AppleVis Extra #110: Envision & the Ally Solos Smart Glasses

In this episode of AppleVis Extra, hosts Dave Nason and Thomas Domville welcome back Karthik Kannan from Envision for his second appearance this year. The discussion centers around Envision’s newest wearable: the Ally Solos Smart Glasses, developed in partnership with Solos. The conversation covers design, functionality, pricing, and how these glasses differ from Envision’s previous offerings and other competing smart glasses.

Key Topics Covered

• Background on Envision

  • Brief history of the Envision AI app and original Envision glasses.
  • Introduction of Ally, Envision’s conversational AI assistant.

• The Ally Solos Smart Glasses

  • Lightweight design (approx. 42g) with two HD (2K-class) cameras.
  • Directional stereo speakers with minimal sound leakage.
  • Beamforming microphones for clear audio pickup in noisy environments.
  • Touchpad controls for volume, Ally activation, and navigation.
  • USB-C rechargeable stems with fast charging (14-hour battery life).

• Functionality & Integration

  • Full Ally integration for text reading, object recognition, facial recognition, and conversational interaction.
  • Can also function as standard Bluetooth headphones for calls, music, and voice assistants.
  • Ability to take photos with auto-generated alt text.
  • No built-in GPS — relies on paired phone for location-based services.

• Pricing & Availability

  • Pre-order tiers from \$399 to \$599 USD (€ pricing equivalent).
  • Post-launch price expected to be \$699 USD.
  • Worldwide availability.
  • Pre-orders include one year of Ally Pro subscription (valued at \$200).

• Accessibility & Language Support

  • Designed specifically for blind and low-vision users, with accessibility in setup and daily use.
  • Supports over 20 interface languages (planned to expand to \~40) and understands 100+ languages for input/output.

• Future Features & Partnerships

  • Plans for offline Ally functionality in future updates.
  • Potential integration with Aira and Be My Eyes.
  • Commitment to continue supporting original Envision Glasses alongside the new model.

Links & Resources

• Pre-order Ally Solos Glasses: ally.me/glasses

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Dave: Hello there and welcome to another episode of the AppleVis Extra. This is episode number 110. I am your host, David Nason, and joined once again by Thomas Domville for AnonyMouse. Good to see you again, buddy. How are you?

Thomas: Hey, it's good to see you too. Oh my gosh, we're going to be bringing them on for the second time this year, right? It seems like they're on a roll here.

Dave: Yeah, we have Karthik Kannan from Envision on today to talk about their exciting new smart glasses product. They're jumping into that space as well. Well, they're adding to it, I guess, because they were one of the originals, you might say, with their Envision glasses. But this is a whole new product in partnership with Solos that we're going to hear about. Much more price conscious, I guess, or cost effective, I think is the term I was looking for. Because it's funny, when we spoke about six months ago about Ally, and they'd just won one of the Golden Apples, and we were speaking, and I kind of raised that the Envision glasses in some ways seem great, but they are very expensive. And, you know, that probably puts people off. And I'm sure he had this up his sleeve, but couldn't talk about it at the time. Whereas now, here we go. There is something to announce.

Thomas: Yeah, that's a good point. No, this ought to be a really good interview because, you know, there's no doubt there's a lot of questions around in the buzz. So I say let's jump in and see what he has to say about this new solo stuff.

Dave: Let's do it. Karthik, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome back to the Up of His Extra a second time this year.

Karthik: Yes, thank you so much for having me, David and Thomas. Super excited to be here again. You guys are always amazing. I've been following your podcast throughout. Great job with everything, you know.

Dave: Thanks so much. Well, you've been busy. So earlier this year, we spoke about Ally, the new AI assistant that you guys have released. And now you've got another big step forward, something that you'd like to discuss further, which is a hardware improvement.

Karthik: Yes, so this is our next generation wearables from Envision. So we had, you know, for those of you who don't know, we've been in the assistive technology space for close to a decade. You know, we first launched the Envision AI app in 2017. And, you know, that got a lot of love from the community. It's also won the Golden Apple Award, you know, and then we had come on to the Envision Glasses, which was our first wearable. That was built on top of the Google Glass, and it basically just, you know, had a set of buttons. People could go through the different menus and buttons and then tap on a specific AI feature that they would like. You know, for example, there was a feature to read text and a feature to recognize faces and objects and so on. And we then, you know, earlier this year, we launched the Ally app, which took all the things we had learned and built over the past eight years and just put that behind a neat, conversational interface. So instead of you having to learn how to use an app or learn how to use the glasses, you could simply hit a button and then ask a question of Ally and Ally can answer that question for you. So you could simply say, hey, can you read this for me? Or can you summarize this document for me? Or can you tell me what's in front of me or describe the color of the table? And you could just keep asking questions and Ally will understand what you want, and then we'll just go ahead and speak it out or give you a response, right? And for the longest time, a lot of people have been telling us they would like us to put Ally on a wearable, and we've been looking like, you know, over the last five years. In fact, I was just joking the other day with a friend saying that we probably have the most amount of smart glasses in the world in our office in Rotterdam. In fact, you know, we could open a smart glasses museum at this point. That's how many glasses we have. So we've been looking for quite some time. And then we encountered this company in Hong Kong, which has actually been building smart glasses for a really long time. And they actually, you know, like we partnered with them and we said, hey, we'd like to put our AI on your glasses. And that's, you know, what we have today. We're launching for pre-orders today for the Ally Solos glasses. These are smart glasses that weigh just one and a half ounces, about 42 grams. They've got two HD cameras, much better quality than what you have on the previous generation Envision glasses. And it, in fact, offers you beyond HD quality on these cameras. It's got a speaker located on both sides of your ears. And it's got microphones throughout the glasses and you don't have to learn how to use these glasses. You just take them out of the case, you put them on and then you hit a button and you start having a conversation with Ally. Right. So it's essentially just. Ally on these glasses and all you have to do is put them on and have a conversation with them. But apart from that, these glasses also work as a pair of headphones. So you can use these glasses to make phone calls, to hear messages, use them with your Siri or Gemini or Google Assistant. You could go ahead and use them just like any other pair of headphones as well as using them with Ally.

Thomas: So I am curious, can you give us kind of an idea, kind of describe of the glasses itself, how it feels in your hand, as in where are the mechanism and things like that, and where are the different things located?

Karthik: Okay, so at the outset, these glasses look like any other pair of glasses. In fact, when I was, you know, taking them home to my parents and I was just testing around and playing with them, they would often grab these pair of glasses over there, prescription glasses, thinking that, you know, this is their glasses. And they would wear it and then they'd be like, yeah, what the hell is it? It doesn't seem, it is not my glasses. And then I started to realize how, you know, innocuous it is, how like seamless it is. The glasses actually are. So these glasses, they are, you know, have their equal weight on both sides. So they're not, you know, going to slant towards one side. There's no additional weight on one side than the other. You can just put these glasses on and on the right hand side of your glasses, you've got a button. And then on the right hand side of the glasses, you also have like a touchpad. So you can actually go ahead and, you know, increase or decrease the volume. You can trigger Ally from the touchpad. You can go ahead and put Ally in walkie-talkie mode, so on, right? Just, you know, interact with Ally through these, you know, options. And then you've got on the sides of the glasses, you've got two HD cameras right next, you know, located on the glasses itself, right? And then on the left-hand side of the glasses, we've got a charging port. So each of the glasses do come with a charging cable. So you can just simply charge these glasses with the charging cable. Or you can actually pull out the side stems. of the glasses and these side stems are usbc rechargeable stems you can actually pull them out and then just plug them into a usbc cable and they will charge uh in about one and a half hours you get a full charge uh and in about 15 minutes you can get up three hours of charge on these glasses so that's how the glasses look and feel like uh and they've got like i said two speakers uh on both sides of your ear and you've also got microphones uh throughout yeah And they come in two sizes. They come in a medium and a large size for two different head sizes. And they have, and at least now we have three different, you know, colors of these glasses, frame options. And you can also swap the lenses on these glasses for prescription lenses as well. Yeah.

Dave: Okay. So you said there's two cameras, so one on each side, I'm guessing, is this? And then with the speakers, are they kind of directional ones that are kind of sitting over your, above the ear? Or what are the speakers like? Is there a lot of, you know, sound leakage from them? Or what's the sound like?

Karthik: Yeah, so the sound is stereo, you know, HD sound that you get. So they are directional speakers that are pointing towards your ear. The Solos hardware actually comes with their own patented technology for these kind of headphones. So these headphones don't leak sound into your surroundings, which was one of the common things that we often hear from people with the Envision glasses or with other wearables. When they use it indoors, they often say that there's sound that leaks into the environment and other people can hear what the output is from these glasses. So we've built this, you know, or rather Solos has built this in such a way that, you know, these are very self-contained headphones. So you don't really hear the sound leaking in from on the sides, right? So that's one of the things with these glasses. Yeah.

Thomas: So let's talk about the camera. I know that he was hinting on the two cameras. I am curious about a little more techie specs on the camera. Excuse me. Three, two, one. Let's talk about the camera. I'm really curious about the camera and the resolution on those and where the placement you mentioned there were two on there.

Karthik: Yeah, so there are two, and they actually support 2K class resolution. So 2K class resolution is much higher resolution than your 1080p resolution that you usually get. So, but then they are slightly lesser than 4K, right? So it's in between 1080p and 4K, which is important for us because with these cameras, and again, the field of vision is like the 1X camera on your smartphone. So that's usually, that's the field of vision. we get or it's between 0.7x to 1x depending on whether you're iOS or Android. So it's a little bit wider than your regular smartphone cameras, but it's not as wide angle as your Envision glasses camera. And the thing with these glasses is that it's optimized for AI in the sense it has enough field of view to give AI as much information as it needs about the surrounding when it's trying to do stuff over live video. It also has enough information when it wants to go ahead and read documents. So the beauty of these cameras is that we can alter the resolution quite easily. So we can dial down the resolution when we are looking to understand what's happening around the person's surroundings and we can dial up the resolution when we want to scan documents. So that way it becomes really easy to read text on the documents for the AI. That's basically a little bit more about the cameras itself. And apart from the cameras, the glasses also come with motion sensing, gyroscopes and compass and stuff. And yeah, we probably have plans of building a thickness version of Ally in the future that helps you keep a track of steps that you're having. And when you go on runs, you can take these glasses with you as well. So those are some of the things that like some of the other technical bells and whistles that are also part of the glasses.

Thomas: Motion. That's interesting. That's interesting. So a number of steps. What about like hand gestures?

Karthik: So hand gestures right now, you'll have to detect those hand gestures with the camera. There are no specific sensors that can go ahead and detect hand gestures. It does have a touchpad, so it does recognize stuck gestures that you do like swipe up and swipe down and tap and hold and all of those things. But not hand gestures at the moment. Yeah, not this hard then.

Dave: I would too, because you're talking about, I suppose you might be looking around your surroundings, there might be signage that you want to read, that kind of thing, but also then maybe giving directions in the future, like any kind of GPS function. Is there a GPS chip even in them or anything like that?

Karthik: No, these don't have a GPS chip. They don't need a GPS chip because they're kind of plugged into your phone. Not plugged in in the sense that they are paired to your phone, connected wirelessly to your phone, right? So because they're connected wirelessly to your phone always, and they do rely on your phone to process data, it is possible for us to latch on to or piggyback on the GPS capabilities of your phone, right? So that way we're able to pinpoint data exactly where you are and you can even ask ally questions like hey can you tell me what's the closest coffee shop to me right and ally will be able to answer that question for you it might not be able to guide you at the moment we don't have any kind of navigation or guidance built into these glasses just yet but we plan to do that in the near future

Thomas: Let's talk about the microphone. How is the microphone quality on that? Are there like multiple microphones or where's the placement of those?

Karthik: Yeah. So there are multiple microphones on these glasses and they are placed throughout the glasses. So these are like beamforming microphones that give you pretty clear audio. Like one of the things I like about these glasses is just the fact that I can have pretty crisp back and forth conversations. I like even in fairly noisy environments. Of course, it's not perfect in the sense that, you know, I sometimes still find I like picking up some stray environmental noise. But for the most part, it does a pretty good job of cancelling out noise in the surroundings.

Dave: But is that a quick question again about the aesthetics of it as well? When you mentioned the lenses, are they clear or are they sunglasses dark? Or does the customer have a choice? How does that work?

Karthik: Yeah, so the glasses are clear lenses, but you can, of course, take the clear lenses out and then swap them for dark lenses, tinted lenses, you know, prescription lenses and so on, all within five minutes at an optician. So that shouldn't be an issue.

Thomas: So you mentioned about it's all processed on your iPhones. That's interesting. So you took all the processing off of the glasses, which I assume would make a huge benefit for battery life on the glasses.

Karthik: Yeah, that's exactly the reason why we're able to offer people, you know, like an all-day battery life because the fact is, you know, unlike the Envision glasses, we didn't have to really put all the internals in the glasses. You know, it was not a standalone. These glasses are not a standalone computer. In fact, they just... simply piggyback on the processing power of your phone, right? And we thought that made sense because, one, it helps us dramatically reduce the cost of these glasses. We can still put, you know, world-class components like HD cameras, a great battery, and a great speaker, and a microphone. These are things that really matter. And then we can take the processing over to your phone because... Most of the times people are with their phones nowadays. We don't really go anywhere without our phones, even to the new we take our phones. Right. And it just makes sense for us to think, OK, we can piggyback on that. One of the really one other really cool aspect of having your phone. phone as a processing unit is you don't have to take these glasses and connect them to a hotspot or a Wi-Fi every single time you step out, right? These just connect to the Wi-Fi that's already on your device. They just use the internet capabilities of your device already, which is another big plus over the Envision glasses or other standalone wearables. Because you had to really go out and like, you know, every time you go to a new environment, like a new office or even the outside, you need to connect these glasses to a new to the Wi-Fi each time or separately. Right. Of course, the ambition glasses or other wearables do remember the Wi-Fi that you're connected to. But largely, it is something that people have to do over and over again in this case. You don't have to think about doing that. You just have to put on the glasses and then start using them. And the glasses will automatically just pick the Wi-Fi or whatever internet source your phone is connected to at the moment.

Thomas: Now, I read something about like it's got, what, 14 hours of battery life. Is that about right?

Karthik: Yeah, that is about right. We have about 14 hours of battery life on these glasses. And yeah, it also has fast charging as well.

Dave: In terms of features, because you mentioned a touchpad, but you also mentioned Ally being the primary, you know, usage of it, interaction method of it. So is there different modes or can you access different services beyond Ally or what's the feature set in that point of view?

Karthik: Yeah, so the primary sort of use case for these glasses is using them with the Ally app on your phone. So you can just, you know, take out the glasses for the first time, you just pair them once to your Ally app, and then you can simply just use the Ally functionalities like being able to read text, recognize faces, objects, and so on. All of that is something that's available to you out of the box. with this, you know, with these glasses. But you can also use them as a regular pair of headphones, right? Which means you can, you know, answer calls with these headphones. You can use them with your Siri. You can use them with your Gemini or Google Assistant. You could use them to listen to music as well. So there are really no restrictions on, you know, what other apps you can use with these headphones. You can, you know, the beauty of it is you're paying, you're buying both a pair of smart glasses that work with Ally, but also just a regular pair Headphones as well. And another thing that you can use these glasses for is you can also use them to take pictures. So within the Ally app, we do have the functionality where you can just simply ask Ally to take a picture for you or you can just tap a button and take a picture. And that picture basically gets saved to your photo gallery with an alt text description saved. So you can actually just know what, like, you know, easily browse through them in your iPhone's photo gallery, right? So that's something that is also going to be possible with these glasses.

Dave: You mentioned calls there, and I know the Envision glasses had a feature where, I can't remember the name of it, but you could call assigned kind of friends or family for that kind of assistance through the camera, them looking through your camera. Will these have this at launch or at a later date?

Karthik: So that's a great question. At launch, we don't have the option for that, for making a companion call just yet. But we are exploring, you know, ways of bringing that over to these classes. You know, we might have them as a free update to everybody at a later point in time. Another interesting side note is we're also in talks with Aira and others in the space. And we're also looking to bring those folks also to the Ally Solos platform. We already have them on the Envision glasses and we also hope to bring them onto the Ally Solos platform as well. These are things that will not be available at launch, just to make it very clear, but they will be available as an update later on for people.

Thomas: Boy, you put a lot of thought into this, a lot of features and things like that. I am curious. It almost sounds like you guys have designed this for simplicity. This is simple. A step above like other competitors or in the previous past where you had to use the buttons to go to different function in different modes is that that seems like it's gone. So you just simply turn it on and you just talk and that's all you do. There's no functional buttons, things like that. Is that right?

Karthik: Yeah, so the idea is to make it simple but also powerful. I think it's also, for example, possible for you to trigger Ally quietly. You don't have to keep talking to Ally to get things done. We've got, for example, shortcuts within the Ally app where you can just click a button and then that triggers a shortcut and then gives you a response. So you don't have to keep asking Ally questions. So we've thought about how do we take what we already have built Over the years with the Envision glasses, with the Envision app, with the Ally app. And how do we just make it so, you know, so damn simple that you don't even need to ship like a manual with these glasses. Like, you know, the Ally Solos glasses, you know, don't come even with a manual. You just, you know, like how they would have in these old Atari consoles, right? Just, you know, turn on, put in the coin and start playing, right? That's essentially what... you do with the Ally Solos glasses, you just put them on, you hit a button and then you start having a conversation or you trigger Ally through many of the shortcut options that are available, right? So those are things that you can definitely do. And yes, I think I believe when I saw the first version of ChatGPT and when we got early access to GPT-4 Vision back in 2023, Everybody else was really enamored by the fact that, oh, now you can start talking to a computer or you can just chat with this thing and, you know, it can be, it can replace a girlfriend. It can, you know, go ahead and act like your assistant. You have all of these things. But the way I saw it was, you know, these tools right now can just replace having to learn how to use a menu or a computer or a piece of software right like you don't have to go back to the old days of windows where you click on a start button you click a bunch of menus and then you get the computer to do something for you now we are in an era where you can just ask the computer to do something for you and it will understand what you're saying in your language and then just do that thing for you right and which is getting really better and better over the years and they're just thinking that that is the future and that's what we want our devices to be like.

Thomas: So I know a lot of people are going to ask this question and I'm sure you probably overheard this. Now because of the connection between your glasses and your device, so in this case I'll just say iPhone, is that using Bluetooth or how are you doing that connection there?

Karthik: Yeah, it does use Bluetooth 5.2 to send media over from the glasses to your iPhone. And it also uses Bluetooth low energy to kind of generally talk to the glasses and things like that.

Thomas: So with that, I know a lot of people have asked me on a variety of smart glasses, is this going to be able to just say I have an ear pod that I want to have it directed to my ear, but I still want to use my glasses, but I don't want the glasses to be in the talk. And it could be for privacy reasons or it could be... lack of maybe a hard of hearing or whatever or not, or you just need something that just goes directly to your ear, is that something that's possible to redirect that sound to, say, an ear pod or hearing aid?

Karthik: Yes, it is possible to continue to keep your glasses on and then just, you know, go ahead and redirect your audio from the glasses over to your, you know, your AirPods or AirPods. And if you have a made for iPhone, you know, hearing aid, which is, I think, the common industry standard for hearing aids right now. You can just simply, you know, like always direct the audio to go, you know, to your hearing aids instead of the glasses. Right. So that's possible for you to do, you know, with them. Yeah.

Dave: That will make some people very happy, I think, to understand it.

Thomas: Yeah, no doubt. Dave, I agree with you on that.

Karthik: Yeah, we always wanted to kind of cover as many bases as possible with these glasses. So even though we don't really manufacture them in-house, we worked a lot with the Solos team to make this possible. So it was a lot of work we did to kind of steer the development of the software, the firmware. And yeah, I think we were very insistent that it had to be accessible from day one for as many folks in the community as possible.

Thomas: Now, would it be correct to say, if I were to say, you will definitely have to have internet connection all the time. So data has to be going freely all the time from your device. So there is no offline version of that. Would that be correct?

Karthik: Yes, for now. So in the first version that we're going to be, in the version that we'll be shipping at the end of September, we probably will not have offline capabilities for Ally. But Ally will definitely have offline capabilities. You will be able to use things like Instant Text, scan text, features on the Envision app and the Envision glasses that people use offline. For example, Instant Text is a very loved feature on the Envision glasses and the app where people can just read short pieces of text really quickly. So it just reads all the text around you and stuff, right? So we are working to bring those features that people love over to the Ally Solos classes. So yes, Ally will be capable of working offline. And we actually have a version of Ally working as an offline agent or offline assistant. We're just doing some testing on that at the moment. And hopefully in the next few months, we'll be able to just put that into the Ally app and give people the option to use Ally offline as well.

Dave: And am I right in saying the ChatGPT is the model that you guys use? And if so, then can it also do other functions that you would do with the ChatGPT, the conversational things or even ChatGPT agents, that kind of stuff in the future?

Karthik: So we used to use ChatGPT as the primary sort of model that picks the right tools for the right things. The industry has moved a little bit beyond that. I think there are tools that are slightly better than ChatGPT at picking, understanding what the user is saying and picking the right tools to solve it. So we currently have our own fine-tuned open source models that do it. We do use, for example, ChatGPT in instances where we need very accurate image descriptions because they do image descriptions quite well. So there are instances like that where we use ChatGPT or when we use ChatGPT, for example, to help us search the web and get us responses from there and then put that together. But ChatGPT is one of the many models we have in our pipeline. So we always mix and match the best AI that we can get our hands on for these days. And so chat is just one aspect of it in the whole pipeline.

Thomas: I was thinking the same thing, Dave. You're thinking just like I was of what model they were using. So you're using some sort of a modification model for yourself that's kind of corporate multiple. So how does something like when those models get updated to brand new version, whatever or not, is that something that you do frequently? Like, you know, sometimes they update it every six months or whatever. Is that something that you will be doing on the fly in the future?

Karthik: We've always done that. So, you know, we started off with like GPT-4 vision in 2023 when we first built a version of Ally that we wanted to show it on CSUN in 2024. And then we since have moved on to Cloud and to Gemini and to open source models. And, you know, now we've kind of have our own, you know, pipeline that with all of these different types of models put together. So the way it works is, you know, we have a very nice internal benchmark, which is a benchmark that we have been building over the years. And this benchmark is nothing but when sometimes people share data with us, when they reach out to us on support tickets and say, hey, the AI is not able to read this document or read that document. We just start putting those documents together and we built like a nice benchmark data set out of that. And these are the most challenging documents and images that AI has ever seen. Right. You know, so we you know, and these are real world use cases. So what we do is whenever somebody. Some company or some outfit then puts out a new AI model and makes a very bold claim that, oh, we now are to the best image recognition in the world or the best text recognition in the world. We just quietly take those models and run it through this benchmark and then see it get humbled. So we do that almost every month, right? Because the pace of change in the industry is quite a lot. So we just go ahead and every month, whenever the new AI models come out, we just take them, put them through this benchmark data set. And if it does better, then what we have in the, at the moment, then we go ahead and put that to a private beta and then a public beta. And then, you know, finally it goes into production. So we keep changing it frequently, but it has to go through a thorough sort of, you know, a testing process internally and on a public beta. And if that works out, okay, then we push that over to production.

Thomas: Now I am curious, and I'm sure a lot of people are going to ask the same question. Now, Let's talk about this ally incorporation or incorporated into the classes. That's something that we are going to have to pay on a subscription basis because now I know that you have a what is the ally pro I think you call it. Is that something that's going to be required to have when you have these classes.

Karthik: Yeah, so one of the things with Ally is that it is a subscription app. And when people purchase a pair of the Ally Solos glasses during the pre-order campaign, we will go ahead and offer them a one-year pro subscription for free worth $200 along with the Ally Solos glasses it sets. And after that, people can go ahead and choose to continue to pay us for a subscription or they can go ahead and still use the Ally app with the free version of Ally. Sorry, the Ally Solos glasses with the free version of Ally without any restrictions. So the free version of Ally still has a lot of features. It still has most of the features that the pro version has. And so people can still use Ally, get the most out of it. And if they feel like it's worth it, and if they want to continue supporting us, they can simply pay a subscription fee and then just upgrade and stuff. So we'll be charging 20 dollars per month and 200 dollars per annum. And this is the pricing of the Ally app subscription itself. Having said that, we currently have introductory pricing of $10 per month and $100 per year. And the interesting thing about these introductory pricing is that once people lock into using, for example, the $10 per month or $100 per year subscription, that's the pricing that will continue with them forever, right? So unless they cancel their subscriptions and then they'll have to pay $200, but anyone who pays $200 A $100 yearly subscription for Ally Pro basically locks their price at $100 until they cancel it.

Thomas: Now, what would be the final retail price once the introduction is off on the glasses itself?

Karthik: Yeah, so the retail price we're looking to have will be around $699. That's the retail price that we'll be having on these glasses. So right now, the glasses are in the super range. Early bird pricing went from $399. I think that's almost sold out because the moment we put it live, a whole bunch of people just bought those glasses. And then the next pricing tier unlocks at $499. And then the final pricing tier unlocks at $599. And we hope to kind of have the post launch price to be around $699. Yeah.

Dave: Will there be a Euro price for those? Or do we have to buy in dollars?

Karthik: Oh, it's the same price in Euros. It's the same. Yeah, so it's €399 for the ultra-early bird pricing, €499, and then €599. So all of them are in Euros at this point. And all of them come with €200 worth of Ally Pro subscriptions for an entire year, along with the glasses.

Thomas: And is this going to be available worldwide or certain regions? How does that work?

Karthik: Worldwide. So you don't have to, you know, be restricted to geography. It's going to be available across the world and you ship across the world as well.

Thomas: Wow. I mean, that's just incredible. I love it that it's going to be available worldwide, unlike other ones that are just so regional. And I think a lot of people get turned off by that. But this, right? Right.

Karthik: Oh, one other thing I want to also like talk about is apart from it being worldwide, it's also available. The Ally app and the interface is translated to over 20 different languages. We are going to be doubling that to about 40 different languages by the time we shift. And the Ally itself is capable of both talking and understanding, you know, in about 100 different languages. Yeah.

Thomas: Oh, wow, translation. Wow, isn't that cool, Dave?

Dave: Very cool. I think at Vardis, it's always been a strength of Envision is the international aspect, I think, compared to some companies. It can be maybe more US-focused or European-focused, whereas I think at Envision, typically you guys are quite international-focused.

Karthik: No, definitely. I think we've got users of the Ally app in over 150 countries. We've got people who use the Envision app in over 200 countries. I think one of the really cool things is in today's day and age, and especially with today's AI, to not be international, to be very regional doesn't make any sense because these models... in general are getting like way smarter at understanding different languages at interpreting different languages um you know and and it's it's quite amazing for me to see how every new generation of model that comes out just is is that much smarter at understanding different languages right like a lot of these companies a lot of these labs are putting so much effort into building ai that's international it would be a crime not to take advantage of it

Thomas: Now, I'm going to ask some tough questions. Are you ready for tough questions now?

Karthik: Oh, yes. I am born ready for tough questions. Hit me with Dolly.

Thomas: All right. Okay. So let's talk about those out there with the existing Envision glasses. So they're using the old Google smart glasses. Where are we going to, where are they going to go from this point? So in other words, with their existing glasses, what kind of, are you going to still support those or what is the thought and what would you say to those existing users what they should expect?

Karthik: Yeah, so we will definitely continue to support the existing Envision Glasses users with new updates. Secondly, Ally is 100% available on these existing Envision Glasses hardware, right? When we first built Ally, even though we knew that there could be other smart glasses on the horizon that we could be working with, we always ensured that we built Ally in such a way that we can support them on existing hardware. It has been supported by Envision for the last five years, six years. If you take that into account, when we first started building the Envision glasses hardware, we've been supporting them for like five years, which has been a bit of a record in the industry. We've been around for that long and we've been supporting the same product and building on top of it. for all those years and we will continue to do so in the coming years as well uh you know whatever features we push out for the ally solos classes in terms of the software capabilities all those or most of those will definitely come on to the envision glasses as well uh we will continue to keep pushing out you know software updates in terms of security updates bug fixes All of those things will continue to be rolled out through the Envision Glasses hardware. So if you are somebody who owns a pair of Envision Glasses hardware, you definitely don't have to panic. Those glasses, that hardware is still going to be very much usable. So if you do want to use the Ally Solos glasses for whatever reason, you can still go ahead and buy a pair of those glasses and then use them as well. So there's no restriction on that. But if you don't want to, your Envision glasses are perfectly usable as they are.

Thomas: So you're not going to retire the original, so are you going to keep continuing the original Envision glasses then along with your Solos?

Karthik: Yeah, no, definitely. The original hardware, it's actually a great piece of hardware. It's a standalone computer, you know, for its class, it offers about six to seven hours of battery life. You know, it has speakers and cameras and it's possible for you to just use a lot of offline functionality on those glasses. So they're really good. So there's no reason to not to retire than just because we're having a new version of glasses out. I mean, it's like the iPhone 15 and the iPhone 16, right? You just know that the iPhone 15 is perfectly good hardware and you can still continue to support updates. For that, it's just that iPhone 16 has a few more new features that, you know, because of the passing of time and technology just improving over time, the iPhone 16 just happens to have better hardware than iPhone 15. That's it. And in this case, it's not even a one-year difference, right? It's been non-step hardware five years ago. And five years later, we're still supporting it. We're still pushing updates for it. And I see that happening for another few years down the line.

Thomas: Okay. Well, that's going to make them feel better because I think that was one of the things that kind of got lost in the noise is that what do we do about the existing glasses and if we continue. So, thank you for answering that. Now, I got to ask a harder question now. Now that we know it's getting kind of crowded here when it comes to smart glasses. And so... I am curious, in your view, and as good as you are, and I know you will do a good answer on this, but how would you compare this to something that's equivalent to something like Echo Vision that's about to come out that is pretty similar in price and similar features? So what makes you more outstanding and original that you would say we have more advantage than over, say, Echo Vision, Ray-Ban, and things like that?

Karthik: Yeah, I think it's hard for me to comment specifically about something like Ecovision because I think I don't have a pair of those glasses with me and I can't comment about that particular piece of hardware. I've seen a few webinars, but I don't think they do justice for me to comment on them right now. But I can talk about the other more, I can definitely talk about the more mainstream glasses like Ray-Ban Metas and stuff, right? I think with them, the primary sort of difference is that these glasses are built for accessibility. I think anybody who tries on the Solos glasses knows that these glasses are basically built for with accessibility in mind, which means that when you're trying to read a piece of text, you shouldn't have the machine decide for you whether you deserve to know what's in that piece of text or not. I think the first important rule in accessibility, at least that I believe, is that you need to provide information as is to the person who's asking for it and then let them make a decision on what they want to do with that information, right? I think mainstream smart classes, because they are kind of encumbered by a lot of corporate legal rules and guidelines, they can't give you access to certain pieces of information, right? So you're trying to read a bank statement or you're trying to read a product packaging, or you're trying to read something that's on your screen, the glasses will, the Ally Solos glasses will just read them out for you if you want it to be read, right? Or if you want to have a summary of it, if you want to know what the meaning of something is, the AI is as uncensored as possible. Of course, we have some safety guardrails in place, but we're not treating adults as kids, right? We're basically giving them the information they need. And I think, though I know I really respect what Ray Ban has done here in democratizing technology and making it available to more and more people, I think some of these things really matter. So with Ally Solos, it's incredibly good at reading text. It can recognize faces for you, can describe things around you, can recognize objects. All of that, as you ask, it tells you without any kind of filters whatsoever. Another thing is the fact that these glasses are also accessible from start to finish in terms of setup. So you don't have to worry about getting these glasses and then the app might not be accessible 100%. There might be issues with voiceover. There's none of that stuff. You just take the glasses out. Ally app is 100% accessible. It's possible for you to get the output on a braille display even with the Ally app. So all of these things are thought of again from an point of view. And lastly, I think this might be the case with other smart glasses that are in the accessibility space too. Ally is very, very cross-platform. So you can take a picture or you can read a document with the Ally app on the glasses and then you can simply continue to read that document on your phone. Or you can go ahead and scan a document with Ally and then you can just save it to my library and you can open up Ally on your desktop And you could go ahead and read the document on your desktop or do whatever you want to do with it, right? Or you can have conversations on the glasses, continue them on your phone, have conversations on your phone, continue them on the glasses, and then use them on the web if you need to and so on, right? So because Ally is available across different platforms seamlessly, you don't have to be restricted to just using Ally on your phone or Ally on the glasses. It's just available online. everywhere and we're also going to be bringing ally soon over to whatsapp telegram uh and our allies are going to have phone numbers so you can pretty much give ally a call like a regular call and have a conversation with it if you need to uh and we're going to make ally available on more and more and more platforms going forward so again the beauty of allies is it's available everywhere so you don't have to be restricted to just one platform even if it's the glasses

Speaker 4: Well said, well said. I love that. That's a good answer, right, Dean?

Dave: Absolutely. Can I ask a question that I think Scott might like us to ask? And I hope I don't butcher it on you, Scott. But when you say that you can use it with your phone, does that mean essentially if you're a Braille display user, if you're deafblind, could you use these by the glasses acting as the camera, but you interacting through a text chat, for example, on the app?

Karthik: Yeah, so that's possible for you to go ahead and do as well. You can kind of connect the glasses, you know, to your phone, right? And then once you do that, right, you could simply use the text chat. And whenever you want to take a picture, it takes a picture with the glasses instead of having to take a picture with your phone. So that's something that's possible for you to do with these glasses as well. So if you're somebody who is a Braille display user and you want to use these with a Braille display, you can actually go ahead and, you know, try it out like this and it would work.

Thomas: I have one last question. And then my question is now is, As I'm thinking about it, the price is beautiful. It's low. It is reasonable. There's a monthly payment. If you choose to do it or you want to use it for free, the Ally Winter Glasses comes down to, my thought is, sustainability monetarily. So how in the world are you going to make money, enough money to sustain yourself when you're probably not making a whole lot of profit off the glasses and just say majority of people go with the free version. So how is that going to work for you guys?

Karthik: Yeah, no, I think that's also the part where, you know, we kind of always have trust in the community to reward us when we do a good job. We've seen that with the Envision glasses. We've sold over 5,000 of these glasses across the world. When we made Envision app into a subscription app, we know that people ended up supporting us because they've kept it alive and well for the last eight years or so. That kind of patronage in the accessibility space. I know does not come easy. I think people here in this industry tend to be very, very, in the community tend to have very high standards. So if you're not doing a good job, you have to do better than a good job to sustain. Having said that, I think at our $699 price point, You know, we should be able to, you know, we see a way for us to make, you know, a decent margin on these glasses to sustain ourselves. But at the same time, I really believe that there's going to be a lot of value coming to Ally Pro at a very competitive price point, right, in a time period. where a lot of the big AI labs are going up to $200, $2,000 in the case of Gemini. You pay Gemini $2,000 a month for access to their top-level AI. I think there's a lot of interesting things that are happening in the open-source AI space. Envision's always relied on the open source AI movement to kind of step in and help lower the cost and help us kind of build a more sustainable business. I think that's what I see happening with this wave of AI as well. So yes, I think I have a lot of faith overall in the fact that our pro offering is going to be really competitive. It's going to have a lot of things that people really want to have. And that, I hope, will subsidize the free users. The glasses is going to be the ideal choice for experiencing Ally. And as long as people, you know, pay us for those glasses, I think we're going to be good. And I think people are going to find a lot of value in those glasses because, you know, they're at an accessible price point, but they come with a lot more. And it's tailored for someone who is blind and low vision, tailored for older adults, you know, who probably want to get things done from technology without all the hassle and the complications of it. So, yeah, I put faith in the community. I put faith in in, you know, in the direction that they're pointing us in. And if we just, you know, walk in that direction in a steadfast manner, I'm sure that we'll hopefully receive the patronage we deserve.

Dave: That's a lovely way to answer that question. Builders and they will come.

Karthik: Yeah, yeah. And we'll build and talk about it, hopefully, you know, on podcasts like this. And, you know, you guys are often, you know, the convites for getting this bit out. You know, when I talk to people, oftentimes I just ask them like, you know, what podcast you guys listen to and, you know, they give me two, three names and, you know, I try to always quote those names more than anybody else to like put our message across because you guys ask Very straightforward questions, no bullshit, like some tough ones, but like, you know, no BS, straightforward questions. And, you know, it's, it's, and you take it, take our words as it is in the community. And I, and AppleBiz has sort of become, or has been our biggest champion over the years. We first launched on the, on the forum in, I remember 2017, we slept one day, woke up, and we saw like 10,000 installed. And I'm like, okay, this place is nuts, you know. So I think, you know, I also like the fact that we have a very tight-knit community that helps us get word across as a small company without, you know, like buying a giant-ass billboard or, you know, spending thousands of dollars on TV advertisements no one's going to watch, right? Yeah. So for those of you all who are interested in pre-ordering a pair of Ally Solos glasses and you want to lock in the current pre-order pricing, you can go to ally.me slash glasses. That's A-L-L-Y dot M-E slash glasses. Z-L-A-S-S-E-S. We are currently open for pre-orders now and we're going to be open for pre-orders, you know, until we ship in the end of September. We probably will close the pre-orders a little bit sooner than that to give us time to be able to prepare units and stuff like that. So please go ahead and pre-order your pair today. All pre-order units come with a 30 days, no questions asked return policy. So even if you're a little bit on the fence with these glasses, you can go ahead and buy them risk-free, try them out and let us know your thoughts on it. And yeah, I'm very, very excited to ship this out to you all. You know, all the things that we discussed today will eventually be part of the Ally Solos classes when they ship. We ship worldwide as well. So yeah, I'm super excited for you to all try out this new innovation from Envision.

Dave: Brilliant. Well, Karthik, I just really want to say thanks a million for your time today. And we genuinely wish you the best of luck with the launch and with the new product. I think it's a really exciting space that we're in now.

Karthik: Thank you so much. Thank you so much once again, Dave and Thomas, for having me on the show. Yeah, thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Dave: Okay, so that was Karthik Kannan from Envision telling us all about his new or their new product, the Envision Solos glasses, which are just gone on pre-sale. What do you think, Thomas?

Thomas: Wow. Wow. There's a lot in here. It's packed in here. There was a lot of questions that were answered, and, you know, he did a great job of, you know, this is exactly what I expected to hear from him, a lot of these answers and tough questions we had to ask. You know, I had wondered when I saw the solo come out, and I think they did a brilliant move just because I think – In a way, I don't know about you, Dave, but it seems like there was writing on the wall. And I think they knew that when Ray-Ban was getting in all this crave and then we got all these sellers and now we got the Echo Vision that's coming down. It's like they're just breathing down their back of the neck. And I think they had to answer the call and say, we need to come up with a competitive price point on a new set of glasses. Maybe it's not as... Like the original Envision glasses, because from what I got gathered from this is that it sounds like a substantial difference between what we had before with the Envision smart glasses and to the Solo, and that is, as you heard for yourself, For one, it seems like all the processing is not done on the glasses like the old Envision glasses do. And where the Ray-Ban and other stuff, I mean, that's why you see the processors and the lifespan on these glasses go down so fast. So it was kind of smart on their part. The Ally, I was really shocked to hear that they are going to offer a free version and a pro version because I thought maybe it would just be all pro only. But to know that I could just buy the classes and stick with the free version, of course, it's going to have a scaled down version. So you're not going to get all the cool features. But the point is, is that those with a limited budget that aren't able to subscribe per month will be able to still use it. And so... Yeah, what are some of your thoughts?

Dave: Yeah, similar really. I think it's great on the fact they're a pair of glasses, a relatively normal pair of glasses, whereas I think one of the criticisms of the old ones was that they looked a bit silly as well. And I know some people care about that, some people don't. But I think that's nice. It's interesting that they're not sunglasses, a standard at least. They come with clear glasses. lenses which so they just look like a pair of glasses that people wear to see better interestingly enough so yeah it'll be interesting to see what people think of the aesthetics of us because that's one of the things people care about with wearables that I'm always interested in as well and for me I don't I have a pair of Ray-Bans the meta Ray-Bans but I don't actually like walking with sunglasses because I have some usable vision left and I kind of lose it so I'm wondering would I actually prefer the clear ones So those kind of things are questions like that floating around my mind that I'm curious about. Do you have metas or do you have any similar product?

Thomas: I just have the Ray-Ban wafer, as most of you are like that. I have been putting a lot of interest in the upcoming Echo Vision wafer. but there are some differences between the two and I am really anxious to see how those compare in the real world because there are some big differences between the two. And now whether which one to go to, I, I don't know. Um, they're both, they both got their pros and cons. So I, there's no doubt this is a direction we all want to go with. Um, obviously that, um, You know, the sustainability that I talked about is the only concern I have. Now, it makes sense that he mentions, like, the iPhone. There's a new version each and every year. So I imagine that every time that Solo has a new hardware update, because the hardware itself does have some limitations. So it has a 2K camera, which I kind of... leery about because i i feel like the echo vision has more of a 4k and it has landscape um so it seems like it's a little better but not to say that it wouldn't do more less reliable but um i i am curious when it comes to the real world testing how good these things work for what we want them to do

Dave: Interesting the charging as well. They're not charged by the case like you get with Metas. I'm not sure what the plan is for Echo Vision. These Envision ones, it seems you plug something directly into the glasses or you can remove the stand, which is an interesting way of doing it.

Thomas: Yeah, the Echo Vision does have a USB port on it as well, and they advertise that if you want to, you can even plug it in, and they have an accessory you can buy on Amazon that they mentioned about. It's like a neckband. So the neckband is your battery, so you can connect that if you want a longer extended life. Now, I know the Echo Vision, they tout about nine hours, so... regardless, you've got some pretty good length of time now. As you know, as I know, is real-world talking here. So the more I use it in camera videos or whatever it might, it's going to be a lot less than those hours. So I'm curious what the real-world time will be like that. But just knowing to let the Echo Vision have like a little neckband that you can connect to, that's kind of cool to go on the go. So you can charge... wherever you want to have them be in charge or if you just want to use it as you're on a very long walk or whatever and not have to worry about the batteries right now.

Dave: Now, what are the big differences? I don't know much about the Echo Vision. What are the big differences? Although I did speak to them last year, but I haven't spoken to them again since they released. So, yeah, you said there's some big differences. What do you think they are, the key differences that people might be weighing up?

Thomas: The AI. I think the AI is going to be a huge difference. Ally is using their own open source, so they train their own models. So I am kind of leery about that. I think it does great. So I know that he concentrated about reading text and documents and things like that. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. But when it comes to, like, I want to be able to, like, identify this product and review it, I don't want any hallucinations. So, I mean, that's obviously what some of the things we've got to worry about, some AI. So with these, I believe it's ChatGPT. So I'm a huge ChatGPT fan. And especially with the five models, I think the description and pictures are amazing. And so I wanted to see what that would be like on theirs. The other big difference is that obviously the Solo is designed for simplicity. So in other words, you just put on, turn it on, and you just start talking. There is no multi-function button. So on the Echo Vision, you have these buttons. So you have to set this button to go in a different mode. I can see how that can be confusing for some. So, I mean, they talk about five different function clicks, and it's like, wow, that could be confusing. It's like the fifth click is your reading mode. And, I mean, they've got some pretty cool features. The reading mode is like you sit into reading mode only. So it's not like I have to prompt and ask Ally all the time. It's just it knows what you want to do. So I can sit there and read a documentation, and I'll say next page, and you just flip it, and it starts reading the next page. So there are some pretty cool things on the Echo Vision. The downside of Echo Vision is obviously the processors on the device itself. But it does have the AI. I know Echo Vision is also designed for the visually impaired people. So it's very comparable. And I think the device is $100 less. Now, where the Ally is, you can use the free version. Where the Echo Vision, you don't have that option. You have to pay a monthly subscription to an AI to be able to use it. So there are some differences. Now, if it does come to the fact where Ally can be used off-mode or offline, you know as well as I do, one of the biggest problems in the real world is that once you step outside of a reliable area... That means you go on a walk or whatever on a bus, that cell reception goes dead, you go into dead spots, whatever that might be, you lose everything. And the connection is just a horrible feeling because now I'm walking somewhere and I hit a dead spot. Now what? So, I mean, I think that's one of the biggest factors. So if somehow they can do that offline, yeah, they got a huge leg up on the competition.

Dave: Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. And I know Karthik spoke a bit about things that will be coming later. Always, you know, the golden rule is buy something based on what it can do now. Although I do genuinely believe that they will get better over time, to be fair. And I'm sure that's true of Echo Vision and even Meta Ray Bans. They're going to get better over time.

Thomas: oh no doubt um the other thing to keep in mind is that because it's using ally and it's using on the device and we forgot to mention this and talking about this is about what about ira how what about be my eyes and one of my understanding and is that um there are working on it they would like to work with them to make it incorporated with ally i don't know what that means because Unlike the EchoVision and the older Envision glasses, those are kind of essentially their own OS, so you can put apps in there. So integrating is fine for Aira and BMI's on those devices, but where these new Solo, that isn't the case. It sounds like it has to be integrated with Ally somehow, some way to be able to use it.

Dave: I'd love to, yeah.

Thomas: Right, so that's the other big differences. So there's a lot of big ifs, you know what I mean?

Dave: Yeah, I think on that question it's interesting because he did mention there that Aira will be, you know, that's one that he mentioned that they're talking to. And I know with the, do you remember the R, I think it's called, headsets, which I tested a year or two ago and they've brought out a 1.5 version, but... It didn't work all that well when I used it, I have to be honest. But they've brought out a feature. They're like this one where it's the phone that does the work. It's the app on the phone that does the work. And they brought out an integration with Microsoft Seeing AI. And now I don't know how well that integration works, but that's how they did it. Exactly. Via their app. So it can be done, but how it works is another question.

Thomas: So really, when it comes down to me, reality, this is how AnonyMouse is thinking about it. I think this is fantastic. I love all the choices. I don't – I am not at the position where I could just plop down and say I'm going to go with this or that because it is now to the point where I really want to hear the big difference between some of these models because it really is going to come down to personal preference. And when I think of it, I think simplicity is definitely hands down for the ally, but I think more of the advanced tech stuff and what you get – is going to go to Echo Vision. So there's just too many variables that I don't know about. So that's something I'm going to have to play with both or hear from other people what they prefer. So I think that's what it's going to come down to. But nonetheless, I think the interview was great. answered all the tough questions, and I think they have a – I think they did a – this is going to be great for them. This is definitely the direction they needed to go to because I had worried about them. And so I'm so glad that they revealed their own solo. And so those that are loyal to Envision and want to keep them alive and kicking, I think this is a great option and direction you should go with.

Dave: Yeah, agreed totally. I'm really happy for them and, yeah, really interested to see how it goes. Like you, I'm not jumping into either quite yet, but I will definitely be watching with interest. So, yeah, thanks for joining me today, Thomas, and we'll speak again soon. Thanks for listening.