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Comment by spanktheuser | Hacker News Reader

For those of you who argue that a device like this is useless I urge you to visit someone with Parkisons, essential tremors, ALS, rheumatoid arthritis, limb injuries etc as well as very low vision and observe the difficulty they have interacting with the vision + multi-touch interface of their phones.

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I expect iPhones to have better accessibility designs, controls, and accessories for these people than this, and most will already have iPhones. It doesn’t help that it looks like it’s marketed primarily for crypto zoomers.

That's the neat thing about phones. You can program them to interact with you via touch and voice(and even camera in apps like Google lens) without having to purchase a new piece of hardware dedicate to accessibility.

A voice app might be ideal for a subset of these groups, but my experience observing others using voice interfaces has not been encouraging. Many people, especially the elderly, are hard of hearing, have an accent that is misunderstood by technology, and/or speak with a incompatible cadence. People also need time to process the response, but with voice it's happening at the device's timeframe, not the user's.

I have a friend who is... slow.

He uses a dedicated GPS device in his car and it speaks directions very slowly. Seems to work for him.

Thanks, I just remembered that there's a setting on my phone to control the speed of speech.

A GPS application seems like a tough place to use it, because it's time critical.

I agree with you that generally people who complain about assistive devices do not consider any form of disability in their analysis. But the way that the consumer tech industry is shaped makes selling assistive devices really hard. Investors only want to invest in things that will be the next iPhone which makes actual assistive tech a really tough industry because the market is too small. So companies broaden try to broaden their reach but in order to do that they sacrifice the resilience, durability, reliability that those under-served communities really need. Most abled people can handle the 80% accuracy of a voice assistant, but for someone who needs an assistive device, that 20% failure rate can be brutal. The bar is so much higher to help those communities, and most companies wont bother.

Basically, if you want to make a medical assistive device, you kind of have to be all in on it, instead of trying to convince everyone that your device is the future of human-computer interaction (because its probably not and you'll just forget and ignore those communities)

Nice, you pulled out the "but think about disabled people" tactic, that's usually a conversation ender. Unfortunately, that's not who they are selling this $1000 device that mimics the existing capabilities of a phone to, based on their marketing.

This device is $199, stop lying.

Were people with disabilities mentioned as a target market?

I often hear on HN how Apple's lockdown of iOS is justified because grandma/grandpa need it that way. The only grandpa I've ever seen featured in an Apple product presentation is Tim Cook.

IPhones have similar voice activated functionality.

And where it doesn’t, an app can add these exact features to devices people already own, since the LLM isn’t running on device on the rabbit (it’s far too small)

Also this product definitely isn’t being positioned as an accessibility device.

Did you miss the part of the article where the complaint is that current voice assistants already do just about everything that was demonstrated? "Play some music. Who performed this song?".

I'll stand by the argument that the device is useless, because it does not appear to bring anything new to the table, "think of the children^Wdisabled" arguments aside.

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