 One of the problems for visually impaired people is being able to tell when the light is green or they're allowed to walk to cross the street. A company called IAS is working on a product called OCO that is supposed to make this easy and I am standing here with Michael Janssen who is from Belgium. We love Belgians of course on the podcast and so he's going to tell us about it. Describe how this works. Yeah, sure. Hey, nice to meet you everyone. I'm Michael, indeed one of the founders of a company called IAS. We basically started off two years ago. We have a buying family friend in Belgium and he told us about the challenge of crossing the street in a safe way and it's why we've developed a mobile app. Of course, these days only on iPhone but basically what we do is we use a camera of your smartphone and artificial intelligence to analyze the petition traffic light status. So we convey the walk signal or the don't walk signal through audio and haptic feedback such that they know whenever it's safe to cross. Oh, that is really cool. Now we've just traveled to other countries. Those signs are different everywhere you go. In Argentina there were like 11 different things that showed but in the US is it fairly standardized? It's fairly standardized but it's completely different than for example in Belgium or just throughout Europe and that's why it took us so long to make the AI as good as it is in Europe and translate that in the US. I can imagine. Yeah, it's different everywhere. Yeah, because our service is already live for about now a year ago in Europe and now we're three weeks here in the US so that's pretty exciting. Before we got started you were explaining that a lot of traffic lights do have like an audio beep telling you you're allowed to walk or don't walk or a clicking sound but that's not standardized and you said it's not very well maintained as well. There's not a lot to correct. There's not too a lot of those audible speakers. That's actually the problem or the biggest problem but of course if there are there the maintenance is not maintained well so they're not always working so that's a very frustrating thing if you're relying on that service and of course our service doesn't need to have something installed at a traffic light because we literally look at a sighted person at the traffic light and convey that information back. Very cool. So we're going to try to do a quick demo here. We've got he's got a traffic light up above us it's got a little walking person right now and do you want to zoom in here Steve on the on the screen. So he's holding the he's holding the phone up to look at the traffic light. We have to get farther away because in reality you're you're really far away. So describe what we're seeing on screen. Yeah so the screen lids up green to indicate the walk signal is on but of course there's also an audible and a vibration cue. It's a very fast tone to indicate the walk signal and the don't walk signal is the same pattern but much slower so a very slow beep to indicate that don't walk signal. Okay how about that run run run hurry the lights about to change signal. Does it do that too? No no yeah no. I mean like if it's got if it's got a countdown what is it? The countdown signal is some sort of a timer tick tock tick tock counting down to just indicate that either you should hurry up and finish your crossing or do not start your crossing if you're just about to enter the crosswalk. So we always are there to convey more information. It's not an replacement of orientation and mobility or a wide gain or a guide tock we're just another tool on the assistive technology belt let's say. I think a very important aspect and that's what a lot of Americans like here the moment that you start veering off which is a critical thing as a blind people the phone will become silent. So if you're rotating to the right or to the left your phone will become silent and that means that you're veering off into traffic. Off of the crosswalk? Off the crosswalk indeed and so what most people do they'll just put the phone against the chest the camera looking in the direction that you're walking in and so if you're crossing the walk signal is on and you're veering off it will become silent and that means that people need to reorient themselves to find the traffic light or our system will find the traffic light of course and that means that you always need to follow the sound or the vibration to reach the other side of the road and it was actually in Milwaukee two weeks ago that I was a blind user that mentioned is the first time in my life and she's 2022 that she was able to cross the street in a safe straight way with our application. Confidence wow that is really really cool and the the fact that the whole screen turns green is it's somebody listening might think well you're blind what good is it being green but low vision as well right? A bright green six inch rectangle you're you're gonna a lot of people would be able to notice that where they don't have the visual acuity to see the sign itself. That's indeed intended for people with low vision to just maximize their wrist features and just look at their phone rather than a couple of feet at distance to analyze the traffic light itself. This is very cool so you can download OCO it's OKO in the in the app store for the iPhone nothing for Android though. Nothing for Android at the moment of course Apple has been a pioneer in accessibility and I think a very important aspect our software runs locally on the phone so no Wi-Fi no setter connection is required and Android is still not there yet and that's why we as a young company focus on iPhone. I wondered why you were willing to do a live demo because everybody else is going oh I can't do that because you know the Wi-Fi and cellular in here is good enough but you don't use that so that's proof of it. That's the beauty of it it's such a scalable thing it doesn't require the Wi-Fi or setter connection and that's the beauty. What's the cost of using OCO? So we charge it for free to the user our vision is if sighted people do not need to pay to look at the traffic light why do blind and visually impaired people. Our mission is to find B2B or B2G partners so working with cities or healthcare partners same is true for Belgium our home country the app is there reimbursed for all users across across the yeah state let's say so that's amazing. That's fantastic well this is this is really cool I'm definitely I'm gonna download it and take a look and see what it does myself so it's OKO and thank you very much for helping us out. Thank you very much.