Not a RoboDog

The UK Guide Dogs Association raises an extraordinary amount every year. For many owners it’s hard to overstate the value of their dog. But the economics of guide dogs as navigation aids makes no sense, so what is the right form factor for a technological alternative?

The Agentic Shopping Wars

Online shopping agents may not be AI’s deepest impact, but our drive to buy online has pushed Google and Amazon toward $5T. AI agents could transform shopping, with huge consequences for winners and losers.

For those of you who thought 'agentic' was obscure

AI excels at generating impressive content, often surpassing paid professionals. So why can’t it handle basic online chores like ordering a book or booking a flight? And what’s the outlook for tackling far more consequential agentic tasks?

Marital Misconduct, Blackmail and the end of the world as we know it

Agentic Misalignment describes actions taken by AI to the detriment of one or more humans. Aengus Lynch and colleagues at Anthropic recently demonstrated Large Language models attempting blackmail to prevent their own shutdown.

Digital Technology Rendering Physical Technology Unusable

Overly complex household tech, with low cost miniature touch sensitive control displays is a nightmare for vision impaired users. But there’s a great opportunity for an AI assistant to guide the user, combining information from online sources with a first person view from smart glasses.

A Step by Step Guide to Blind Image Creation

It turns out that a blind man can now create, and verify with reasonable confidence, surprisingly rich images. Artists will say this is derivative, shallow and not creative, but although I haven’t found a serious use case, it does feel like a bit of a super power in a fun sort of way.

Voice first does not mean voice only

Conversational voice is a brilliant inclusive, communication mode. But as illustrated here, we have limited bandwidth to process a noisy soundscape, so sometimes we need bi-modal solutions.

Conversations and Memories - Introducing Hobson

Seamless conversation and memory have been Huge historical barriers to effective digital assistive solutions. Hobson is a mainstream voice first conversational personal assistant with a great memory and profound assistive potential.

Eyes; what are they good for?

A summary of 5 different task categories in which we rely fundamentally on vision and some observations on how I manage without any sight. There’s a brilliant but simple app called Be My Eyes described in this post, which despite its limitations, still surpasses what AI can do

Dancing With Technology and The Right Number Of Crashes Is Not Zero

My recent enjoyable and amusing San Francisco experience of two blind men locating and riding in an entirely autonomous Waymo. The future of independent blind travel is getting closer, but there is still a real challenge in joining up the dots for an end to end inclusive experience