technically, how feasible it is. This is being built on Android, the — on this — it's being — it's using Android underneath.
Audience Member: Oh.
DW: I would think that it would be relatively doable. I do not know. This is at the beginning of this product's lifecycle. We want to develop the most innovative products that we can. That has been a need that has been conveyed to us; and I think, if there's any way of doing it, we probably will. At the moment, it doesn't do it.
Audience Member: You might have answered this, but I didn't hear it. You said it — you said — you said it's — it's Bluetooth — it has Bluetooth.
DW: Yes.
Audience Member: So does that mean you can read DAISY with a Braille display? Like, you could —
DW: This —
Audience Member: — pair it with a — with a BrailleSense or something and —
DW: At the moment, you can't. I — and this is, essentially, the same question that I think she's asking.
Audience Member: Yes.
DW: I would love to have that feature. It's been something —
Audience Member: What —
DW: Now — now you're behind her in line.
Audience Member: What's the Bluetooth for, though?
DW: Speakers! Headphones!
Audience Member: Okay.
DW: I'm hoping we'll have a keyboard in the future. Doing the dishwasher.
Audience Member: You can plug in speakers.
DW: Keep — you — yes, you can plug them in. I know. But keep in mind, this is at the beginning of its lifecycle. This product has not been out that long. Any suggestions that you have here — and here's the way that — that suggestions work. Send them to info@hims-inc.com. They mean more coming from you than they do me because Dave is just being cranky, and he's sitting on a plane dreaming up features that he wants to bother the engineers with; whereas, if you send them in, they're like, "Hey, they're customers. They spend money, unlike Dave."
Audience Member: Any plans to have it accessible with the Beetle?
DW: That would fall — that's going to be the same basic answer. I — it — if it's going to be accessible with one Braille display, it's going to be accessible with lots of Braille displays. So I hope so because then we could have Beetle — Beetle-Blaze.
Audience Member: What is the beetle, then?
DW: The — the Smart Beetle's a 14-cell Braille display that can connect to multiple devices. And I didn't bring one up here because there were people looking at it down in booths 705 and 805, but I'll be happy to show you Smart Beetle.
Audience Member: Is that different from the — it's just a Braille display?
DW: It is just a Braille display. It's a 14-cell Braille display. And the reason it's called Smart Beetle is that a beetle has six legs; that's one leg per connection you can have. So you can connect to six devices simultaneously and flip from screen to screen to screen. And it does some other cool stuff.
Michelle: Seven minutes.
DW: I've got — is that all I have is seven minutes? Holy mackerel! We've got to show OCR! I thought this went for a full hour.
Audience Member: They're 40-minute sessions.
DW: Is it 40-minute sessions?
Audience Member: Yeah.
Audience Member: Yep.
DW: Oh, jeez. Okay. We've got to start talking fast.
We also have the Blaze ET that goes along with the Blaze EZ. And I'm sitting here thinking, Man, I've got all kinds of time. The Blaze ET is different from the Blaze EZ — visuals? How's it different?
Audience Member: More buttons?
DW: More buttons. What type of buttons?
Audience Member: Number pad.
DW: Number pad! Who said number pad who hadn't won a chocolate bar so far?
Audience Member: [Laughs]
Audience Member: I'll surrender it to my friend back here.
[Audience laughs]
DW: You'll surrender to your friend back there. [Laughs] It has a number pad. The reason it has a number pad is that we were — we were told that we needed to have a device with a number pad. All right. Now I've got to start talking really fast to make up for being slow earlier. A lot of our BookSense users wanted a number pad. The Blaze ET also has some features that aren't on the Blaze EZ, such as a calculator. It also — it has the ability to copy and paste and move files around; it can unzip files; and also — and I know this is being recorded, so this is dangerous. I can't tell you about it —
[The Blaze ET speaks over Dave.]
DW: Oh, shut up.
[The Blaze ET begins beeping, then starts reading some text before being silenced.]
DW: It also — you'll find, in the utilities, there's a thing for Skype download.
[The Blaze ET announces the time and date.]
DW: Be quiet. I can't tell you that Skype is there; but if you happen to find it by looking in the Utilities menu, it's there. Microsoft won't let me tell you. So anyway. There you go. So you can use — and the — part of the reason that I point that out is that we've got a lot of things we can do with this camera. There are other features that we're looking at that you can use a camera for in addition to the optical character recognition, which we're about to demonstrate to you. You should — you should never believe a salesperson if they just say it's going to work. You have to make them prove it, right?
Audience Member: Yes.
DW: But — so the Blaze ET has a number of features that aren't on the EZ.
Now, this is going to double back to — I — I have this little stand up here. I don't need this stand. I'm now holding the stand up in the air. It does come apart. We asked for something that'd fold in the middle and was lightweight; we got something diecast metal that has screws. It's close. But it's — it's relatively portable. I don't think I'd take this with me to a restaurant, but it'd be great for just being at home to, you know, see if the mail's going to be in the throwaway pile or the — the "read it" pile, right? The reason I'm using a stand — I could use the elbows on the table method — this automatically tells me that it's going to be a 9 by 12 field. If I want to get really cool, I can also plug into the Blaze EZ — when you get the stand — or the ET — you can — you get a two-button remote. It's a wired two-button remote. And the reason you've got a two-button remote is that, again, if you've got people with limited mobility, limited dexterity, that just want to hit one button for scanning, we can do that.
[Dave pushes a button on the Blaze EZ.]
DW: It's going to tell me to take a picture.
[The Blaze EZ announces, "Take a picture."]
DW: Now we're going to hit it again. I think I hit it again.
[The Blaze EZ chimes.]
DW: Come on, buddy.
[The Blaze EZ chimes, then makes a camera sound and announces, "OCR analysis."]
DW: There we go.
[ The Blaze EZ begins beeping.]
DW: That scared me.
[The Blaze EZ announces, "OCR analysis completed." Then it begins reading a garbled version of the document.]
DW: Oh, it caught a couple things up here. It caught my thing, and it caught the sign. [Laughs]
[The Blaze EZ announces, "End of document."]
DW: That's pretty funny. I caught several things that were up here. I guess I should have been more specific. Let's — now you won't catch anything.
Audience Member: You're looking at a blank page now.
Audience Member: Yeah, the paper's facedown.
DW: It's — oh. Yeah, facedown would make — facedown would make a difference. I usually don't end up on the floor until after dinner.
[Audience laughs]
Audience Member: And now you're Blaze is upside down.
DW: I'm going to be glad this is 40 minutes. Now we're —
[The Blaze EZ announces, "Take a picture."]
DW: Thank you.
[The Blaze EZ makes a camera sound, then announces, "OCR analysis." Then it begins beeping.]
DW: Now, while it's — while it's analyzing, we can pick everything back up.
[The Blaze EZ announces, "OCR analysis completed."]
DW: Now it'll start —
[The Blaze EZ begins reading a document.]
DW: Oh, it's still getting the podium? [Laughs]
Audience Member: Yeah, it's —
DW: [Laughs] That's awesome. All right. So there we go. It's got — it saw my instructions for up here on what I'm supposed to be doing. I thought I was going to grab a product photo. But it's pretty quick as far as the — the OCR. I'm obviously not going to read an entire book with this. It's going to be for single-page or for a few pages. If I was going to — wanting to read an entire book, I'd still use other scan-and-read programs. But this is very much for, like, spot-reading.
Audience Member: What's the difference in price between the two?
DW: The Blaze EZ sells for $695; the ET sells for $795. The stand is separate. The stand is a 99-dollar add-on. However — don't get cranky with me yet — you can use those little stands you see out on the web — the StandScans, the Giraffe Readers, that type of stuff. They work fine. If you want something that's durable, that you can drop out of an airplane or run over with a tank, then this is a really good stand. And it's magnetic. That's proof that I've had too much time in the booth. But it really is kind of cool — it's magnetic. It sticks the remote to it.
[The Blaze EZ announces, "Take a picture."]
DW: So — and it's meant to be very much sort of a — a permanent portable stand. You could move it, but it's not going to fold up and you're not going to take it with you.
Michelle: So we have one minute left. There's a slide —
DW: One minute left for questions.
Michelle: There's a slide up about the webinars.
DW: Oh, webinars! Don't forget our webinars! We have a webinar coming up on job — on — on job skills. We have a webinar every month. Michelle and I have been doing a lot with webinars. You can always send suggestions to suggestions@ — what is it? — webinars@hims-inc.com. We do these about once a month. We try to mix in product-specific webinars to just idea, blindness, low-vision-type webinars. We've been getting hundreds of people signing up, so don't forget our webinars. My apologies at our rush through this. I thought I had more time. I'll be here if you have any questions afterwards. And if we have any chocolate bars left, you can come up; and the first ones to grab them win.
[Audience laughs]
DW: So thank you guys very much.
Audience Members: Thank you.
[Audience applauds]
For more exclusive audio coverage, visit BlindBargains.com or download the Blind Bargains app for your iOS or Android device. Blind Bargains audio coverage is presented by the AT Guys, online at ATGuys.com.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
