ATU706 – Cephable with Alex Dunn

Hi, this is Alex Dunn. I’m the founder and CEO of Cephable, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 706 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on December 6th, 2024. On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome back Alex Dunn. Alex is the founder and CEO of Cephable, and he’s here to tell us how this software can assist individuals with a lot of different needs with accessing the devices that they count on every day.

We also have a quick story about a new exoskeleton suit that may be able to assist individuals with their mobility. Thanks to all our listeners who listened to our holiday gift giving guide last week, always enjoyed to do that and to get some members of our team here in the studio to record. Don’t forget, we are always looking for your feedback as well, so you can always reach us at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. We always like to hear your opinions, your comments, your questions, your critiques. Hey, we’ll take those as well. Or if you know somebody that might make a really good guest on the show, we’d love to have that also. But for right now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Folks, we cannot thank you enough for giving us a listen here at Assistive Technology Update, but did you know that this is not the only podcast that we have? You can also check out our sister show Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. This show comes out once a month and it features panelists, Belva Smith, Brian Norton, and myself as we try to answer the questions that are plaguing your mind about assistive technology. We gather up all the questions we get during the month from emails, phone calls, and many other means, and then we do our best to answer them. But I got to tell you folks, believe it or not, we do not know everything. So we rely on our listeners a lot to reach out to us and give us some of those answers or maybe just talk about their personal experiences and things that have happened to them.

So if you like Assistive technology Update, you may very well love Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. Again, it’s Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions where you can get your questions about assistive technology answered, or if you happen to have the answers to some of the questions asked on that show, please, please do reach out and let us know so that we can help the community with the answers that they so desperately seek. Much like Assistive Technology Update, you can find Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions wherever you prefer to get your podcast. And as always listeners, thank you for listening. Okay, very soon listeners, we’ll get into our interview with Alex as he tells us about Cephable and just the amazing way this software can really increase access. But for our first story today, we talk a little bit more about hardware and access, not so much access to computers, but access to the entire world around us.

So our first story today comes from over at Tech Times and it’s titled KAIST’s WalkON Suit F1. This technology brings independence to paraplegics, smashes Cybathlon. It’s written by Jose Enrico and it talks about an AI powered exoskeleton called the WalkON Suit F1. This was made by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and it’s actually considered a breakthrough in from what it really says here just because of all of the extra features that are built into it to really hopefully be able to give folks even more independence than some of the other exoskeleton suits. So you may have seen… I know I’ve seen it, I think around the Special Olympics and maybe a few other things, some of these exoskeleton suits so that an individual who is unable to ambulate independently can use a device such as this to walk around, think of just kind of the exoskeleton legs and how they can move the legs and everything else, and there’s different controllers and different ways to make them work.

But this one looks like it has a couple of extra parts, and I’ll put a link to this over in the show notes that you can go check it out. But one thing that I really like that it talks about in here is that it actually has settings in there that where it can just walk up directly to the individual in the wheelchair and kind of help them get into the suit. So you don’t even have to have anyone help you get into the kind of exoskeleton. You can essentially just call it over, have it come over, and then jump up in it so that you’re able to use that to ambulate if that’s what you want to do. And it says that this technology really came out of having a front docking system that allows folks to transition a little bit easier. It also has balance control mechanism that will change and move to counterbalance the center of gravity to avoid falls.

It says whether a user can walk upright and use both hands freely to work and even walk short distance without requiring cane or crutches. Looks like just kind of some other things in there. Does have AI and for an individualized experience, it has a built-in onboard neural network and learns how to adapt to different users and environments. It also has obstacle detection to help out while you’re moving around and miss out on knocking into some things and everything else. There’s a little bit more on this suit in the story, so I’ll put a link to it over in the show notes that you can check it out. And maybe this is something we’ll see out there on the streets here hopefully someday to help individuals ambulate in any way they might choose.

Listeners today I am super excited to welcome back Alex Dunn. Now, Alex was a guest back in September of 2022 on episode 589 of our show to talk about Enabled Play. And if you have a chance, you may want to go back and listen to that show just for old times sake, but a lot has changed since last we spoke. Of course, we’re all two years older and Enabled Play has grown into Cephable, and I know that I’m excited to learn all about Cephable and how it can increase access and independence for individuals with various disabilities and barriers to access and inclusion. Alex, welcome back to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, I am really excited to get into talking about Cephable and everything, but since it’s been so long since we had you on, could you start us off by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, so my background’s in mostly applied machine learning, product engineering, things like that. At the time, actually when I was here last, we were talking about Enabled Play. I wasn’t even full-time on it then. It was still mostly a passion project of me hand building adaptive controls and doing machine learning stuff in my basement. But all of it originally started from research I was doing to support a younger brother of mine, he’s 15 years younger than me with a disability and trying to create new ways for him to play games and keep up with his friends in games like Minecraft and Roblox at the time.

And so I started working on new forms of doing things like speech recognition for voice controls, new ways to use that in different games and apps, using face expressions and gestures. And basically anything that isn’t a physical switch that you have to hit or a mouse you have to move or a joystick you have to be able to move in order to do things in, what, at the time was originally just games. And then that turned into a lot of stuff in education access, especially as the pandemic came through and a lot of, if not all education became a digital first ecosystem. And since then been focused on bringing Cephable to the world in workplaces, at home, and digital accessibility and personal AT and just everything in between. So yeah.

Awesome. And I think you led me right into my next question. So I guess, and we were going to dig into all of these, but just what is Cephable?

Yeah, so Cephable is an AI software platform that empowers individuals to control technologies, really just ways that work best for them. You can download the app for free, for personal use on Mac on PC. You can get the companion app on iOS and Android, and then essentially you can tell Cephable’s AI how you need to access certain apps. So I could say something like, “I need to use Microsoft Word and I need voice controls for all the shortcuts and dictation, and then I also need it when I move my head around that the cursor will move on the page,” and then it sets it up for you so that you’re off and running with those controls. So you use our adaptive voice controls that adapt to your speech over time, including folks with limited or impaired speech. You can use just your webcam from your computer if you have a laptop or an external webcam to track your face and head movement.

And all of that is running offline on device, totally private, personalized and accessible from the beginning. And then on top of our free versions, we have Cephable Professional, which is meant for workplaces and employee experiences as an accommodation for employees with disabilities or an ergonomic tool or just generally a productivity tool. And then we also have tools that enable developers to integrate Cephable’s controls natively into their own experiences. So if you’re building an app or a game or you’re building your own devices, you can add things like adaptive voice controls, head movements, face expressions, multi-device controls, stuff like that ultimately to empower individuals to walk or roll up to your experience and have that experience in an accessible way that’s personalized to them.

Nice. And Alex, you said that it’s free for individuals to use. Why did you make sure that it was free? Why is that important?

Yeah, I mean, the cost of assistive technology a lot of times is it’s astronomical. And what I found as I started really getting into the AT space for the last sort of five years is that cost tends to be the biggest barrier to folks getting the assistive technology that they need. Even at the time when… last time I was here I was talking about Enabled Play. I was building hardware devices and you would use the mobile app to control it. And I was building them and selling them and shipping them, and I was trying to sell them for as low cost as possible. I wasn’t trying to make a bunch of money off of it, but even then, I think we were selling it for $250 each. For what it did, reasonable price compared to everything else. But one of the things that even I heard directly from so many people is like, “I tried this at my state’s assistive technology program or AT lab, and it was life-changing for me, but I can’t afford $250 for it. What can I do?”

And so at the time, I was already working on this software only approach to it where you didn’t need this external hardware to be able to run on your existing computers and devices. And that was sort of where I realized there was an opportunity to change the business model, especially as we started getting more involved in enterprises and the employee experience where we could do that side sort of commercially and use it as a way to enable it to be free for individuals for any of that personal use you want. So whether you’re playing games or just using it for media controls at home or just browsing or whatever you’re doing on your personal devices is a way to sort of dismantle and disrupt what we call the disability tax that an individual has to pay a lot more for their assistive technology to use the same devices that they still have to pay for in the first place, whether it’s a tablet, a computer, or a laptop or even a game console.

So that’s always sort of been the focus and drive, and it really just came from talking to our community and users of the sort of early versions I was trying to make.

Nice, nice. And as an AT act, I got to say, I really do appreciate it because yeah, a lot of times we’ll show folks stuff in our lab or let them borrow it, try it out and everything, but then yeah, you get to that disability tax and it’s like, “Oh man, this could really make a big difference, but how in the world am I going to afford it?” So it’s great to be able to tell them, “We can help you download it on your device and you can run with it straight from there.” You mentioned some of the different methods. What are all the different methods that Cephable lets me control my computer with?

So you can use adaptive voice controls, which you can use for voice shortcuts and anything across any apps. You can also use it for full dictation, so writing what you speak as you speak, and then you can do things with head movement, so like tilting and turning and leaning with your head. You can do face expressions, like different eyebrow controls and mouth controls just using the camera. And then we also have, for our companion app, you can set up virtual buttons on the app. So if you have a tablet or a phone, you can set up a grid of buttons or even just a single mega button to tap to do things. And then you can also use your phone or tablet’s motion control, so tilting, turning, shaking the device to send inputs and any and all of those things all at the same time plus any other physical input device you might have, whether it’s a switch input, a keyboard and mouse, a game pad.

Our goal sort of bring all of that to the forefront. And that’s really where we’re at now. We’re always looking at introducing, especially within the camera controls, new things from eye tracking to hand and body gesture tracking and just more unique things that we can start to detect. Trying to balance introducing those things without making it cumbersome and confusing to use as well is sort of the current challenges we face. But it’s a lot of different things you can use. So ultimately if you need to replace a keyboard and mouse because you aren’t able to use it out of the box, you can use just Cephable or you can augment these different types of devices with these adaptive controls as well.

No, and I like how you give all the options. It is not made for just one person with one kind of need. And I’m sure that’s probably something that you might have learned over time with Enabled Play and everything else as well.

Yeah, it’s exactly right. I mean, everyone’s got a different ideal setup, and so it’s about personalizing it and it’s a mix of making it super customizable without making it extremely challenging to customize as well. As you know a lot of… especially digital assistive technology, it can become a configuration pain over time and it’s like, oh, it’s a whole other thing I have to learn. And that’s where we’re leaning on some of our newer AI capabilities where you basically can just tell Cephable what you want it to do, and it just kind of does it without having to be in the depths of configurations and macros and stuff like that, which of course you can still do. We have power users that go bananas and dive all the way in, and they build these really large and robust macros and they’re having a good time, but most people just want… they have a single goal, they have a specific need they want to start with, and so we’re trying to make it as easy as possible to set that up too.

I definitely… as an AT professional, I appreciate that. I always hope, and it’s one of those bad things, I always hope there’s a day where just no one needs me anymore. Everything’s just accessible and works and isn’t really needed. But yeah, listeners, I can tell you just when I learned about it and really started playing it with it within a few minutes, I think I gave a PowerPoint presentation and used the head gestures just to go through just to see how easy it was to use. And I mean, it took minutes to really, I mean once this downloaded to kind of set up and get up and working. So I mean, if it’s a friend, a family member, yourself, you don’t have to be a tech guru or anything to really get it up and get it working and figure out some of the things it can do, but I love that there is the option there that if you are that techie person who really wants to just dig in and make it amazing, you do have the ability to be able to get in there and do that as well.

Totally.

Alex, as I was looking through everything, you also… just kind of looking at the Cephable website and everything, I found a consortium on there. Can you tell me about that?

Yes. Oh my gosh. I love our consortium. So it’s a program we set up and I have to shout out Julia Franklin, our chief learning officer. She also manages our community partners and John Campbell, who’s our director of engineering, they’re the ones that really drive the consortium, but it’s our community of users that are part of our product development cycle. So they’re folks that get compensated for their time. We learn as much as possible about them, not just within the assistive technology they use, but just what their interests are, what they like to do, what their experiences are, what their goals are. They join this sort of sub-community of the greater Cephable community, and then we work with them on the product side from early idea and concepts we have for features all the way to feedback on designs to user testing, to getting early betas. We do some storytelling with them too, and ultimately it’s very core to how we continue to develop Cephable out.

So there’s nothing that exists in the Cephable app at this point or any of the platforms or even the SDKs that hasn’t gone through our consortium of users. So it ranges in folks’ needs by the disabilities that they live with to the goals that they have with their technology, regions that they come from. We are trying to basically build just as diverse of a core group of people as we can to just make the product work for everyone. To your point earlier, everyone has a different setup and Cephable has to be customizable to meet everyone’s unique preferences. And so that’s the way we sort of go about doing it from the beginning. We build with our community from day one.

Well, and I love something you said there because you mentioned not just the people have different needs but different wants. They want to do different things. This isn’t a program that’s going to work in, you mentioned Word, it’s just going to work in Word. No, it can work across those other ones. So I like that you’re looking at not just how would you like to use this, how can this be more accessible, but what would you like to do with it? And really finding out and taking that input. I’m sure it just adds to, well, the usability and just the many different things that it can do. Alex, you brought this up at the beginning. We’ve talked a lot about the individuals, but how can Cephable help businesses be more accessible?

So there’s two ways we do that. One is in empowering their team members, which is using the same things that the personal version has plus some extra more professional features like user management and single sign-on stuff that a lot of enterprises expect, but it’s essentially empowering the workforce to have a much lower cost and accessible tool available for their employees. And so we’ve done some cool things there.

For example, like Intel and Accenture, we put out a white paper and a video showcasing basically Intel and Accenture employees that were using Cephable. And one of the cool things that we found that we weren’t expecting during that initial testing phase and training phase and stuff like that is how many people that actually didn’t identify as having a disability got a ton of great value out of the platform too as an ergonomic tool to avoid repeated strain injuries so that if you’re sort of at the limit of what your wrists and hands can handle on a keyboard and mouse, instead of having to go memorize keyboard shortcuts to be more effective, you can basically just set up voice commands as a great example, or just folks that just tell Cephable’s AI the apps they’re using and they use voice alongside any other input too.

So there’s some interesting stats that came out of that. But yeah, we continue to work with businesses. You can jump in and set up a free trial super easily, set up as many team members as you need to use Cephable. There’s built-in training, a whole bunch more pre-built set of control profiles for different apps and all sorts of support and stuff that come with that from our team. The other side of what we do is enabling product engineers and developers and teams to make their apps and their games more accessible. So whether you’re building an app for a bank or you’re building a AAA video game, there’s an opportunity to introduce Cephable controls to that experience too, outside of what you could already do on the PC out of the box, so anything past the keyboard and mouse.

Imagine you roll up to a kiosk at a restaurant that’s not accessible because it’s dependent on just the touchscreen interface to control it. Being able to actually instead use things like your face expressions and head gestures and voice controls and stuff on the go, or you’re in a mobile app that isn’t very accessible in terms of tab navigation and things like that, but being able to just tell it what you need it to do, those are the types of experiences we’re enabling now. Or you’re building a game that runs on Xbox and I can’t use an Xbox controller or physical inputs, or I need a little bit more to play that game that’s a little faster paced or competitive, well, maybe I can use an Xbox adaptive controller, but then I could also use my phone’s camera and microphone to send stuff to the game as well. So those are the types of things we enable there.

Oh, that’s super cool. And the sky’s kind of the limit I feel like on the things that it might be able to do, and I’m excited to see where that goes.

Yeah. And I think the other main thing about it is that it’s not just about making your app or your game or your device accessible or more accessible, it’s also actually connecting to the community of people with disabilities. For businesses, it can be checking a box on accessibility, but really what we do is help connect our users to the apps and experiences that are more accessible to them now because they are integrated with Cephable controls, and for these businesses that becomes a user acquisition channel they actually can not just be accessible, they can actually reach new customers in a way. So yeah, it’s sort of like that bridging the gap from our community that wants to find the things that they can do more easily now to the businesses that are enabling it to bring those two together.

Nice. That’s awesome. That is awesome. I’m sure you have tons of these, Alex, but can you tell me a story or two about how Cephable made a positive impact on a user’s life, or maybe even a way someone used it that even surprised you?

Yeah, okay. One of my more recent favorite… I’ve got so many, but one of my more recent favorite ones, actually one of our consortium members, her name’s Hogan, she is now an attorney, but when we first met her, she was finishing up law school. She actually used Cephable during the bar exam and passed the bar exam with Cephable, which I think was pretty cool. A lot of other assistive technologies in proctored exams get blocked because if they have an internet connection or if they have any means of basically being exploited to cheat on the exam, then they just get blocked, which for the sake of the exam, you don’t want people cheating. But for people with disabilities, you just removed their means to participate. So it’s pretty exclusionary. But she was able to get Cephable approved through the bar exam proctoring group, and was able to actually use our dictation and voice controls to take the multi-question exams to dictate into the essay parts of the exam.

Now she’s an attorney down in North Carolina just doing some amazing stuff, especially around disability rights and disability inclusion. So I think that’s my most recent favorite one because it was just from this past summer, but there there’s so many more from people being able to play games with their friends and family that weren’t able to before to people getting jobs where they were facing challenges with the accommodations offerings that an enterprise had that they were trying to get a job at all the way to students that are using it in their speech and occupational therapy, finding that they’re getting improved results out of gamifying those therapy sessions using Cephable controls.

Oh, that’s awesome. That is absolutely great. If our listeners want to find out more or even download Cephable for themselves, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Yeah, definitely. You can just go right to the website, it’s cephable.com. And then I also definitely want to plug our Discord community too, so you can get there from the website, or if you go on Discord, you can search for Cephable. We’ve got tons of people there who aren’t just sharing their experiences and ideas, but they’ll even share… people will share the controls that they’re building. So when you build a set of controls for an app, you can share those with the world and people get their own copy of it. So there’s a lot of cool stuff you can get there and not just using the app and taking it home with you, but actually joining the community. And I think it’s the best way to get as much out of the platform as you can.

No, that’s great. I love that people are sharing their special setups and everything. Then if you are a new user and maybe you want to get a little bit more in depth and it gives you some ideas in some places and some ways to start, that’s great. That’s great. Yeah, it sounds like you’re building a lot more than just a little bit more accessible, but kind of a whole community of folks to work and help each other out. That’s great.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think a lot of people have questions and ideas on how they use a tool like Cephable, and it’s better to share those with the community because you’ll find a lot of people that have the same goals, the same preferences, and the same types of setup. And so you can get through a lot of those headaches of configuring AT or saying, “Does it work with this,” because there’s a lot of people who have tried it before you.

So they either know that it works or it doesn’t, or they figured out that work around on their own and got it there.

I guess on top of our website, you can check out any of our socials on Instagram or X or LinkedIn. We’re just at Cephable everywhere. Also, if you want to try out the controls before you even download the app to see if they’re right for you, we have a really fun way to try it. You can get to it from the website or just go to try.cephable.com and you can play the game 2048, that little sort of combining numbers to try to get them to 2048 on a board with your head movement or with your voice. So you can try out the different sensitivity settings for your head controls, try out the different speech recognition settings for voice controls and just basically experience what it is before you even download anything, which I think is pretty cool.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Alex, thank you so much for coming back on the show, for telling us all about Cephable and we love just… and listeners, if you do get a chance, do go back and listen to that first episode 589 back in September. Just it’s fun to compare and contrast. I mean, the passion’s still there, the usability’s still there, but I love how it is just grown into such a bigger tool, not just gaming, not just kind of like you said, a hardware device that connects and is able to do stuff, but something that’s available in so many different places and for so many different needs. So Alex, thanks again for coming on and sharing and telling us all about it.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show is produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.