So, hello everybody. Welcome to the HLAA Diablo Valley Chapter Meeting. And for those of you who don't know me, my name is Anne Thomas and I'm the president of our chapter. And all of you I'm sure realize by now that you can't host a Zoom meeting one person doing it very well. And we have chapter leaders behind the scenes who are also helping out today. And I would like to go ahead and introduce them so that you know who they are. So, one of our chapter members, a leader just had to leave the room. So, when he comes back, we'll introduce him. So, first we have Jill McFadden.  Hi everybody. Oh good. Okay. So, there's Zoher Chiba. Zoher, can you say hi? Hello. Welcome. And Zoher's our vice president and Jill's our secretary. And we have Alan Katsura who does all of our tech support. Morning everyone. Okay. So, I don't see Walt Bateman here and he's our treasurer today. Maybe he'll come later. So, everybody's here and I'm thinking everybody's excited to hear about Ava. But before we go ahead and have Peter give his presentation, we'd like to go ahead and give directions on how to use Zoom for people that this may be their first time using Zoom. By now, most of you are old hats. But we want to make sure that everybody's really comfortable using this format because it's not going away. And I personally absolutely adored it's so much easier for me to read lips with the captions and everything else. So, the directions that we're going to give for Zoom are for your desktop only. If you are using an iPad, tablet, iPhone, Android, these don't apply to you. The things that we're going to talk about is how to view the captions, a full transcript, the chat window, and to raise your hand for Q&A. If you look at the bottom of your window, you should see a toolbar that looks like the picture in black. And the CC icon is circled. You need to click on the CC icon and then a subsequent window will open up. In that window are three options. One is click on subtitles and you need to do that to turn them on. If you need to have the subtitles larger, you can make them larger by clicking on the subtitle settings and you can increase the font size. There's a slider there. You also have the option of viewing a full transcript and that can be very helpful because you know for all of us with hearing loss sometimes we don't realize that we missed something until it's already passed and the captions that are below the slides or on the slides have already passed what was said too so we don't have anything to reference. So if you're viewing the full transcript, you can quickly scan back over that and go, oh, what was that phrase or what was that word? It can be really helpful. So the chat window is available in our meetings and we know that people like to say hello to everybody that they know as their friends that they can't do it in person so please feel free to do that. The chat window is normally in a fixed position. If you would like to be able to drag it anywhere on your screen there is a pop out chat window, a pop out chat option that looks like the square box that you're showing on the screen. If you click the downward facing arrow which is called a carrot another window will open up and it says pop out and when you click on pop out you can move that anywhere you would like on your screen and obviously you want to move the chat away from where you have your captions because otherwise you won't be able to read your captions. You can also change the font size of the chat window and the keyboard shortcut on a Mac as you press command plus or command minus. If you have a PC it's control plus or control minus and obviously plus means they get bigger and minus means they get littler so we will want everybody to use the chat feel free to do that. Since our meetings are open to the public and they're now on the HLAA national calendar we'd like to ask that people identify yourself by name and say where you're from so that people have some idea who those names are that they might not be familiar with and when I'm in another HLAA meeting it's really fun for me to see where everybody is coming from all over the country so I hope you enjoy the same thing. Now I've never had an international person attend one of our meetings I think that would be really fun so we're going to have Q&A and we're sure everybody's going to have tons of questions for Peter so we have a lot of people in the meeting if we only had five people you could just raise your hand like this and it would work but since we have many more than that we're going to ask everybody to raise their hand and where that feature is is in the reactions so when you click on the reaction button the bottom most option says raise your hand. When you raise your hand a hand shows up in your thumbnail Alan can you raise your hand for me okay so Alan and Jill see some people raised their hand so it makes it easy for the moderators to identify who raised their hand first and it also shows up in the participant screen for the hosts and the co-hosts and that order happens in the manner that the order that people raised their hand so that means that ideally you would get called on in the order you raised your hand there's also an option here with when you share the screen and this is from a previous meeting of ours and you can adjust the screen size so on one side you will see the powerpoint presentation and then you see the thumbnail or the picture of the person who's talking at that time see that's the place that's circled there there are two vertical lines that run up and down if you take your cursor over those two lines you can slide the windows to be any size you want so if you need a bigger window of the participant to help assist you with lip reading just make it bigger and excuse me and excuse me just a moment Jackie do you have a question or did you just forget to lower your hand you have to unmute yourself I guess Jackie lowered her hand okay so a problem all of us have is you know if you're like me when you get nervous or excited you tend to speak faster well when you speak faster and you're with heart of hearing people it's like impossible for us to understand anything so we'd like to remind everybody to speak slower and if somebody's speaking too fast well we'll remind you don't worry and it's also helpful for the captioner because the slower we speak the easier it is for Cory to be able to accurately transcribe what we're saying we'd like to let people know that external minoc microphones help tremendously with the audibility of people's voice with zoom I use a blue external microphone if you don't have one for this meeting we advise that you get them to assist people who are heart of hearing and go ahead and connect it next time we have quite a few announcements and we're going to do the announcements first so then we can totally focus on peter's presentation of course the next big thing coming up we have the bay area and long beach virtual walk for hearing it's going to take place saturday june 12th which unbelievable is I think that's next saturday right and you can actually start connecting at 8 45 it'll actually begin at nine o'clock so Jill who's our walk captain is going to have some encouraging messages to have everybody help us I just wanted to remind everybody about why we walk maybe the single biggest reason is because we have an invisible disability and we want to make it visible and the way that we can do that is to raise public awareness about hearing loss we also want to promote hearing health raise funds for educational and awareness programs you know we're a non-profit our chapters are non-profit hla is a non-profit we don't sell things so we rely on everybody's donations to keep ourselves going and so the more money we have the greater potential we have to be able to do better things in the community so I really would like to have public service announcements I would like to have some major ads and newspapers and those all cost money and we also advocate for policies and support for people with hearing loss so we need to have you donate get ready set and walk and now Jill it's your time to put it in your little plug well I've been having a great time fundraising and we've done quite well I'm actually on the leaders list and the second from the bottom but I'm still on it so it's very exciting I'm going to send out another email to everybody to explain how to register to walk to be at the walk because a lot of the donors my donors have asked me how do we see it and so I'll I'll send out instructions on how to do that and I hope to see a lot of you there it's going to be fun that we have speakers ready to go and Anne are you going to be moderating actually I have a piece that's already been pre-recorded that I'm thanking all the sponsors okay right and we'd like to remind everybody you know sometimes when it's time to make a donation people think that small donations don't matter but they do the largest number of people in the united states who give donations are the small donors that's what supports all of the good works that we do in America so please don't feel inhibited about a small donation if that's what you're comfortable giving we just want you all to give I hope to see you all there okay so that's next weekend and then immediately following that we have the HLA national convention it's June 24th through 26th 2021 and it's a little different this year than last year last year it was completely free this year there's a nominal fee of $35 if you register before June 15th and then it's going to go up to $45 so everybody get your early bird registration and save 10 bucks now it's my pleasure to introduce my friend my colleague and the co-founder of Ava I've known Peter since oh gosh when Ava was a dream when everybody was putting together the beta on it and I've been able to experience all the advancements and how accurate it's become and I'm thrilled to have Peter with us today and Peter it's all yours and I'm gonna get you have control of the screen I think can you go ahead and share your yep yep all right let me oh actually the I do need to be able to share the screen I don't think I have permission yet because I I think I'm still a participant perhaps no I think we made you co-host okay let me try hang on that's my fault sorry no that's all fine okay now you're co-host you should be able to share okay great here here we go okay good can you see the full screen so in the top you see the slide and then in the bottom you see my captions is that working for everybody so Peter are the are the captions under the Ava screen are those Ava's captions correct did you want me to turn them off for now or well no it's kind of fun yeah so much so everybody you can see so that you know what's happening there the big captions all the way in the bottom are our live captioner Corey the smaller captions above that are Ava's captions that Peter's using here as a demonstration for accuracy right yes but I you know I this is also just sort of standard protocol for me when I'm doing the presentation I put captions up because it's not always the case that zoom captions are made available so if it's distracting I'm happy to also move them away from the screen for now and then it can be part of my demonstration later so I don't know if anyone has a preference or if it's potentially distracting for people because I don't mind as long as everyone has access to this conversation that's what matters right um so whatever is the preference honestly leave them okay cool so thanks and thanks for the introduction thanks for having me today and it's you know for me it's always exciting to speak with different chapters of the HLLA but more importantly people like yourself who ultimately we've built this company for you know and as Anne was pointing out we started quite some time ago and I think there might be a question from Walt should I pause for a second here because I see a hand being raised I don't know Walt do you have a question? Walt right now you are muted so you'd have to unmute yourself on zoom first you're still muted right now Walt so in the bottom left corner you'd have to click on the microphone icon okay um Walt can you put your what you wanted to say in the chat so we can't understand you I'm trying to lip read me I think he says I don't want to I didn't want to say anything necessarily uh perfect okay yes now we can hear you I'm confused with two sets of captions oh you're overlapping each other okay so thank you for that Walt I appreciate you pointing that out so what we'll do for now is I'm going to let let mine run but I'm just going to move them away from the screen so now you should be able to just see one set of captions if I'm not mistaken does that help Walt yeah that's fine okay perfect so so yeah I guess where I was um what I was going to say is just that it's it's it's great to be connecting to to the people who ultimately we are building this company for and the services we're building and working on to improve every day um are ultimately you know designed to potentially benefit uh you in your everyday life and I'm going to speak more about that but that's why I'm also uh always uh happy when I get to to to interface and talk to to you so uh yeah let me just jump in and give you a little bit like short backstory I think some of you or maybe even most of you have already heard of Ava previously maybe even try it out or use it so I won't I won't spend too much time on that but I'll talk a lot about like sort of what are the the latest developments and and things that we're focused on today um yeah let me go in actually okay there we go that works so so real quick an introduction of myself but more importantly my two co-founders at Ava so on the left side of the screen um is our uh CTO our technical co-founder um Skinner who is from Taiwan originally and who um became deaf when he was two years old um and Skinner is an incredible human being first of all but also uh an incredible developer so he has a lot of technical knowledge and skill and he has actually helped us to build the very first prototypes of this app of Ava and throughout has you know been such an important part of our mission um and then on the right hand side is Tebow uh Tebow is originally from France as you might be able to tell from his name um he's the CEO of Ava and Tebow is actually born in a deaf family so both his parents and his sister are fully deaf and he grew up with sign language as his first language um French sign language that is um which actually has a significant overlap with uh American sign language for those who didn't know that already um so you know it's funny when he's signing in in in the US sometimes he'll throw in a couple of French signs and then uh you know people might get confused a little bit but he's learning that also pretty quickly anyway so I want to say like Skinner and Tebow are really the foundation of the story and the mission behind Ava um myself I'm from the Netherlands I have a background in building engineering um so engineer by trade I love technology and I was very much in search of a mission where technology can benefit people when I met Tebow and Skinner and so the three of us basically embarked on a mission and initially it was not meant to be a company it was us working on the side while we're all studying um at Berkeley and in San Francisco and and it just kind of escalated into a company so um and and really the foundation beyond their personal story is that one when we were out there and speaking to uh individuals who are hearing challenged some who are poorly deaf some hard of hearing uh age-induced noise-induced like the many stories and many uh different people who are challenged today in their everyday communication uh because of their hearing loss um and really starting to understand the bigger picture of that problem and the fact that that's actually a very wide like a common challenge and not just for those people who who who experience this but also their family and friends who at times don't really know how to best respond right and so it's it's a pretty large uh obviously uh a challenge that we're trying to tackle and and that's why originally like so after us working in the evenings and weekends while studying we slowly sort of built this into like something that looked more like a startup and um and and the solution that we came up with which i'm going to talk about of course um is called EVA and what it stands for is essentially audio visually accessible which is based on the realization that there's a lot of advancements in hearing aids cochlear implants in that technology which is fantastic to actually be able to see and experience um but we also know that those solutions will still not tackle all of our challenges they don't they're not applicable to everybody but even if they are there are situations where they might just amplify the noise and so how can we provide a different um sort of language channel like or sorry channel of information through the visual components right so through text in this case and so our mission centers around this which is how can we make the world 24-7 accessible for people who are hearing challenged that means anywhere anytime and for everybody and with that said and before i go into showing you sort of what we have built and developed over the past seven years um i'd love to ask you this question um and i'd love for people to to provide if maybe in the chat or even speak up and and and and talk about or give us a few examples of you know what are still challenges that you experience or perhaps even what are challenges that have come up in the past year because a lot of our world has shifted to digital meetings i mean i i've i've been to many hlla chapter meetings in person but of course this is a whole different environment for everybody so i guess my question to you all is what are today your biggest challenge is when it comes to um not being able to fully understand or or or follow the interactions that you partake in on an everyday basis i don't know if i can't actually see the check right now so i'm not sure if there's people already providing some some points but maybe i should just go out of my um presentation mode oops um peter yeah so how about if i read the question read the comments to you okay so the first person says getting a host to activate captions in zoom meetings yeah interesting okay yep i have a huge one because for those of you who are new here during the pandemic i've gotten two cochlear implants and my mission is communication access and healthcare settings yeah yeah somebody must have something so here's another one peter being able to understand in restaurants and other noisy environments yep situation where doctors and nurses still use masks fear of missing something important healthcare foreign speakers on cell phones yeah phone calls phone calls foreign speakers is a big one yeah so so first of all thanks for those who are providing those those different challenges and that's very helpful for me i also would like to see you know and i'll talk to maybe how ava addresses some of these um and um yeah i think i mean from my experience in speaking with you know a lot of organizations in the past year whether it's on the educational side or corporations different types of organizations but also directly with people with hearing loss obviously the whole mask introduction has been a big challenge for everybody and and we've seen efforts in different places with transparent or translucent masks to tackle some of that um sometimes you know there's only few masks that actually work well because a lot of them they condensate or how do you say that like they uh they yeah you can't really still still see much of the people's lives so i think that's just really if you know there's obviously a whole set of challenges before kovit but with kovit and the social distancing the masks the virtual meetings with people having their cameras turned off and to what what was already being input it the fact that people might not always turn the captions on um you know the world's just gotten less accessible for everyone right so it's it's something we're also trying to to address and and learn from um i don't know if there's other input but i can i can sort of continue with the presentation and then address some of these things that were mentioned so thanks thanks for your input there um cool so um introducing ava so ava originally we started with the mobile application now we've also developed a web application and a desktop application so there's multiple platforms if you will um with the core purpose of showing you who says what in a conversation whether it's a one-on-one interaction when you go to your doctor's appointment or it's a meeting with multiple people involved uh perhaps it's a family dinner uh for thanksgiving and as you can see in this screen here part of the idea is or the original idea of ava is when we have these different speakers and this is obviously also one of the biggest challenges for for most individuals with hearing loss is when there are multiple speakers around the table and i'm trying to lip read the person in front of me and somebody to my left or to my right starts talking i'm just missing the words they just said and that's how i very quickly get behind in the conversation and it's exhausting so you know one of the ideas here is how can we actually visually show those different speakers and so we try to do that by using different colors color coding the different speakers that are partaking in the conversation so that's the basic sort of or the beginning of ava and you know well while we're developing this tool we also try as much as we can to listen to people like yourself and is actually a great person for feedback sometimes very critical but that's even better that's the best feedback we can get and so thanks to and some of these features and and and developments actually have taken place but but basically to say that you know we're developing and designing this in collaboration with our users and that's an important part i think of of how ava exists and and and and continues to grow and so some of these features i think the ones i want to point out here is that it is possible in some situations where you don't have connection to the internet or to a wi-fi service that your phone is offline you can still use it you can still use the ava app to get captions um furthermore you know for for someone like skinner who i talked about my co-founder he actually has the ability because he doesn't verbally communicate to type and then have the app voice it out so that's what we call text-to-speech which actually is kind of showing a little bit in this screen here um there's other other things that i will kind of talk about in the next few slides so i'm just gonna um and actually i'll sort of demonstrate uh quickly sort of what ava mobile looks like on my phone here and i should be able to share my screen in a different way maybe before i do so let me give you two uh slides that kind of give you a little bit of a sense so this is me when i had short hair earlier during during this pandemic and i did not want to go to hairdresser um what you can see here is that uh i'm i'm just basically speaking into the into the phone and it's captioning directly what i'm saying this by by itself is not something very novel everyone has seen this uh a lot now right so the next slide here is um is actually an example of a language translation situation so she's actually speaking in Spanish and uh it's being captioned in English so that's another you know feature it's not actually something that we are very focused on because again our focus is on how can we make the understanding the real-time understanding better for a deaf or hard of hearing individual but it's just something we are able to deliver because the core technology exists and so it is actually possible to speak with people in different languages back and forth using Ava so that might be helpful if you can actually take the flight again and go on a on a on a holiday trip to i don't know Italy or somewhere else uh whatever is on the bucket list um so let me share my screen um my phone screen so you can see my i think this should work here this one let's try there we go all right can everyone see um the phone screen yeah okay fantastic testing one two all right so here so what i'm doing now is this is the phone that i have in my hands um there's a little bit of a delay in terms of when the captions show up on the computer because i'm using zoom's broadcasting feature um and this is me basically saying don't worry our latency is really good uh but the basic use of Ava is using your mobile phone and i'm guessing that most of you have a smartphone these days um the the microphone that we use per default is the one that's in the bottom of the device it's the same microphone as people would use when they make a phone call and um what's nice about one of the features that we've designed based on the user feedback is that if i point the microphone towards the speaker then it flips the phone uh sorry it flips the screen so that way i can still easily read along so imagine that i'm walking up to uh my doctor who's trying to tell me uh you know about the medication i'll need to get at the pharmacist i'm going to go up to the doctor and i'm going to hold the microphone up to him or her and then i'm going to read uh easily kind of continue to read along that way and by pointing the microphone towards them i increase the accuracy of the captions that's why i would want to do that so anyway that's just a an easy quick feature that i wanted to kind of demonstrate here um i'll leave it at that for now and i'll go back to my slides because there's a couple more things on the mobile site i want to show if i can figure out a way to share again here yep okay so i mentioned earlier that we have a web application and a desktop application as well with that it's possible to use avon any device pretty much whether it's android or ios so you don't have to have an iphone you can also have a samsung or another type of android device um it also works on tablets and on laptops laptops would be a mac or windows computer um and then on tablets the same ios and android so most devices are compatible with ava today um if yours isn't then let us know and we can see if we can make it happen one thing here um that is that is really important and and i think one of the key features that i would say differentiate ava from perhaps some of the other um speech to text options or solutions you've seen out there is that with ava and i i just mentioned how it can be used on on any device you can connect also devices to one another so that means that if i am say meeting up with a friend or with a colleague i have avon my device and i can connect my device with their device so that i can see what they're saying by them speaking into their uh phone so i'll demonstrate that so you have an idea of kind of what that looks like but the point is that you can actually connect any number of people together so that means when you're in that family dinner or in that meeting with multiple people everyone can be connected on ava so that you get a more accurate transcript and you actually would see who's speaking so the different speakers um and actually this is a just a quick video um where um i'll speak to this a bit more in a second actually um so maybe quick quick example again this is an this is uh someone who's scanning my qr code and i'm going to show you what this actually looks like but the idea here is that whoever is joining you on ava does not necessarily need to download the app so it's not the case that the other people your friend or colleague has to download any software they can simply connect through the web application through a web page essentially um and then okay so so let me actually go and show you on my phone uh what this looks like and then i'll continue uh with see if that works again there we go i think so share here we go yeah sorry i was a bit too quick there okay so this is my phone and um this is kind of where we left off what i'm going to do is i'm going to connect with another phone that i have here so i have two phones here and in this case both of these devices have ava so this would be maybe my friend who already knows about it and has installed it as well um okay so what i'm going to do is on this phone which is the phone of my friend he or she is going to open ava on their device and then i'm going to ask them okay for us to be able to connect show me your qr code so this every account has a qr code so let me actually do that um and and what i what i can do actually is i can show you on this screen what it looks like so if i tap on the screen here in the bottom there's a little icon it says add and did you have is it not visible um can you explain what a qr code is many of our people present may not know what that is okay yeah i apologize so um essentially a qr code is um is sort of it's actually quite hard to explain i think it's a static it's like an image with a um it's almost like a bar code on a on a product you would buy in a grocery store but instead of the bar code the qr code is sort of uh there's a there's uh some information embedded in that code that allows you to scan it and then some action will take place in this case the so i'm just going to pull it up so you can see also what it looks like so there's on the left hand side here it's a scan qr code so i'm going to click on that so this is what the qr code actually looks like and what this very qr code does is it is it's it's connected to my ava account so i as an ava user have an ava account a username and a password it which associates to my ava profile if you will and this qr code is unique to my ava account so each ava user has their own qr code so if my friend scans this code with their phone what it does is that phone is now going to know oh that's peter i'm going to connect those two devices so let me show you what that looks like so on this phone i've also opened the qr code i'm going to put it down here and then what you'll see um on my screen is i'm going to go over to this phone i don't know if you can see the camera on the top of that screen so as soon as i go to that qr code it went pretty quick but it recognized it immediately and the app crashed that was not meant to happen i apologize so we're going to try that again and maybe it's a good thing that had happened because that way we can we can actually see what i what i just did so i'm going to open the qr code again on my phone open the qr code and i do the same on the other device this is the device of my friend and i'm going to hover over it okay that was very quick again so as soon as i see the qr code or the camera sees the qr code it's going to make the connection and based on this experience that just happened i'm going to have to go back to our product team and tell them that we have an issue because it's the second time it actually crashed which is not supposed to happen so that part of the flow don't remember that but what you saw briefly is that when i was speaking into the other phone it shows up as a different color what i'm going to do is i'm going to connect these two phones in a different way and see if that actually works and it actually gives me an opportunity to also show you that you can connect with each other not just by using a qr code there's different ways to do so one of them if i go back to this little ad icon is to say okay let me look at my contact list so right here ava contacts and then i can see there that my friend here pc that's actually myself on this phone the other phone is online because it's a green connect icon so i'm going to click on that and it actually connected to us and there's something happening i don't know what maybe it's because well i'm gonna have to investigate that but it's not working exactly as i was hoping so i'm going to try something else which is i'm going to connect with my ipad here so let me do this real quick peter do you want to connect to me oh that's also yeah that would also work although i will say i have just successfully connected i think uh oh yeah perfect testing one too okay so i think we are connected and but no mine crashed just a minute that's never happened to me before it might be because i'm on an internal version of the app that's i think what's happening and that's my that's my mistake i should have done done that differently so i actually uh i'm not using the the app store version so what we can do and is that i'm going to connect on my other device with you here here actually let me do this sorry about that yeah it's it's it's because i'm on an internal build i think is it working right now so i just it crashed again yeah that's okay let me connect with you and on a different device so here i'm going to and that's actually good for our demonstration anyway so i'm going to try to connect with an even though an and i are not in the same room right we're very far apart um so i'm going to so just so that everyone sees what i'm doing let me go back to the main screen i first i click on add a person then i go to uh my contact list right here ava contacts and then the top of my screen i have the ability to search for other users in this case i'm going to search for an so i click on that and i have to type in an's name or ava name which i believe is and thomas am i wrong no art one i'm sorry my bad art rt one there you go yep okay so an is right there so i'm going to click on and and see if we can connect all right did all right can you see what i'm saying and ah there you are okay so we're having a bit of a channelization issue it looks like so what happens is that my audio is actually coming out of an's computer speaker and going right into ava but what you can see also is that there's different colors associated to when an speaks and when i speak so and if you don't mind saying something into ava oh there you are there there is no i'm so happy you're here it's a great presentation i hope everybody learns wonderful ways to use ava thanks awesome um yeah so let me actually with that go back to uh the slides um and and and i guess the main thing that i was uh meaning to show you here with that short demonstration is so that there is different ways to connect with other individuals but essentially if uh if others have ava it makes it a bit easier but also if others do not have ava they can still connect with you using the web application so when other people use their own devices and they speak into their device it shows up on your screen as a different speaker with a different color so that's kind of the the real like important concept behind that um okay so i've showed you this one then one thing here which is kind of important to also mention is that it's possible to connect ava with external microphones um and i think Barbara do you have a question oh could you unmute yourself um on zoom your microphone okay am i good yeah can you hear can you hear me Peter yes perfect yep okay um the qr code is a new concept to me i found mine finally but does everybody have their personal qr code even if they don't have ava that's a great great question no so the the qr code it lives within ava specifically that qr code at least so the ava app is one that uh that that provides an qr code to each user um there might be other applications that that you use today or other services or products that that that include a qr code but it's not per definition the case and so not each individual has a qr code not not like you have a phone number or a social security number or something like that that's not that's not at all the case no um yeah but you might actually so what you might find and i've seen this a lot in in the recent times with um a lot of restaurants they uh of course for them to be uh more covid friendly they are reducing the the the the things you touch and and hold and stuff so they've gone from having physical menus to digital menus so a lot of the restaurants actually nowadays they have these qr codes you might find a sticker on the dinner table or they might have a little sign with this with the qr code on there and that's essentially a way for a guest to walk into the restaurant to scan the qr code and then that takes them to the menu of that restaurant in a digital version so you don't have to hold uh the menu that's one of the ways that qr codes is being used which is it's a different way of how we use qr codes in ava i don't know if that's helpful but so so what i what i think you're saying is that you do need ava on your phone to get the qr code oh i'm sorry okay uh so um because originally because originally what confused me is you said people don't need to download ava to access the captioning but in fact you need the ava to have a qr code yeah so that's a this is a really good point you're making so indeed there's something i forgot to say which is that others who are joining your conversation do not necessarily need an ava account or ava to be downloaded on their device that is okay account was a keyword account was a keyword yeah i guess that's a good point and and and and that's only if those individuals are joining your conversation as a guest however okay if they themselves want to start hosting conversations then they will need to set up their own ava account ah okay that's that's good i i that clarifies a lot thank you yeah thanks for the question and and it's good feedback for me i need to i need to change the way i present that because that's a really uh that was a bit confusing so i apologize um so what i was gonna say here is that what i've just shown you is okay i can have my device and then i can connect with somebody else's device if however i do not want to connect with other people's devices and i just want to use my device only however the speaker might be far away then i need to figure out some other way to get their audio accurately transcribed into ava so there's different ways to do that you can use a wired microphone or a bluetooth based microphone one microphone that actually has a bluetooth capability uh for example is also a roger pen i know some people might use those so there's some not all but some fm systems that have a bluetooth capability if they do then typically it is actually possible to connect the fm system with your hearing aids at the same time as you connect them with your mobile device so that you can see the captures on ava while you're also getting the audio enhancement to your hearing aids that's something you can do now you can also if you walk into say a worship center or a space where there's an already existing audio infrastructure there's ways to actually connect ava with that existing audio infrastructure so that you get the most accurate captions so we have actually gone and captioned large events as well as a lot of services today in worship centers across the country are using actually ava to caption the services and what happens then is that you can just walk in perhaps there is a qr code on the door while you walk in that you can scan or you already have that service in your in your contact list and it's really easy for you to just sit down and then receive the captions on your personal device so basically what i mean to say with this is that while the default is the microphone at the bottom of the device as i was pointing out earlier there are many ways to expand the way you're using other microphones to get better accuracy and better audio quality from speakers who are far away or from multiple speaker conversations and this is just a quick demonstration so here there's a microphone that's connected it's a wired microphone that's connected to my shirt that's myself again and then the other individual is able to get the captions that way and then the next one here is where i actually have a bluetooth microphone clipped onto my shirt and that way we get the captions but it's possible so in these two examples they're still two devices but you can have a microphone that's connected just to your device and you can sit in say at a lecture or a workshop or something like this and you walk up to the speaker you give the speaker your bluetooth microphone if they have that if they wear that during the session then you can just easily follow the captions of what they're saying on your device during the session um okay so and i hope i'm okay on time this kind of concludes a little bit the in-person situations of using Ava where you use your smartphone or your tablet or your laptop but it's all in-person interactions one-on-ones groups um or or like being part of an audience of course in the past year we've shifted to a world that is more of a hybrid world uh where some of the things or actually the past year everything was digital but now we're shifting to a hybrid world actually now things are going to be in part in person and in part virtual so we need to have a tool that can help us in both worlds i've just talked about how it helps in the in-person world now i'm going to talk about how it helps in the virtual world so what i was showing you earlier during the session at the very beginning when i had my own captions up those are Ava closed captions so this is a relatively new product and it's essentially a product that works on desktop meaning laptops or computers which either are windows or mac those are apple computers um and you install that software on your computer and then um i'll do a demonstration now actually which which kind of shows you how it works but i think the key thing i want to convey to everyone is that if you are half this installed on your system on your computer you can essentially use it to caption any digital content whether it's a zoom conversation where the host has forgotten to turn the captions on or you might be attending a different conference platform i don't know maybe it's hopin or webex or microsoft teams or what have you um perhaps you're doing a FaceTime call with a family member um maybe you have you're watching a youtube video or some other type of video that has no captions already to it with Ava CC you can caption all of those different things and you're not dependent on anybody else so you can have control and independence with this tool i'm going to demonstrate to you what that looks like so i will let's see go out of this presentation for a second and then i need to pull up our Ava app again where are we oh here we are something something has been really valuable for me has been to use Ava for podcasts because i could never understand those before at all and now Ava on the desktop that's no issue yeah no awesome thanks for for uh for bringing that up and that is actually a good um a good example so i'm going to close this session here but yeah that's another form of digital content that you can actually caption with this tool so basically i'll start uh well this is basically the beginning so i have the app on my computer let me close this here because it's kind of distracting a little bit um i have the app on my computer i open it and i get to see this screen there's different options but the main one and the most important one and the one i'm going to show you is if that i say and you have to imagine so so okay a scenario would be that i i start zoom say zoom webinar as we are doing today and the host has forgotten to turn on the captions and i'm not i don't want to ask the host to do that because i'm not close enough to the person or for whatever reason i'm not going to ask them so i'm like okay how do i get captions now what i can do is i start the Ava desktop app and i say start captions so it's one click only and then it automatically turns into this little box perhaps this is a bit small because i'm sharing a big screen with you so what i'm going to do is i'm going to increase the size of this box so it's a bit bigger you can change the font size you can change the size of the box you can move it around your screen so it can be in the top it can be in the bottom it can be on the right or left whatever is sort of your preference i'll put it in the middle now because i know that otherwise it might be overlapping with the other captions and i apologize if i was doing that a second ago but the point is that that same zoom webinar session where i otherwise would not have had captions i just clicked one button and i have this box sitting at the bottom of my screen and it's captioning for me of course now the question is how does it caption other people so i'm actually curious if somebody would speak right now if it's going to caption uh what they're saying um i don't know if anyone wants to go ahead and and speak and do you want to say something maybe we have a question in the chat that's very interesting to tuck under your belt to answer later oh great i go to a place of worship i can connect a bluetooth mic to my smartphone place it near the speaker and i will be able to caption the sermon so the question is how do you caption a sermon in a church okay and obviously it that picked up everything that i said yeah thanks ann and also i see i see that jill do you have a question because you have your hand raised and note that you are muted right now on zoom yes um my question is when you're riding into a car say i'm car pooling with three other women to a book club meeting and they're having this very lively conversation and i can't understand so how do i you said they don't have to download ava how do i qr them i don't get that okay great question so i'm thinking about the best way to uh to demonstrate that so i think um they all have iPhones yeah so i think androids whatever yeah so the the way to do it actually i i know how to show it to you it's actually a very same thing as a as a as is in the in the slide deck so let me actually go and pull that up where is it right here it's this very slide here so um let me move this over here okay so this here um is an example of um the the the lady in this video does not have ava on their device they do not have the app installed and i am showing them my qr code i do have the app i'm the host of the conversation and i show them my qr code and they're gonna scan it so there you go and what happens i'll pause it for a second actually let me back up whoa sorry about that uh pause here as soon as she scans the qr code what you're seeing on her phone is a little pop up this is basically a thing that is built into iPhones so it's not has nothing to do with ava every iPhone has that which is that with an iPhone and in most android phones actually have this as well you can simply use the camera on the device to scan a qr code and when you do that in this case here that little pop up is is basically the iPhone of this lady recognizing this qr code and saying oh i know what to do next then she clicks on that little notification so watch what she does next she clicks on it and then it starts to open our web application so it doesn't open the download or anything it opens the web application and it automatically joins my conversation so you can see actually here it's already that did that so in a couple of seconds it's connected to my conversation and as soon as i start speaking it shows up in her phone she can also turn on her microphone and when she starts speaking it shows up in mine and so with your friends they can all scan the qr code connect you through the web app and you can start seeing what they have to say of course when you're in a car make sure you're not distracted while driving but i'm usually the passenger okay there you go great um yeah no so so so that is definitely something you can do and i've actually gotten quite a bit of feedback from some some of our users who they will have their phone mounted in a in a in a holder and they are actually able in the car to follow conversations now which is is is is not an an atypical situation i've heard that use case quite a few times so if i go back to the desktop application what i wanted to point out to every bun is that what we use to understand the other speakers so what happened when an was speaking and when jill was speaking is that you could see their captions it's sort of magic actually because avas just started separate from zoom but somehow avas able to still pick up the other speakers so the way it works is we use something called internal audio and and you have something to say yeah i have an image of ava in my car would you like me to show it oh yeah that'd be awesome that'd be great okay so hang on one second um should i continue to explain what while you find that or you you have it ready to go yeah i just pulled it up just oh okay i'm going to stop sharing then okay so i have a event holder in my car here and i actually did the the demo in the past the driver's seat but obviously i don't do this when i drive and if you see on the side those two clips those are microphones that you can piggyback it's made by a company called iriglab and so you can hand one to the person in the back seat so they don't even need to connect to ava you're just connecting as you go nice okay back to you peter thanks thanks annan this is great thanks for showing that and so um one thing so if i open the the the desktop app you can actually see what's happening here so on the left hand side this is where my menu is there is here a microphone menu so i can select different microphones and the microphone i have selected currently is called ava mic the ava mic is the one that takes the internal audio from your system what that means is that even while i'm wearing headphones i could be wearing over ear headphones or the ones i'm wearing right now these are apple AirPods so i hear everyone on this call through here but ava hears everyone through the internal audio system that also means that when i'm watching a video or when i'm doing anything else perhaps there's people in the room my family might be around i don't want them to have to hear or listen to everything i'm watching so i can simply just turn on ava mic and get the captions of whatever content i'm watching on my computer without necessarily having the audio to physically come out of the system so i hope that's that's helpful as a means of explaining a little bit more but that is what we call ava closed captions um back to the slides actually i don't think i i should have all right i didn't have to do that better okay so back here ava cc okay there's one more thing i want to talk about and then i'll sort of wrap up so that we can go into the question answers because i know we're kind of like running into the last part of the session so this is not an unimportant thing though this is actually one of our most prominent developments in the past year or two namely everything you've seen so far during this demonstration is based on machine based captions so AI based captions and we realize you know after having been in the space for now good seven years having developed the different tools getting so much feedback from our users we realize that there are situations where AI captions machine based captions are not gonna they're just not gonna cut it they're not gonna do it you know like they hit a ceiling of accuracy whether it's because the speaker has a thick accent because there's a lot of background noise for whatever reason the accuracy is not sufficient for you to actually get a full understanding of what is happening and in those situations you're going to need something else there's a good reason why we have a captioner on this call right it's to get proper good quality accurate captions and so the thing is we also see captioners and interpreter interpreters as the number one ultimate solution today however we also understand by listening to our users that there is limitations to those services some in some situations i might not have the budget available to get a captioner or or or an interpreter to come to my session in some situations it might be too last minute and i won't be able to get my captioner or interpreter to come over for you know a meeting that's happening in three hours or something is rescheduled you know there's all sorts of reasons why i might not have that access that i need in that situation and that's why we've developed eva scribe which essentially combines the machine based captions with human professional transcribers who are able to connect remotely somewhat similar to you know a remote captioner and it essentially allows us to increase the accuracy of the service and to make it so that if there is contextual information that the machine doesn't understand that there's actually a human listening in and helping to kind of provide that so let me quickly show you what that looks like and i unfortunately was unable to arrange scribe for this very session because i wasn't sure what time we're going to have this demo or i was going to demonstrate this but what i can show you is kind of the concept of how this works so within eva whether i'm using it on my mobile device on my tablet or on a computer it doesn't matter whether i'm using the web app desktop app or the mobile i have the option to request the scribe service to join my session by clicking on this improve accuracy and then they say scribe captions and what it's doing right now and you can it's maybe a bit hard to see but in the top of my screen it's actually requesting the scribe to join so this is basically calling our scribes and saying hey i need a scribe to join my session and what you can see is that it stopped blinking so now there's a scribe in the conversation and the microphone has turned green instead of blue so that's another indicator of the fact that the scribe is actually here and so let me see if when i make a mistake for example if i say my own name that's often a very good way to make eva phil peter duvedance that's not that's not too bad actually except oh well it even corrected peter so uh let's try that again my name is peter duvedance okay i need to try something else i'm from billberg okay there you go oh even that was okay so what i guess what i'm trying to show you is that if there's mistakes then the scribe will will follow basically the asr or the machine based captions and then make corrections to the transcript and yeah so i'm sorry it's maybe not the most clear demo but like that's the concept i hope is clear um that you know the the thing you see there it's basically our scribe who's like listening in and then correcting the transcript as it goes okay so that is that part and then to close off so that we can actually enter into sort of a q&a um what we're trying to do again it's really to figure out how can we give you the fastest and easiest access to captions anywhere you go right and there's some examples here in a work environment this is actually a large event that we captioned here's is an example of a poster that was used with the qr code so that when i walk into the breakout session at this event i scan the qr code and i immediately get the captions for that session and i go to the next one and i get captions there and you know fun fact is that one of the people who we actually ended up captioning was michelle obama which was fun for us to do of course um and this is like a hospital environment where they have tablets rolling around on stands and by the way thanks to and also for advocating uh we are making strides to work with organizations like ucsf and others to to to see how we can make more access possible in those kinds of environments and ultimately this is what we do it for this is what is the fuel of our company and the reason why every day we're working hard to make this happen is this kind of feedback and i won't go through all the different feedbacks but it's go ahead what's your question oh i thought someone had a question but so the to finish off with we also work with some larger organizations small startup to really large organizations and so for those of you on the call who are affiliated to organizations happy to have a conversation and see how we can make your organization more accessible i think to conclude you know we look forward to working with any of you to kind of get feedback and have you try it out and essentially um make the world more accessible together that's it for me and i'm happy to answer questions and thanks also thanks everyone for listening i know that was quite lengthy so i hope i didn't bore you um but i appreciate all the questions and and um yeah so peter you want to quit sharing your screen oh i'm sorry yes okay may i ask you a question do you know who i am okay i just went to my tv and i looked again at cnn fox msb whatever and why don't they why why don't they use this device they're always delayed they're so delayed i want to put my hand through the television i didn't even know what was possible yeah i'm hearing you like i'm hearing you yeah and you know that's a really good point um and i think a lot of money in the world i think we all have frustrations around um uh subtitles for some of the television like broadcasting it happens quite often that there's significant delays and and sometimes even that there's completely wrong subtitles associated with what we're watching and i i agree i i'm not exactly sure how to best address that but ultimately that's where i think it would be great to have professional captioners associated to uh to that and i think that till some extent there might be i'm not even exactly sure what's the kind of the technology or how it's being done today but surely we need to figure out a way to have less delay on that because you should be you know more real-time connected to the television or any content that shows up so thanks for bringing that up holland yeah you need to file a complaint with the FCC there you go and well if if there's no specific oh actually holland you you're uh you're muted again um your microphone is muted i just why can't they use a but well so one thing i will say is is that you know as i was talking about the main so the machine-based captions are very quick right they have less latency but they also make mistakes and so when you have you know especially with more complex vocabulary or speakers with an accent then it's it's you might not want to use purely and only machine-based captions even though the latency is so great at that point you want to see how you can actually leverage professional captioners because they won't make as many mistakes and they can pick up typically on complex vocabulary and like all that kind of stuff so but certainly um there's a lot of room for improvement so and we're happy to have that conversation with the FCC or whoever is sort of pushing that agenda and see how we can maybe partner up with with professional captioners to provide a service that's faster and more accurate but yeah um thanks again uh yeah thanks again all and also maybe i'll quickly sort of address the question uh that was asked about uh the worship situation and i'm trying to see if i have maybe a quick example uh of that or actually so maybe if there's other questions let me answer the questions and then i'll in the meantime i'll i'll look for um i'll look for something that i can show here yeah tony ferrick asked the question and he's the next person with his hand up so tony i'm gonna um ask you to ask your question and then can you go ahead and do that yes uh so that was about that worship uh kind of just yesterday i had somebody asked me about um providing card subtitles for a uh for a church service and this certainly looks like a good application for it um so i'm gonna so this was a great opportunity i've used your app in the past and i'm impressed with how your demos here with with the exception of that crash but i'm sure i understand you you were using a maybe an alpha release or something but apparently uh so i'm impressed i'm really looking forward to getting that uh getting this back up again and working with it so thank you very much i've learned quite a bit today yeah absolutely thank you and maybe if i may like i'll quickly do this here uh can you see this youtube yeah okay so i'm just going to skip through different parts here so that you get a sense of what we're doing this is the same setup as we have in several worship centers in in the u.s right now in other places generally when there is a an audio infrastructure or a space like a public space like a large event space or whatever where there's audio infrastructure in place what we do actually is we uh connect and i'll just kind of play this real quick um what we do is we set up uh our device in connection to the audio infrastructure that's in place so in this case i mean with larger events you typically have these av people who you know have professional gear and simply what they do is they send through their audio system they send the same audio signal as they would send to the speakers in the room so that everyone can hear it they send it to us and we captioned that so this device here is captioning that as the host so that anyone who walks in can do can join as a guest right so this is um this is an example of like several um so this this is this is if you were a guest this could also be a worship center right now this is a an example of an event but i'm scanning the qr code and as soon as i do that it connects me to the session so it's captioning right now that session right so that's how we essentially do that i don't know if there's other uh examples of no i think i think that kind of gives you a little bit of a sense of that so that's a way for us to connect with the existing audio infrastructure which means that the speakers don't have to wear an additional microphone that you bring along and you don't have to bring along an extra microphone you just walk in and use your phone to get the captions and everything else is set up right so so that's the advantage of doing that can you explain how um the av connects to ava yeah uh let me see i'm just trying to see if i can find uh the there is an article okay i think it's this one yeah okay this is perfect uh here let me share my screen again this here is a picture it's not it's not super perfect but at least it gives you a little bit of a sense of what is happening so um there's different ways to do this by the way it depends on kind of the av personnel what technology are they using like what's kind of the setup but typically as i was mentioning what happens in a space with with an audio infrastructure is they have microphones on stage or whatever those microphones are feeding into some type of audio board like a mixer like this one here that and that there's cables going from that to the speakers in the space and then along with the cables that go to the speakers we add one cable so we plug it into one of the ports and the audio and the mixing board and that runs to an ava device in this case in this picture we're using a phone but you could also do that with a laptop or with anything that you might have access to so you run this audio cable into the device depending on what that looks like you might need an additional piece of hardware which is this iRig which is an off-the-shelf piece of hardware that converts the audio from this analog signal into a digital signal so that the app actually picks it up and then it starts captioning so that's all and and what we do is then we make sure that that device that's captioning is broadcasting the captions to anyone who would like to receive them right so that that it's easy to access that as a guest i don't know if that helps and if that answers the question okay Barbara Bottomley you're next okay i don't know whether this is a question that that applies directly to ava um a number of of companies have have apps that offer captioning for your your cell phone and is ava offer captioning for your cell phone is my question remember my first does ava offer captioning for your phone Peter yes yes okay and then there's probably one of them that appears isn't the only one i have the ava app but i have a couple others that i've tried and when i get very to the very bottom of the application they asked for the last four digits of my social security number okay that's interesting so i have been hesitant to give that information because i've tried to keep it off of my cell phone so yeah i would i don't sorry i presume that ava's asked for the same thing no so ava does not ask for such information um and i don't necessarily think that you should provide this to an app uh i mean it depends kind of what kind of app we're talking about but i would be hesitant if i were you to give this out um and it's certainly not common i don't think but it's also not something that ava's going to ask you for um at most i mean there's different ways to you can you can sign up or log into our service one of which is using your phone number so at most we're going to ask you for your phone number um we might also ask you um so we can give you a better experience what's your level of hearing loss like we might say hey are you hard of hearing or are you deaf are you hearing because then we tailor our experience accordingly um and that's kind of the limit of what we want to ask you in terms of your your personal information because we we want to be careful with that Barbara okay Barbara ava is not a telephone communication via the telephone oh that's what's up okay okay so ava is not like making a telephone call no i didn't think so okay so i just wanted to make sure i because that's hard for some people to understand i thought that these companies that are offering captioning on your phone are different than ava but i wasn't sure i didn't know whether they they seemingly are promising that when you pick up the phone you automatically have captioning i know that i can the problem with ava is with a phone i can't use it on the phone because the phone is ava you know i mean yeah i answer the phone i can't use ava because i'm already on the phone is like yeah you know that kind of no that's it's a great point and so right right now weird this is not part of our focus so in terms of what we offer today phone calls is not something where i recommend using ava i would recommend uh well of course there's the traditional solutions like caption call i think there's a few others but there's also an app called inocaption which you might want to check out it's actually very uh good i think um so those would be typically solutions that would be more fit for phone call captions okay i'll try those see if they ask for my social security number that's where i that's where i've ended up with a problem so Barbara bottomly to register for inocaption you register online prior to using it on your phone okay so maybe they don't okay later about that's what i wanted to know okay thank you thank you thank you diane gross hey okay hello um there was something i was laughing when you were talking about showing how somebody is outside a conference room door and you know using the qr code to get onto ava so they could listen to a speech outside the door and because i was my mind was going to what happens if you're walking through a hotel and there's an event you're interested in but it costs hundreds of dollars to get in you could just look outside the door and listen anyway that's where good point i was going um but i was asking i just put the ava app on my phone and i noticed when it downloaded it was saying something about may have in-app purchases what does that mean yeah so um that that's actually good that you bring this up because it you know kind of prompts me to talk a little bit about that side of things so in the basis we offer free services um which is basically when you go and download the app from the app or play store or you go to our website and access the desktop or web application software you can use this for free however there's some limitations um there's limitations around the session length so if you are attending say a two hour long session that's not with the free version you'd have to restart after 40 minutes because it's capped at 40 minutes you can still use it for the two-hour session you just have to restart it that's all um however if you want to run all the way through without having to restart that's when you would upgrade to a paid service so that's actually what that's referring to and there's also differences in terms of the accuracy level so with our free version it's not as accurate as with some of our paid versions um and there's a couple of other differences in terms of the features that are made available the level of service we are able to provide and such typically what we try to do as i was sort of pointing out a bit in my presentation is what we try we try to work with organizations to sponsor EVA for the people like for their students or for their employees or for the individuals within their organization that can benefit from the services so that's typically how we try to go so to avoid having you make a lot of cost to have more access um but yeah that's that that speaks to the in-app purchases i think okay another question um i have a severe vision loss so if i've got an app open on my phone i'm reading it like this even with glasses um and that free service is there an option to be able to enlarge the fact yeah so you can with an EVA you can change the font size if you find that the text size isn't large enough even if you go to the maximum font size please give us that feedback because then we can actually you know take that into consideration and potentially change it so that there is a bigger font size available for you okay thank you diane the way the way you make the font bigger just spread your fingers on them oh okay okay that's and it makes spread them and it makes it bigger and do this and it makes it yeah okay now that that's another thing that makes me laugh i was in a class where we were talking about zoom and so she was talking about zooming on the screen and there is a program for people with vision loss called zoom text and then there's zoom the um the platform we're using and so much there were five people in the class for them had never used any of these things and there was so much confusion and just every time i hear zoom i thought which one are you talking about today yeah thanks diane okay thank you my friend sherry perizoli is next hello everyone peter thanks this was a great presentation um i learned so much today i really am a visual learner and so seeing you uh demonstrated in real time was especially helpful for me great um i so i have some questions and i think one of our biggest challenges is um being able to easily communicate the benefits of ava to an organization like a hospital or a theater or someone else um and especially in a in the specific applications that i think that ava differentiates itself from the other caption apps and um i i can only use words so much to describe this process and people are technically kind of understand it but they really want to see what you've just done they want to see it demonstrated in real time and and so i noticed a maybe i'm wondering if maybe we can work with you if you don't have it already to create some video that's a little bit more uh more actually represents the situation um because i've been looking for that and i and i've come up to what looks pretty close but i haven't been able to find something that really shows those all those benefits and and and and zan knows you know it's great i just feel like we have the potential to reach so many more people if i have a visual tool that i could just send to someone and say yeah this is how you could use this at your hospital this is how you could use this at your place of worship or this is how you know you use this in your conference center i'm getting a lot of information about how i can use it as an individual and as a matter of fact you know i do have a paid account and when the um when the bill came in my husband said so how are you going to use this to really benefit your whole community and and so i think that that's giving me a lot of ideas today of how i can do that but i do have a question in terms of like and this may be a simple stupid question but um so um i go so i have more than one house so let's say i want to download have the desktop version can i download this desktop version on multiple device multiple computers or wherever i might be so i can do that and uh and i'm assuming i need the latest version of the of the app to be able to take advantage of the qr code and and all of that right yeah i would generally suggest to stay you know up to date with with the more recent uh you know updates that we provide uh because um there's always improvements and and and for example that bug that happened earlier i'll have to investigate if that was because i was using internal bill or not but if that's something that is actually in the product that everyone has in their hands then that will be fixed in the next update ASAP so so that's why you know it's generally a good thing to keep updated with the software um and to answer the first part of your question you can have ava installed on as many devices as you'd like the one thing that is not really possible is that you use it on all those devices at the very same time you know i'm saying so it's like you can't really use it on a phone and a tablet on a computer all in the same conversation because then it's like connecting to itself and talking to itself so the app gets confused as opposed to you know you have it on all your different devices and you just use it on this one moment and on the the next one like the other one on the next moment right so that's that's not a problem okay great and i just have one last question and um so i actually have more than one ava account or ava name and and so is the solution there can i can i apply ava to my different account so should i just get rid of one of the accounts um i i mean typically so when you get a paid subscription that is associated to one account um you could if you want transfer that subscription to the other account which would you know you'd have to come like tell us or request and say hey i would like to move it over it's not a problem um what you can also do um i mean you definitely don't have to get rid of the other account if you depends on your preference because what you can do if you have to us two accounts is you can actually join yourself in that case right you can have two devices where you have one with the paid account and one with the guest account if you will and then you would be able to have two devices connected to one another and potentially you could give the second device to your friend if they don't have one with them for example okay okay that's great okay yeah great great tools and uh i think this is going to be really really useful for so many people in our community and and again you know i think you know having that piece that i yeah to an organization to say you know if you set this up for me not only can i use it at the meetings for me but there are probably four or five other people who are going to benefit as well yep thanks definitely thank you so for those of you who don't know sherry parazole is the president of hla washington and she's the chair for the hla get in the hearing loop committee and we're both on that committee together so thanks sherry uh sarah osir hi um thank you for the excellent presentation um kind of along the lines of what sherry's asking let's say we have a monthly chapter meeting and with maybe 10 people could i have ava then on my phone and then have a qr code and then everybody people come in and they would then scan the qr code and they would then um how would that work how would they then it connect somehow connects to the microphone in the room or i'm trying to think of how it could be used in a small meeting scene yeah and that's thanks for this question um and i'll sort of talk to the technical sort of side of this i also want to point out that you know one of the i think things that we are really trying to always improve but also to provide to the community is not just a technical solution and say here's where you're downloaded good luck have fun you know we have the people who are part of our sport are people who are very well versed and are also very strongly mission driven so that means that if you have this type of question we're going to do our best and go out of our way to help you figure out the best solution because every situation is different and really depending on you know what the situation looks like there might be a different way to best implement ava or something else maybe not ava per se right so um i just want to put that out there um the the technical side of the answer is that for that very meeting if you want if so if there is an existing auto infrastructure if there are already microphones somehow distributed in that space then we should look at how can we connect with those because they're probably high quality microphones they're you know everyone is speaking into them great so let's use that if that's not the case however and it's just 10 people who are all around in a circle or a big table or whatever the situation might be you could have ava on your device and you can ask the other individuals to use their personal devices to connect with you um that can happen through qr code there's different ways to do it it might also be the case that you have 10 people but say you have only five people that are connected to the ava session as long as those five people are somewhat distributed equally around the room you still have five microphones that are listening to the whole conversation so it helps you to have you know a pretty okay transcript for that session most likely and alternatively finally if none of the other people is interested in helping helping out so to say or using ava and you're the only one who has ava then you might want to consider bringing along a microphone of some sort so that you can better pick up what people are saying right but also i want to point out that and this is maybe something i should have said earlier on the accuracy of the captions is very dependent on how close people are to a microphone whether it's the microphone on the device or a bluetooth microphone or any type of microphone so if they're very far away it's going to be a lot more difficult for ava to provide good quality captions so that's an important thing to to keep in mind i see okay thank you so sarah years ago one of the driving forces in the hladv board was that we meet as a small group and the place that we so and we needed captions so we have extensively used ava in a kind of situation like what you're talking about we connected ava to a projector and projected it on the wall i've connected ava to a television which could be anybody's home and i'll pull up the picture and show you this is ava on a regular tv so any place as long as you can project ava you can have the possibility of having captions for a small group and i can talk to you some more about connecting that to a small portable hearing loop or a um the same one that you use for your tv okay thank you very much nice does anybody have any more questions for peter well peter i'm delighted that you could join us today um peter and i maybe talk once every six weeks or something and he's been so busy lately i haven't had an opportunity to see him so thank you for and it was a big deal for him to try and fit us in today so thank you very much for joining us and we have a few more um things that we're going to talk about you're welcome to stay you're welcome to go um all right if anybody has any large questions that they just want to send to me and i'll filter them to peter so that he might have them all together it might be easier to answer please feel free to do that awesome thanks so much and again for hosting really appreciated thanks everyone else for your time also thanks gory for captioning uh i know i spoke a bit fast at times so i apologize um cool all right i'm i'm i'm gonna jump out thanks everybody enjoy your saturday take care bye so everybody this is the time when bob zastrow always passes out his muffin so here's the muffin from bob to everybody i'd like to remind everyone that hearing losses is a disability and that this is the 31st anniversary for the americans with disabilities act and all of us even if you know let me back up here it's been my experience that all of us including my own being all think we hear better than we actually do and we're never really sure when we're going to really understand and when we aren't so that uncertainty piece i know that i generally earlier when i had better hearing would kind of push that away and say oh no i'm doing just fine but then what happens you're in the situation and all of a sudden you can understand a couple people just fine but then you can't understand anybody or you can't understand this last person so i really want to encourage everybody who's part of our community to always ask for communication access if it turns out in that situation you didn't need it that venue those people are getting experience and what it's like to provide it i personally believe that one of the reasons that we don't have the communication access that we need is that most of us aren't asking for it so where should you ask for it everywhere so these icons are to represent all of the different kinds of places that there'll be communication access and some of these were not included in the EADA but none of them are excluded in the state of california a new york and new jersey just expanded communication access for their airports for their transportation and we need to do similar things here in california of course for a member organization i need to remind all of you to renew your membership it's easy to do just go to our website and click on the membership icon that circled in green there you we have paypal you don't need to subscribe to paypal you can just use your credit card to sign up we'd like to of course thank kori dosti for providing us with the gold standard of captions today by being a live captioner and being present kori we do not mean today by hosting ava here that we're advocating to replace live captions there aren't enough live captioners in america to provide all of us with the captions for all the locations that we need kori's book to the moon she doesn't have any time left so if somebody would like to engage with kori though for professional captions her address is listed on our screen here our recording will also include all of that and this is how you can get ahold of us now earlier before everybody came on we had a small discussion about our next meeting is scheduled for january excuse me july third so that's the day before the fourth of july do you want to keep that meeting or would you like to skip the month of july can you so i'm going to ask two questions and i forgot to do a poll so if you would like us to have a meeting on july third please raise your hand in the raise your hand in the reactions so that i can see we can see how many hands are up so right now only two people want a meeting does no one else want a meeting on july third okay so we have two people who want a meeting so that's not anywhere near a lot of you so i'm comfortable not having a meeting for july third so we've talked about having a picnic we don't know how things are going to open up we're not completely closed to not having one this summer maybe it would be in september even so i just want people to know that it's potentially still on the agenda here um as all of you know who have been attending our meetings i've had two cochlear implants this year i have learned how to advocate and successfully and unsuccessfully in healthcare and i'm telling you the healthcare system in northern california is shameful so our next presentation that we have that's going to be for august will be about how to advocate in the healthcare settings and with your physician so i don't have anything else to add is there anybody who has any news that they would like to share before we close for today and this is diane can you stand for a few minutes after the meeting i can thank you very much okay okay so then we'd like to thank everybody for coming we'd like to remind everybody to please give us a donation for the walk for hearing even a little one every little one counts and that way you're raising your voice with ours and you're saying that you count two so you're important we need everybody to know that we want to be able to hear like everybody else and participate and have the best life we possibly can so thanks for coming see you next time bye