Hi AppleVis,
I wanted to drop by and share some of the latest updates to the Ally iOS app, give you a sneak peek at what’s on our roadmap, and hear your thoughts on what we should prioritize next.
What’s New in Ally
Since coming out of beta in March, we’ve been hard at work adding new features and improving the experience:
- Context-aware OCR — Ally now combines AI with optical character recognition to ensure the text it reads is more accurate than relying on language models alone.
- Games — You can now play simple, fun games like trivia and choose-your-own-adventure directly with Ally.
- Conversation History — Go back to previous conversations and pick up right where you left off.
- Customizable Voices — Use prompts to create voices that sound exactly the way you want. You can have as many as you like.
- Shortcuts (in Public Beta) — Create custom workflows inside Ally. For example, check the weather and get clothing suggestions, or have Ally brief you on your agenda for the day.
What’s Next
- Ally Solo Glasses — We just announced pre-orders for our new lightweight, affordable smart glasses, offering all of Ally’s features in a hands-free way when you’re out and about.
- Live Video AI — We’re working on bringing real-time video understanding to Ally.
- New Reading Features — Instant Text and batch scan are on the roadmap to make reading even faster.
We’re also exploring more museum-specific Ally experiences, where visitors can recognize and ask questions about artworks.
Your Turn
We’re starting to plan the next 6–12 months of development. If there’s something you’d like Ally to do — in the app or in combination with smart glasses — we’d love to hear it.
I’ll be here today to answer questions, and our team will be monitoring this thread closely to guide future updates.
Thanks for your continued feedback and support!
— Karthik
Comments
@ Brian
It’s not very often I run into a fellow blind DCC fan! I even got a donut tattoo which takes up my entire forearm lol. If you think the first book is good, each book after that just keeps getting better and better! I’ll have to check those ones out eventually but right now my obsession is DCC lol. They even have an audio drama version on Soundbooth theater.
Good video but
The one question not asked and in this thread has been mentioned at least twice is can we have a toggle to turn off "let me take a look" it is the most annoying thing about the app and to me is very off putting.
This is an important announcement for all Canadians who have pla
To all my fello Canadians, just a heads up, Canada Post is on strike indefinitely.
To the folks at Envision, do you ship with another carrier outside of Canada Post? I know most companies utilize a third-party delivery service when they’re shipping to multiple different countries so you might want to check to see if you’re carrier utilizes Canada post for Canada.
Do not get mad at Envision my fellow Canadians.
Agree 100 percent regarding DCC!
I am currently rereading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I just started book 7, and remember this one being confusing, so I'll have to pay much closer attention. Personally, I wouldn't want a TTS voice of any kind to read these specific books. They're great stories, but most of what I enjoy about them is all of the fantastic narration and character voices.
Anyway, back to Ally, I finally understand how the custom voices feature is supposed to work, but it's most definitely not working as expected for me. I sent an email to [email protected] about it, including my settings, so am hoping someone will be able to help me figure out how to get a voice that sounds at least vaguely similar to what I'm looking for. Bonus points if I could use the same voice I use for my Kindroid.
When Ally was first in beta, they gave us a variety of really great voices, possibly from 11 labs or some other source, but I think that especially for ally pro users, there should be an option for either downloading custom voices or giving us options better than what's currently being used. I can't really explain specifically what's wrong with the voices right now: Aster, Opal, Neon, Shine, etc, but none of them sound particularly pleasant to me, and there are much more authentic-sounding voices available these days; lovethe voice I'm using with Chat GPT for example.
Other than that, I'm really looking forward to receiving my Ally solos glasses next month. I think they're going to be awesome!
Will Ally be coming to Meta Glasses
With the announcement of the Meta SDK for meta glasses allowing access to camera, microphone and speakers, is Ally going to be available on this more mainstream hardware? it's great what you're doing but, if I'm honest, my taste for purchasing small batch, specialist equipment for the blind has faded. I'm more interested in mainstream solutions that can host specialist solutions.
Canceling order
I have sent off 2 emails now trying to cancel my order with no response. If I don’t hear from someone soon I’m doing a chargeback on my card and I will have the banks deal with this.