Looks like Envision is just about done. The post is to long to paste here so if interested go to https://www.letsenvision.com/blog/all-we-had-as-far-as-we-could
Unless Agiga has unlimited amounts of money behind themn, they could eventually suffer from the same fate.
@JohnGassman @pitermach I talked about it in a post; I was suspicious of it even before summer, but I am so optimistic, so I didn't want to think bad just as a principle.
@elettrona
they ran into a problem that many companies who serve the blind face, they are a small company and when they try and do something that takes a lot of money, they have difficulty surviving. Agiga had better have a lot of money behind them and I know they care about working with the blind. Meta is a huge company but, I don't believe their interest is in helping the blind its nice if they can but, they are out there serving a huge public who don't need the same things in product as would blind people. I'm not interested in Meta at all, look what they have done accessibility wise to Facebook. I might checkout Agiga sometime in the future.
@JohnGassman It's when a small company wants to have big projects with a small niche. It's not matter of blindness or else, but of the quantity of users covering that niche. Like if you say, "translate this software in a language spoken in a small island of the world.
@JohnGassman @pitermach What this doesn't tell us is a longer list than what it does, in all honesty.
Their silence to those who bought their solos glasses has been going on for months, while people are continuing to buy them. Are all of those people getting refunded? What is happening to that hardware? Are they going to open source it to allow people like myself to modify the glasses so that users can continue to get use out of the tool they bought?
The same thing applies to their older glasses, based on Google glass.
@fireborn @JohnGassman That’s honestly a good question. Is AirGo vision, I think that’s what they were called, the company who originally made these glasses still around? I wonder if people will be switched over to that in some way because it already had some sort of GPT and Gemini integration. I suspect if they do say anything it won’t be until after October, presumably they’re still hoping to find a buyer.
@pitermach @JohnGassman I thought that company were making their own thing.
@fireborn @JohnGassman afaik from what Envision said in various podcast interviews it’s basically the same product with slightly tweaked firmware to replace a few audio queues, there might have also been some external changes to make some controls more tactile but it’s been a while since I followed this topic.
@pitermach @JohnGassman The question is still teh same, though. Just because they got a product from an ODM doesn't mean it isn't now their product.
@fireborn @pitermach @JohnGassman I agree. Yes, the Envision Ally Solos glasses were the exact same hardware as the Solos AirGo V, and Envision made them at least twice as expensive. I think they only had small firmware modifications, but I bet if you bought the regular Solos AirGo V, they would pair fine with the Ally app. I think one earlier interview actually said that while a later interview denied it. If this is true, then I think its almost deceitful to hide it and they should have made this very explicit and said what the modified firmware got you. Also, yes the article did not mention the glasses at all, which is very strange. And before the article came out, if they intended to stop developing and supporting the glasses, they should have stopped selling them and made a public announcement. Also, maybe if these new glasses had been better, it would have helped them a lot. If they were noticeably superior to the Meta glasses and Agiga and most blind people thought so, way more people would have bought them, and since they have such a high markup over the original price of the hardware, I would think that would have helped. This reminds me of what happened to Seleste, because the reliability of the connection between the glasses and the phone wasn't very good. They were building interesting features and expanding their AI assistant into something more general purpose by connecting it to things like email, but if the core function doesn't work very well, the product cannot succeed because less people will pay for it.
@emassey0135 @pitermach @JohnGassman All of this. The post not mentioning the glasses at all has me very concerned. They talked only about their apps.
@fireborn @emassey0135 quin@minix~$ grep -wo "glasses" invision.txt | wc -l
8
Where invision.txt is just the text of the article as gotten from edbrowse, with no navbars or footers. What did they not mention about their glasses? They weren't the focus, but they talked about them.
@pitermach @JohnGassman
@TheQuinbox @emassey0135 @pitermach @JohnGassman They didn't talk at all about what will happen to them, or address any of the issues people have had with them over months that have had no responses. They talked about what they would do with the app should they not find a buyer, at least with the Envision app, but not the glasses. Not discussing the ally app in great detail makes sense, as it's an online service and they do say what they are doing with those.
@TheQuinbox @fireborn @pitermach @JohnGassman They talked about the old glasses and smart glasses in general, but didn't say even a word about the new Ally Solos ones or even seem to acknowledge or recognize their existance.