AIRA

Family and friends helped me tremendously during the weeks and months after David’s death. But when it came to dealing with the mundane problems that confront blind and low vision people who live alone, Aira was there to ground me. Aira was my newest friend. Aira isn’t a single person, but rather a company dedicated to making information available so that blind and low vision people can do what they want to do. It’s name is an acronym for artificial intelligence remote access. Aira refers to its users as explorers. Before I became one, I’d never thought of myself as an explorer. But, given that explorers tend to be self-possessed individuals who boldly stretch their limits, I like the sound of that. Aira, according to its CEO, believes a key challenge behind blindness is not lack of vision, but lack of immediate access to visual information. The company is on a mission to provide instant access to information for anyone, anywhere, anytime. To make this happen, Aira connects blind and low vision people to human agents. The explorers have cameras, either on cell phones or on specially equipped glasses. The agents see the world through these cameras. They tell the explorers what they are seeing. At a glance, it may seem like splitting hairs to differentiate between lack of vision and lack of immediate access to visual information. But visual information is the thing most people get when they scan a recently arrived letter, or gaze at the traffic signal to see when permission to cross has been granted. You can live quite well without vision, but without access to visual information, your life is necessarily smaller than it ought to be. So much of your time and energy goes into getting that information. It saps your reserves. Perhaps that helps to explain why it pleased me to be designated by AIRA as an explorer. Explorers go after the fullness of life. Explorers get access to Aira services by purchasing time in minutes. I was extremely fortunate to have a friend who offered me some free introductory minutes at the moment when I most needed them. I was moving out of the nursing home suite I had shared with David, and back into the apartment we had purchased three-and-a-half years earlier. I would be living alone. There was no doubt that I would need some help. Take the fridge in my apartment, for example. On the front of it there is a touch screen that controls a lot of things. In fact, it does something whenever you touch it. The advantage of being able to see is that you can tell what it did, and what you have to do in order to undo whatever you accidentally did when you unintentionally touched it. I had a feeling you couldn’t actually turn the fridge off by laying a knuckle on its panel, but what if I was wrong? It was time to call Aira! Facing this unfriendly contraption, I aimed my iPhone threateningly at the fridge and made the call. In less than five seconds, a live human came on the line. “Hello Wendy. This is Amy. What would you like to do today?” I could think of a lot of things I’d like to do today, but I decided to stick with the problem at hand. “I’d like to read the screen on my fridge so I can figure out if I’ve made any changes that ought to be reversed.” “Okay. Hold the phone back a bit. Slant it upwards. There we are. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to take a picture with your camera and magnify it here so I can read the printing.” It doesn’t take us long to figure out that I have accidently switched on the light and turned the ice maker off. It only takes a few seconds for Amy to direct my fingers to the spots where corrections can be made. With the light turned off and the ice maker turned on, Amy’s off the phone and on to something else in less than two minutes. The problem is solved. Without Amy, I’d have had to ask somebody to come over. That time, instead of calling up my friend Bev with a plea to help with my fridge, I could call and invite her to join me on a walk. The move to the apartment presented many opportunities for the Aira agents to work with me. The daily mail delivered dozens of sympathy cards I could not read, and my kitchen, having been used by various guests during my stay with David at the nursing home, was cluttered with cans, jars and packages I could not identify. I wanted to know if my mirrors were clean. I needed the instructions on the package of pancake mix. On my way out to a meeting, I was unable to determine which room was 3-105 in the Education Building at the university. Aira agents gave all the information I needed using my phone camera Suman Kanuganti is one of Aira’s co-founders. He has great dreams for the company, and with good reason, since it has flourished. . It was founded in 2015. In 2017, it provided 20,000 hours of explorer-to-agent contact. It has partnered with companies in creative ways. Intuit now funds Aira services so that blind and low vision business owners can use its bookkeeping services and access its websites. Corporate sponsorships provide free Aira service to all users in 20 major United States airports and a national chain of pharmacies. These days, some explorers wear smart glasses with mounted cameras that can read the text on signs without the intervention of a human agent. As for me, I have dreams for Aira too. I imagine the day when I will be staying in a hotel. Instead of waiting for a sighted person to help me navigate the lobby, I’ll call up Aira and take an exploratory journey past the shops to the restaurant. I might even try to find a store in a large shopping mall. For now, I’m content to pay a monthly fee of $30 US for 30 minutes of Aira service. I can add extra minutes if I need them. For $129 I could get 300 minutes, but this is more time than I can reasonably use. Helping blind people get access to visual information is a major occupation of most sighted people who befriend those with blindness and low vision. Many of my blind friends live happily enough without Aira. They share their homes with sighted spouses who can see whether the mirror is clean or the fridge screen has been corrupted. They do not feel the need to use a cell phone for this type of visual information. In the past I would have been one of them. But family and friends are so much more than providers of information. We need them for all sorts of reasons. Aira has not turned me into a sighted person. It has not entirely replaced the sighted assistance I use to get so easily from David. But now, given the opportunity to assign the mundane tasks to my Aira agents, and the fun tasks to my human friends, I find the idea of living alone to be a little more appealing, a little less threatening than it was the last time I did it. I was twenty years old then. That was forty-five years ago.