Braille Day and Shark Tank's Annie

Two days ago was Braille Day, a day pioneer in history for those suffering from visual impairment.?

4th January is the day when "Louis Braille" was born.

In 2019, the United Nations declared January 4 as World Braille day in order to promote awareness about Braille and the contributions of Louis Braille.

He's the inventor of braille! Louis was born in 1809 in France and became blind after a childhood accident. But he quickly mastered his new way of living.

He published his braille code in 1829. It spread to other countries after his death in 1852 and is still used today.

It has made the lives of thousands of those suffering from visual impairment easier.

I was thinking about how we have progressed after 170 years of the death of such a brilliant linguist and technologist in the domain of visual aid. And how I as a computer science student could contribute my dutiful in this field.

To draw inspiration I found many machine learning and data science projects and research that are going on and have progressed a lot to provide service in the field.

There has been a lot of buzz around the current ongoing new season of the Shark Tank India.

A thought just struck my mind "How could I forget "Annie" world’s first Braille self-learning device. Thinkerbell Labs came up with their product Annie in Shark Tank. The co-founders are?Aman Srivastva, Dilip Ramesh and Saif Shaikh. Their presentation was very much backed up by the data.?

As explained, there are more than 20 lakh visually impaired kids in India with low literacy rate. Even in the developed countries, literacy rate for visually impaired kids is around 10% only. As per WHO, 1 in 1000 visually impaired kid needs a product like Annie.

The low literacy rate of visually impaired kids is a global issue and Thinker Bell Labs has come up with an excellent product Annie to resolve it. To mention it again that Annie is the world’s first self-learning, remote-enabled Braille literacy device. It helps kids learn the braille by speaking in their mother tongue. It is integrated with their product Helios through which the progress of the child can be tracked and new learning content can be downloaded. This also enables the children to learn in school. Annie can be used by kids of age 4-15.

The design of Annie has gone through multiple iterations, which Srivastava says is a common practice in designing a product from the ground up. In the early versions of Annie developed in-house, the device had only one large Braille cell with audio but later it was decided to add a few standard cells. “The design has evolved based on functional requirements, which is if you have to educate from classes 1 to 8, what all do you need hardware-wise?” Srivastava says.

Srivastava recalls the team built 50 to 60 prototypes across five to six versions before commercially starting deploying Annie in 2018. Early prototypes of Annie were completely white and the vibe was exactly the same as a washing machine from IFB. But during the design process, Srivastava and the team wanted Annie to go beyond that white colour. “We really wanted Annie to have a playful, colourful, console-type design. We were inspired by Xbox and Nintendo consoles of the past and the design worked for Annie,” he adds. In fact, Annie’s middle portion, where the typing module is, mimics a video game console. “Most assistive gadgets have been boring, but we wanted to change that with Annie,” says Srivastava.

?The design of Annie has been inspired by Nintendo consoles of the past.

Srivastava sees Annie as a full-fledged computer that can be updated just like a smartphone. The device controls the tactile display that children can touch and feel which then shows words, alphabets, and letters to them. There are different buttons for different tasks, similar to how a laptop works. Annie is a connected device and can be remotely enabled—it is possible to keep track of students’ performance.

But Annie isn’t just a hardware device, clarifies Srivastava. In fact, Annie has a hardware layer, a content layer, and a software layer to it. Srivastava and team worked with the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) as well as India’s National Institute for the Empowerment of Persons with Visual Disabilities to develop the content which is as per different grades of Braille that works on Annie. The content, which consists of alphabet learning, listening to sentences and games, is fully digitized and made interactive in nature. “We had to design a new system where if a child goes wrong, Annie can correct them instantaneously in real-time, and then the progress is recorded and that can be given to a teacher, parent, or school authority as and when required,” he says.

Thinkerbell Labs is a young, Bengaluru-based startup, which focuses on assistive tech.

The perception towards assistive tech is changing quickly and more people, especially investors, are rooting for access platforms and hardware. “People [Investors] want to invest in hardware, they now want to look at tangible things,” Srivastava says. “When we initially started, everyone would ask to replicate the concept of [Annie] on a mobile phone app but the things functionally required for a child to learn can’t be put on a smartphone because a phone is not tactile in nature.”

“In tech, inclusion has to come to tech. It should be seen as yet another customer problem and solving leads to value creation and eventually business,” he says.

For Srivastava, the acceptance of Annie—sold as Polly in the US—has opened new opportunities for the young startup in the west. TIME Magazine recently named Polly one of the best inventions in 2022. The hardware of Annie and Polly are the same—the only difference comes when it comes to the software and content designed keeping the US curricula in mind.