Pre-episode Intro Amos: And the unique aspect about the work that we're doing, and the mobility aid that we're developing, is that it, uh, uses autonomous driving technology to guide the person. We actually call the device "Glide." Uh, the reason is because, uh, I feel that when you use Glide, you glide. Chris: This is the Penny Forward podcast, a show about blind people building bright futures one penny at a time. I'm Chris Peterson. Liz: I'm Liz Bottner. MOe: I'm MOe Carpenter. Chris: Today, our guest is Amos Miller from Glidance, and, uh, Amos is going to talk to us about his company, his product, how it came to be, and what kinds of things he believes it will help the blind community to, uh, achieve. Amos, thank you for being here. Amos: Chris, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Chris: First, could you tell us a little bit about yourself personally and your connection to the blind community? Amos: Yes, of course. So, as I said, uh, my name is Amos Miller. I am blind. I have retinitis pigmentosa. I lost most of my sight in my twenties. I trained to use a guide dog. I'm on my Guide Dog number 6 now with uh, a couple of short term guide dogs throughout, uh, my time. I've also always been in software, computers, I spent many years at Microsoft, and some of, uh, your listeners may be familiar with my previous work on Soundskape. I led the team in Microsoft Research. And, so I've always really enjoyed that cross section between, uh, my passion for computers, and uh, software and advancements in AI and capabilities. I personally focused mostly on, uh, way finding, navigation, mobility, uh, but I'm always fascinated with the amazing technologies that uh, come online and that we can apply. MOe: Can you tell us a little bit more about your education, and your career? Amos: Yeah. Um, I grew up in Israel, actually in a, in a ... like a farming community, uh, so my early work experience" in the fields. I worked at the banana fields, and uh, I was not as blind uh, then. I, I had some sight loss, but uh, I was still able to see enough. And then, when I finished high school, I, I already sort of started uh, tinkering with computers through high school, and learned to code and everything, and then when I was 18, I went to college and took a computer science, uh, a bachelor of science in comp-- software engineering. Uh, that was in Israel. And after that, uh, I married my wonderful, uh, wife. She's actually from South Korea, and we both moved to London England, and uh, that's where I really started my career in software technology, and um, while I was in England, I also went to do my MBA. Actually I did what's called an executive MBA, which means it's evenings and weekends while you keep a full time job, which was a pretty crazy thing to do, but I loved every moment of it. I was one of the, I, I would say the first or second blind person to do an MHA in London business school, uh, which was uh, a lot of fun, and uh, a lot of educating the schools how to include a blind person in the program, um, and yeah. From there, career. Many different companies, then many as Microsoft, about two years ago, uh, I left Microsoft and started Glidance, because I really wanted to take some of the ideas that I've, uh, thought about and developed and experimented with, and felt that the only way to really bring it to everyone, and have the impact that these technologies can really have, uh, we needed to build a well financed company. Build a fairly sophisticated product, uh, do it together with the community, and um, that's what Glidance has become. Liz: Tell us about Glidance as a company. Amos: Thank you, Liz. Um, Glidance, uh, is uh, a new company, uh, that uh, we started about a year and a half ago. I have two co-founders on my team, Kyle Buzzard, who's our head of product, and Luke Bacborough, who's uh, head of growth and financing, um, and myself, the, the founder and CEO. The work that we do is to bring about a new mobility aid for people who are blind, low vision, and the unique aspect about the work that we're doing, and the mobility aid that we're developing, is that it, uh, uses autonomous driving technology to guide the person. We actually call the device "Glide." Uh, the reason is because, uh, I feel that when you use Glide, you glide. You feel like you're walking very smoothly. It's not a cane. It's not like a cane with all kinds of bells and whistles. It's also not a dog, or electronic dog. It's a glide, it's uh, it has two wheels on the ground, a long handle, the handle is about forty-five degrees to the ground, so the wheels are about two, two or three feet in front of you. And you start to walk, and as you begin to walk, the wheels begin to steer left and right. And guide you on your path, avoiding obstacles, keeping you on the safe path, whether that's a corridor, or sidewalk, or a busy street. Uh, Glide can also guide you to line of sight destinations, like a dropped curb, if you're walking along the sidewalk and you're getting to the curb, or when you're crossing the road, you need to get uh, the other side of the, of the, on the other side of the road. It can detect doors, escalators, elevators, and so on, uh, so that uh, it can guide you. The essence of the idea is that it's not really, it doesn't work in a way that some of the other technologies work where they give you information and you need to navigate. Glide actually is physically connected to the ground and guides. And I think that's the, the main innovation. Chris: I had a chance to try Glide at the American Council of the Blind national convention, and I was also lucky enough to be next to Glidance at the National Federation of the Blind national convention, and, uh, while you said that the product isn't a guide dog, it, at least in its current iteration, and it's still under development, as far as I know, it feels a lot like working a guide dog. Was that intentional? Amos: I don't, I wouldn't say it was intentional. I, I would say that it's probably where we landed with the design at least so far. Very much looked for something that is connected to the ground and physically guides the person. We've been exploring different types of handles, and different ways that you can work with the device, in order to make it as easy, and as, uh, familiar for people to follow and be guided by Glide, and also to give inputs to Glide, so if you want to turn left, or you want to turn right, you want to sort of steer the device in one direction or another. So, I would agree that there, that there is similarity to the feeling of a, of a harness, although I think the experience is a little different. Because it's uh, it's not, for example it doesn't pull you in the way that the, the guide dog harness does. You're actually using the handle to push the device forward. So it, it actually feels somewhat different. Chris: Yeah. It, it's interesting. It's different, and yet similar. Amos: And yet similar. Yeah. And you know, I, some people describe Glide as something, somewhere between a guide dog and a cane, or a bridge, it really isn't a cane. You would probably agree with me on that. I mean it doesn't really give, lend itself to feeling, and sensing the environment around you. Glide uses its cameras and its senses to sense the environment, and guide you through it. It can also communicate with you about what it can see. That was not implemented in the prototypes that you saw at the ACB. So Glide can inform you of your environment, but um, in many ways, on the whole, it, it probably feels more like it feels when you work a guide dog where you don't actually know that you just passed an obstacle. You just kind of walked, and, the dog took you around it. Chris: So this is uh, mostly a personal finance podcast, and many of our listeners are people who are interested in finding ways to improve their financial health, some of, of which might be through starting businesses of their own, or, or finding employment, and I'm curious, you know, at a, at a very high level, what does it take to go from a person that, you know, and I'm not quite clear on how high up you rose in the, in the ranks at Microsoft, but uh, if you were leading a development team, it, you know, you at least had some leadership experience. But what does it take to translate that, uh, work experience into building your own company? How did you get started? Amos: Oh my goodness. I mean, it's a very ... I don't want to say "difficult" transition to make, but it's not just going to happen. I think one of the things that, you know, when you work in a big corporation, you get slotted into certain roles, and you get told how well you've done, and you might get promoted if you're told that you've done well, and you kind of get smooched along some organizational structure. If everything goes well, you might find another role, and then you have to convince people that you fit the needs of that other role, and I think I did a bit of a, sort of a personal accounting on my own experiences. I've uh, have done all this work, different jobs at Microsoft, I led a development product team in Microsoft research, but prior to that I did, um, strategic consulting with the Microsoft Enterprise customers. And before Microsoft, I led a large development team for Telecom's company that had like thirty developers in the UK and another thirty developers in India. And it was back and forth between India and the UK for a few years. Uh, I also sat on the board of Guide Dogs for the Blind for a few years. Um, and saw sort of how a company, and how an organization, runs from the top. And, I sort of did this personal accounting, and S, and thought, and, sort of reached this conclusion, "You know what? Other people can do this. Other people clearly start companies. Nobody in my environment at the moment is gonna tell me that I'm ready to be a CEO, but I think I have relevant experience. I have experience across multiple disciplines. I have developed a product." So I basically took this, um, idea of believing that you, you have the experience, if I may say something that might sound weird, but um, looking fear in the eye, and saying that I am afraid, this is scary, but it's something that I've always wanted to do, and I'm going to go through it, and build up the courage and, and, and go for it. And, and I think that that's, uh, it's sort of a mental transition that one makes, and uh, it helps to talk with people who believe in you, and who have, uh, supported you over the years. Um, don't listen to everybody, because some people will tell you "Oh you're crazy." But honestly, from the moment, uh, we, I started Glidance and got it off the ground, it's just been the most amazing ride personally. I have to tell my mother sometimes, "Even if I don't succeed here, I wouldn't regret for a moment that I tried. MOe: I love um, identifying with the fear and overcoming that. Are there any other challenges that you've come across that you've needed to overcome? And how did you overcome them? Amos: So I started the company with a lot of conviction. Having worked on Soundskape, having been involved in the blind low vision community for awhile, having been, having seen how guide dog schools work and what they spend the money on, and so on, I've really reached this very strong conviction that we have this incredible technology available to us today, and, and I do believe that we can apply it in ways that can make a material impact to our ability to get around, and, and I don't think it's gonna be done by, in this case, Microsoft, a big corporation, who, you know, they, Microsoft doesn't build robots. Let's, let's, just, be straight there. Yeah? Um, and uh, the fact that I have this conviction, I wasn't gonna take a, a massive risk, and risk other people's money, and livelihoods, uh, before I start validating some of that. So, for example, I went and spent uh, went to CSUN in 2023, talked to as many people as I could, and, and, really laid out my thoughts. "Okay, here's what I think is going inn, here's what I think we can do," and I already had a pretty good idea of what Glide was going to be. Um, and very quickly, I got feedback from many, many people that if there was a better solution, they would, at a heartbeat, get it. Um, also the challenges of how the industry works, and why some of these devices are so expensive, can we make something that is affordable, that people can make a buying decision themselves without having to fill out applications and, uh, wait for somebody to approve it for them? I started testing the idea with more entrepreneurs, and investors, and really starting to shape a narrative that would actually start to attract capitol. That took time, and now, uh, by June of 2024, two months ago, we've raised 1.4 million dollars towards the project. So, we're making progress. Chris: We started talking about this earlier, and, and then, sort of moved back into the mechanics of building a company, but now it's probably a good time to transition back into the Glide product itself. Can you talk in more detail about what it does now, and what you expect it to do when it becomes a minimum viable product and is available for people to purchase, and, uh, then also your thoughts about the price point? Amos: Yeah. Of course. So, just to give people a, a, a sense of time line, what we showed in NFB and the ACB were, I call them "juiced up Prototype 3." So they were Prototype 3 with updated electronics and updated software. We really were able to start, uh, showing how the device uh, autonomously guides, and, our Alpha device, which is uh, due in September, is really the first incarnation of the fully integrated product. So the physical design of the product with all the software and hardware and everything. Now that is still a year out before we expect to have a product ready for sale, uh, in September October of 2025. We're still a good year out before we start to ship the product, and what's gonna happen in that year, today, the Alpha device has all the electronics to do everything that the final product will ev— will be able to do, but we still have a lot of work on the software. The Alpha device will be able to detect sidewalks, and crossings and corridors, and mainstream places that we walk at, keep you on a safe path along those corridors, along those sidewalks, avoid obstacles in those areas, um, and also identify line of sight targets, and we're currently, uh, developing a library of potential targets that you would go to, like I mentioned earlier, like doors, escalators, stairs, crosswalks, uh, dropped curbs, up curbs, and so on. That's the foundation. Wherever the device goes, you need it to be affective at keeping people safe. From there, we're starting to, um, flesh out the capabilities, first of all, implementing that whole user interface that enables you to navigate what we call "in free style mode." If you know the way that you need to go, uh, let's say that you're in a cubicle and you need to go to the bathroom, or you need to go to the step, to, to the front door of the building that you work at, or from the front door to the bus stop, you know, your familiar routes, you can use Glide as your primary mobility aid to easily navigate those familiar routes. Uh, in free style mode, you decide where to go, and, and Glide keeps you safe. Glide will also use audio, uh, so voice interaction, to tell you what's in the surroundings, allow you to make queries, so all of that will be developed. Some of that will be already available in the beta devices, which we expect in November, and some of it will be contin— we will continue to develop after that. And so with the free style mode, and voice interaction, as, as sort of the core capabilities, we will then overlay the ability to program Glide on a route, where Glide can guide you from one place to another. One feature set that we are working on is what we call pre-mapped routes, where you can train Glide on a route that you are using, and then Glide will able to, uh, will enable you to repeat that route. Um, another is you give, uh, you use a navigation app, like Google Maps, or Apple Maps, or Voice Vista, or one of those, and you provide a destination, and Glide will guide you, although I'm not a hundred percent sure that that feature will be ready on Day 1. What I will say is that we're creating a very extensive over the air update, so if you buy the device, you will get, uh, updates as, as we release them. Chris: You talked about wanting to make this affordable so that people didn't have to go through any sort of approval process or something, that they could make the buying decisions themselves. How do you go about doing that? Amos: So basically my goal is, most people are able to own a cell phone. We've planned everything around the design of the product so the device will not cost more than a cell phone. And, I know that it's still out of reach for some people. I know that it's not a cheap device. Like the Meta Ray Band, uh, three hundred bucks, that's more affordable than the, than the fifteen hundred dollars that Glide is priced at. But Glide is also not five thousand, or six, or eight thousand dollars. It's a price that, if you found it to be of significant value to you, you could make the purchase decision. There is, I would add, there is a, an element of a subscription attached to that as well, for the sensible way finding AI capabilities, which is very integral to the software, and to, uh, and is powered by cloud services. And, and, and we've basically designed the device from the ground up so that it doesn't start to cost a lot, to weigh a lot, to sort of get caught up behind systems that not everybody can approach to, to get funding for. Chris: And is it a replacement for traditional orientation and mobility skills? Amos: It is a primary mobility aid, so it's not something that you would use together with a guide dog or a cane. So the answer is yes, but, it's another tool in the tool kit. I perfectly expect people to be having canes and glides, dogs and glides, canes, dogs and glides, or just glides. Like, you know, one of the things and one of the motivations that brought me to really go all out on this device is the recognition that there are still a lot of folks out there who are not confident enough, or maybe have never had orientation and mobility training, and are not confident enough to get out and about. Uh, you know, the numbers that uh, even if you look at the, the NFB statistics website, one of the numbers that will jump at you that only between two and eight percent of the blindness population uses a cane or a guide dog. Okay, that means that ninety percent don't. If somebody loses their sight at the age of sixty, and uh, their husband, uh, or wife, helps them to get around, you know, how do they start to build their own independence again? And rebuild their, their ability to get around? And I really think that a mobility aid like Glide could be more accessible to a lot of people. I also believe that it's inevitable future. I think that intelligent guides, uh, are types of devices that we will start to see in the streets and in the malls and in the airports in the coming five, ten years. I think they will have a huge impact. A huge positive impact for a lot of people. We'll still see people using canes and guide dogs, but I definitely expect that many people will be guided by assistive, uh, intelligent guides like Glide. Chris: This is an incredibly fascinating vision of the future. And I wish we could spend hours and hours talking about it, but we're running out of time. So, before we run out of time, is there anything that you feel is important to cover that we didn't think to ask? Amos: Well, I think it's very important to add that we have decided in Glidance to build Glide out in the open, with the community, so that we can all feed into the evolution of the product, the priorities, what works, what doesn't work, what needs to change, because it's an assistive device. It's a mobility aid. It's something that we need to think about what kind of orientation and mobility training people are going to need. What kind of, you know, how does a device need to look? You know, does it need to look like a cane? Do we want to convey that I'm blind when I'm working with it, or is it more important that it just tells people to get out of the way, like, there's all kinds of nuances here that we as a company can't resolve ourselves. It's a community effort. And so, we do this work out in the open, which means that anyone can join the effort. You can go on to our website and register with us. You will be invited to our monthly zoom calls, where we talk about all the latest developments, we run extensive Q and A's, we have E-mail lists, people send questions and discuss topics. Um, we do demo days. People who register with us will be invited to come and see the device when we visit in their country or city, so there's a lot of opportunities for people to play a part in this. We're working, you know, through this engagement, we've had tremendous engagement from organizations. Like the RNIB in the UK. The CNIB in Canada. The ACB, the NFB, the Vista Center for the Blind in California is very involved. The vocational rehabilitation organizations. The VA. And so, so basically, I encourage people to join the list to be part of this effort. There is a possibility for people to also preorder the device, but I, I emphasize that pre-ordering the device is synonymous with backing the project. Preorders give you a significant discount, um, which we give you, uh, in order to thank you for backing the project and supporting our effort. So again, glidance.io is our website, and, if you wouldn't mind, Chris, uh, sharing it with people. But glidance.io is the website, and that's where you can register and uh, learn about it. Chris: glidance.io Yeah. We'll put that in the show notes, and, and uh, ... Amos: Thank you very much. Chris: Amos, we appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. Again, a really fascinating and compelling vision of the future that you have, and I'm really excited to see where it goes from here. Amos: Thank you very much. MOe, thank you, thank you Chris, MOe, and Liz, uh, thank you for the opportunity, and thank you for the, the wonderful questions and the, the approach that you are taking. Uh, it was a, it's a privilege to participate in your podcast. Liz: You're welcome. Chris: Thank you. Before we go, we'd like to thank our valued partners and our sponsors. Those would be the APH Connect Center, and World Services for the Blind, and our sponsors are Thrivent and Wells Fargo, and we would also like to thank Glidance for setting up this interview today. It was really, really cool. Not just saying this, I'm, I, I am very excited to see where this goes. The Penny Forward podcast is produced by Chris Peterson and Liz Bottner with help from MOe Carpenter, audio editing and post production is provided by Brynn Lee, and text transcription is provided by Anne Verduin. The music is composed and performed by Andre Louis, and as an aside, all of the people I just mentioned are blind. Penny Forward is a nonprofit organization founded and led by blind people. Through education, mentoring, and mutual support, we help each other navigate the complicated landscape of personal finance. We offer self-paced online financial education courses, on subjects like budgeting, credit, debt, employment, taxes, social security, and more. Our weekly workshops cover personal finance in an interactive way to help you build the financial capabilities that you want, and one on one financial counseling is available if you need greater help, or more private help than we can offer through our group workshops. Information about all of those things is available through our website pennyforward.com Now, for all of us in the Penny Forward community, I'm Chris Peterson. Liz: I'm Liz Bottner. MOe: I'm MOe Carpenter. Chris: Thanks for listening, and have a great week.