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The Louie app, which helps you to absolutely management widespread apps and smartphone with voice instructions, has been downloaded 9000 occasions from the Google Play Retailer. (Picture credit score: Pramit Bhargava)
A drug response 20 years in the past affected the retina of Pramit Bhargava, an alumnus of IIT-BHU and IIM-B. Since then, he slowly began dropping his imaginative and prescient, and by 2012, it had dropped to a degree when he couldn’t learn something. Dropping his imaginative and prescient had impacted Bhargava, each mentally and physiologically. Low on confidence, the 53-year-old even began questioning himself.
“I used to be turning into so depending on folks due to the dearth of expertise. Although I’m a very good consumer of expertise, I realised that the one factor out there for the visually impaired was a primary display screen reader that was pretty primary, and was troublesome to make use of,” he informed indianexpress.com in an interview.
4 years in the past, Bhargava, who has labored with Hindustan Unilever and Motorola, received the thought of growing an app that exhibits the way in which as to how tech can grow to be extra accessible to folks with disabilities. Whereas in search of assist from a sighted buddy to guide a cab, Bhargava puzzled if he might create a cellular app that permits visually impaired customers to make use of widespread apps with simply voice instructions.
“Louie, in a means, is all about fixing my very own drawback, and with the hope that it’ll work for different folks as effectively,” mentioned Bhargava, the creator of ‘Louie Voice Management’.
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Bhargava visualised a cellular app that may very well be a ‘digital buddy’, doing interactions like people – one thing he himself wished existed for reserving a cab or sending a WhatsApp message. Whereas the thought of a cellular that lets blind and visually impaired use generally used apps and controls the telephone with voice instructions had a possible, Bhargava initially struggled to get builders on board. However as soon as he secured funding from Sequoia Capital, Bhargava recruited his personal builders and began engaged on the app. His staff now consists of 14 folks, together with three visually impaired builders who’re within the space of testing in addition to consumer expertise.
Bhargava has labored with the FMCG large Hindustan Unilever previously. (Picture credit score: Anuj Bhatia/Indian Specific)
Bhargava says the cellular app, ‘Louie Voice Management’, is part of the bigger effort to make tech services and products accessible for the folks with disabilities and particular wants. With smartphones turning into extra accessible than ever, it turns into pure to design options that profit a bigger part of the society, together with blind and visually impaired folks. The app’s title Louie was derived from Louis Braille, inventor of the Braille, a system that permits blind and visually impaired folks to learn and write via contact.
“Whichever app we assist, no matter telephone performance we assist, we received to make Louie so good that similar to a sighted particular person, a visually impaired particular person also needs to be capable of do every and every little thing inside that app with simply voice instructions,” he says.
Louie is designed to be an accessibility app and the voice performance is an integral a part of the answer. “It’s a really complicated expertise, and no different app on the earth is definitely utilizing it the way in which we’re,” he mentioned. However how do you differentiate between your answer vs Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri?
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“The distinction in method is that for those who take the voice assistants, be it Google Assistant, Siri or Alexa, they’re meant for the sighted plenty,” he explains. Citing the instance of Uber, Bhargava mentioned none of those voice assistants can truly do an entire reserving. “What Louie does is that it’ll ask you for the vacation spot, it would let you know the rides and the order of accelerating costs after which it would verify decide up. Even publish reserving, you may name the driving force and cancel your journey. They do superficial assist for every app, what we do is we do full 100 per cent assist inside an app that we voice-enable,” he mentioned. For Bhargava, the blind and visually impaired is the use case for Louie and that itself differentiates the app from Google Assistant or Alexa.
Bhargava says the core expertise used to develop the Louie app is developed in-house. Nonetheless, there are lots of supporting applied sciences which are used to make the app come from Google. For instance, the Louie app makes use of Google’s speech to textual content conversion, which is the place plenty of synthetic intelligence comes into play. “With Louie, you may arrange any voice engine and voice that you really want. We don’t have a voice of our personal,” he mentioned.
The Louie app is designed for blind, visually impaired folks, and aged. The app works with Uber, WhatsApp, YouTube, amongst different apps.
Bhargava says the app, which is presently out there on Android, has a consumer base in 70 nations and there’s a WhatsApp group that’s getting used to get the suggestions from customers. “Virtually 99% of the customers that we now have are all visually impaired.”
Large tech firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft have been making their merchandise extra accessible for the disabled. With iOS, Apple has added options designed to make its gadgets simpler to make use of for folks with disabilities. Microsoft in the meantime provides an Xbox Adaptive Controller specifically designed for folks with particular wants. Google, too, shouldn’t be behind in its efforts to make its providers accessible for disabled. It not too long ago added Stay Caption, a characteristic which transcribes movies and audio on a smartphone in real-time. Efforts are being made to make merchandise that profit everybody, however the accessibility tech remains to be in progress.
“One of many the explanation why this app is so complicated for us is that there isn’t any one customary Android and in contrast to iOS the place accessibility options are baked in, right here there are numerous variations of Android, notably the Chinese language telephones, the place completely different telephones have gotten completely different variations of Android. As a result of accessibility is like an afterthought, it’s not baked in so you may make an app which might be fully inaccessible,” he mentioned.
Accessibility tech has plenty of potential to develop in India, in keeping with Bhargava. “The core answer must be expertise, and even the dissemination of those options via expertise.”
Proper now, the Louie app is in beta stage and could be downloaded without spending a dime from the Google Play Retailer. However Bhargava is considering on find out how to worth the app in India. “The entire thought is that how do you make it so inexpensive, so it may very well be right down to Rs 20 a month, it may very well be Rs 35 a month, however definitely not within the vary of Rs 350-400 a month in India”. Bhargava can be considering of tying up with an organisation, and giving them a free license.
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