Mariner8

In terms of the $2,600 price, I started out in the field when a full Dragon Dictate setup was > $20k and most augmentative and alternative communication devices were $5-7,000. This month, the AI-powered VoiceItt app broke through a barrier by gaining the capacity to translate individual *spontaneous* dysarthric speech into spoken English on the fly for a subscription price of fifty bucks a month, which wilk make it possible for many people with cerebral palsy, strokes, Down syndrome, and other speech challenges to be understood by everyone. Just watch. 

Selections-to-speech will be easy.  Selections-to environmental controls will be a cinch, and much more. 

Think about the thumb-finger tap as a secondary ‘single’ switch, locking in or activating a primary selection that’s made by eye-gaze, timing (e.g. capturing the moment when a target comes into view or moves into the crosshairs, or when a rolling highlight hits the desired selection in a drop-down or matrix menu).  

Consider that *any* single-switch has exactly the same function and can accomplish the same purpose as a thumb-finger tap.  Under what circumstances would this be useful?  Well, if your fingers don’t work but your toes still do, that would be useful (try it now).  If your fingers and toes don’t work but your tongue still does, that would be useful (try making a little ‘tetch’ sound with your tongue now).  

There are scores of single-switches that have been developed and used by people with disabilities for over 40 years.  Think about Steven Hawking writing A Brief History of Time with a single switch (Walt and Ginger Waltoz built that solution to run on an off-the-shelf laptop instead of a $7,000 AAC device).  Run a Google or Chat GPT search on the phrase [disability single-switch interface]. 

Speech-to-text and text-to-speech were developed in the disability field and then adopted for use by ‘the rest of us’.  The first full-fledged Dragon Dictate system cost many thousands of dollars, and its successors are now a free component of every major operating system, including devices in the $50-$100 range. I just filled in a YouTube search on my TV set by speaking into an Apple TV controller. 

Think about sound-activated switches, sip-and-puff switches, proximity and capacitance switches (you may have used one the last time you got on an elevator), voice-powered switches, and coming up, EEG switches. The interesting thing here is that *any* single switch can be linked to any device through a universal port (there’s at least one on the device that you’re using to read this right now). Apple in particular has added dozens of accessibility and switching features to its standard iOS and OS systems.  Adding that capacity to the Vision Pro should be a cinch. 

David Wetherow 
The Star Raft Project