Ally Solos smart glasses

I eagerly await to hear your experience with this device. I am still enjoying my Meta smart glasses, and while I got mine at a reduced price, I am hesitant to spend money on another pair of smart glasses for now.
Still, from your summary of the device, they sound ... promising. 🙂

Hello,
Envision will make more profits despite the high price of their glasses.
When you read their blog about the glasses, you’ll see they offer an 18-month plan with an Ally subscription.
For me, Meta glasses would be better in this case, even though Meta hasn’t launched LiveAI here in Europe.

At least for now. It will be a long time before I consider glasses specifically for the blind. I'm content with my Meta Ray-Bans.

I read on the Access On podcast transcript that there will not be support for Bluetooth devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants. I know better than to think braille support will be a thing. I'm still hoping the EchoVision glasses will be reliable, and they are still saying they will support Bluetooth audio output. I'll be reading the experiences of others and hope Envision can deliver for those who have a less severe hearing loss, or none at all.

Yes, what's the premium price for when it isn't meeting the target audience's needs? I understand all the stuff about small market, etc., but that means you need to also bring the needed features to be justifiable. Meta Ray-ban also just got an accessibility update although I've not tried it yet. But seeing its not subscription based at this time, extra expensive hardware and a subscription is going to be difficult for a small player to justify. I respect the effort, but economics still make decisions for me the consumer too.

Hi there, Karthik here — just dropping in to clarify that the Ally Solos glasses will work with hearing aids and cochlear implants. The way it works is simple: the glasses pair with the Ally app on your phone over two channels — an audio channel (like normal Bluetooth headphones) and a media channel (to send images from the glasses to your phone).

If you use hearing aids or cochlear implants, you can pair your phone’s audio directly to them while the glasses still use the media channel for image capture. It’s the same approach used by Meta Ray-Bans and other lightweight smart glasses, and works well with assistive audio setups. Sorry if that wasn’t clear in the podcast!

I'd like a pair of glasses simply to read books. I've got a hankering to have a little library of physical books. Think these could be a go for that?

I've not really bothered much with my meta raybans. The usage is too narrow for me. I don't use be my eyes which, of course, they are amazing for.

can you make this ally app available in the arora store? that's what the blindshell classic3 uses. I see ya'll have the basic ally app available on there already, that I have been checking out. hoping you can make this possible for us to use the ally solo smart glasses winth with the classic3. thanks. enjoyed the presentations so far. yep.

So we can try these for 30 days and see how it works. If not something we want, we can return them.

My money is still on the echovision glasses by agiga. But these are also worth a try. I did the early pre-order and will see what is what. Something that always bothers me is that they don’t show the glasses working in real time. How much latency is there? 2 seconds, 10, seconds 30 seconds?

I decided to follow Karthik's recommendation from a podcast interview and test the Ally iOS app to get a sense of how Ally might perform on the smart glasses, especially for my typical use cases.

I grabbed a jar from my spice rack - a typical use case for the glasses for me would be identifying items while cooking or grocery shopping. When I asked Ally what I was holding, it confidently told me it was a jar of Schwarz mixed herbs. I was fairly confident that this was wrong, so I asked if it was sure. Ally doubled down, insisting that based on the label, it was indeed Schwarz mixed herbs.

To verify my suspicions, I opened Seeing AI, which correctly identified it as a jar of ras el hanout - quite different from mixed herbs!

If Ally can't reliably handle something as basic as identifyinh a spice jar - which is exactly the kind of task I'd rely on the glasses for most - and I still need to double check with other tools to be confident in the results, then unfortunately the glasses become a non-starter for me at this stage.

This example highlights one of the major current flaws with AI tools - they express complete certainty when hallucinating or making errors. I would be more tempted by the smart glasses had Ally admitted that it couldn't be sure from what was visible on the jar label and asked me to rotate the jar or try a different angle.

I have the Meta glasses, but unfortunately, they've been nothing but frustrating to me, and I like to think I'm pretty good at communicating with AI. I've had multiple occasions where I get wrong info or the glasses essentially refuse to be helpful. So, I'm thinking that in my specific situation, the Ally glasses will be a huge improvement. I only wish I would have listened to my instincts and waited a while longer before jumping on the smart glasses bandwagon, but I will either sell or give my metas to one of my co-workers once I receive the Ally glasses.

So far, I haven't been able to find the Ally app on my Blindshell. Not a huge deal since I use my iPhone for almost everything, but it would be great if I could use Ally on the blindshell as well whether it's with or without the glasses.

the basic ally app is not available on the blindshell classic2. but there is some version of the ally app available on the classic3.