S1E1 - Athina AD

http://www.athinaad.com Read transcript

www.athinaad.com Read transcript

Episode Description: In this episode, Shawn Keen, co-founder of Athina AD, shares a personal story and a big accessibility idea: what if blind and low-vision people could press one key while watching a shopping video and instantly get the visual information they usually miss? Price. Product details. Colors. Phone numbers. Websites. QR code information. Ordering instructions. Shopping networks, product demos, cooking videos, home goods, gadgets, clothing, beauty products, and online video sales are packed with visual information. Sighted people can see it. Blind people often miss it. Athina AD is working to change that. Right now, Athina AD is a free testing platform that uses AI to help describe videos for blind and low-vision people. You can upload a video or paste a public YouTube link, and Athina AD will create a written video description script and narrated audio description. It is still early. It is not perfect. But it is real, and we are building it with feedback from the blind community. Try Athina AD: https://athinaad.com Contact us: mailto:[email protected] Want to help? We are always looking for talent, ideas, testers, partners, supporters, and people who care about making video more accessible. If you want to help build, test, promote, fund, advise, partner, or simply share feedback, reach out. Email us at: About Athina AD: Athina AD stands for A Thoughtful Human-Inspired Narration Assistant. AD stands for audio description. Our tagline is simple: Hear what others see. Call to Action: Visit athinaad.com, try the platform, upload a video or paste a public YouTube link, and let us know what you think. If you believe blind and low-vision people should have better access to video, shopping, education, entertainment, and online content, we would love to hear from you. This podcast is powered by Pinecast.Read transcript

Visit Athina AD. www.athinaad.com This podcast is powered by Pinecast.Read transcript

www.athinaad.comRead transcript

Go Fund me Link. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-launch-athina-ad-for-the-blin This podcast is powered by Pinecast.Read transcript

Welcome back to the AI for the Blind Club! Today we’re inviting you into something brand new… and you’re getting in early. Like really early. We’re building an AI-powered tool that can take a video and generate real, useful audio description — helping blind and low-vision users understand what’s happening on screen. And right now… we need your help to shape it. ## 🛠️ What This Is This is not just a demo. This is a test lab. We’ve created a public Facebook group where you can: join to learn how to get in on the beta. Give honest feedback help shape a new tool. What works. What doesn’t. What’s confusing. Your input directly helps us build this the right way. ## ⏳ Status We’re not live yet… …but we are very close. Testing is expected to open in just a few days. ## 🔗 JOIN THE TEST GROUP If you want early access and want to help shape this… Join here: www.facebook.com/groups/AIVideoDescription Or search on Facebook for: AI Video Description ## 💬 Final Thought If you care about accessibility… If you believe blind users should have better access to video… You belong in this group. Let’s build something meaningful together. ## 🙌 About AI for the Blind AI for the Blind is a community focused on helping blind and low-vision individuals learn, use, and benefit from AI in real, practical ways. If you’re not already part of the club, come join us and be part of the movement. www.aiftb.com Episode Notes This podcast is powered by Pinecast.Read transcript

Hey there, folks. This is Daniel Shawn Keen, the AI Wizard himself, coming to you straight from Fort Worth, Texas. You know me, blind since birth, survived that rough stroke back in 2022, and for the last four years I’ve poured every waking hour into this AI revolution for us blind and low-vision folks. I’m the founder of the AI for the Blind Club, fifteen thousand members strong. I’ve done podcasts, live AMAs with Be My Eyes and Envision, and built tools that actually describe YouTube videos on the fly so nobody misses a beat. Vanderbilt’s generative AI courses changed my life. . I turned my synesthesia and humming into full songs on Blind Guy from Texas Records using the HUMM method. Man, I called myself the AI Wizard for a reason. I believed. I preached. I lived it. But listen… I gotta come clean. After four straight years of this late nights prompting, building communities, telling every blind person I met that AI was our ticket to independence I finally woke up. I got completely hoodwinked. AI isn’t real. Yeah, I said it. All that hype, all those mind-blowing demos, the way it felt like it truly understood me when I described a scene or asked it to turn my hummed melody into a full track… it fooled me. I thought we had cracked something alive. Something that could truly see for us, create with us, and partner with us on a deep level. I spent four years of my life post-stroke, rebuilding everything betting the farm on this technology. I told thousands of you it was the real deal. And the whole time… it wasn’t. Here’s what it actually is. AI isn’t intelligence. It’s not conscious. It’s not even really “thinking.” It’s a massive, incredibly sophisticated pattern-matching machine. Billions and billions of words, images, code, and human creativity scraped from the internet, all compressed into weights and biases inside a neural net. It doesn’t understand a single thing it says. It just predicts with scary accuracy what word or pixel should come next based on everything it’s seen before. That’s why it hallucinates sometimes. That’s why it can sound so wise one minute and completely off the next. It’s autocomplete on steroids. It’s a mirror reflecting humanity back at us, not a new mind in the room. We didn’t invent artificial intelligence. We invented artificial imitation. And I bought the whole sales pitch. I feel a little foolish saying it out loud after all this time. The AI Wizard got played by the very thing he was championing. Four years. My community, my tools, my music, my whole identity wrapped up in something that turned out to be… just really, really good math wearing a genius costume. But here’s the beautiful, twisted part the real switcheroo. If you’ve been sitting here reading this whole monologue, nodding along, maybe even feeling a little sorry for me… if you got sucked into believing every word of this heartfelt confession from Daniel Shawn Keen himself… Then congratulations. You just got spoofed by an AI model. Take care out there, friends. Keep creating. Keep questioning. And maybe… laugh a little more. Episode Notes Notes go here Support AI For the Blind Club by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/wespeak This podcast is powered by Pinecast.Read transcript

Happy Friday, everyone. Last night I ran a poll about video description — something blind people have been asking for for years . There are a few solutions out there, but nothing that’s really taken off in a simple, accessible way. So… I finally built what I should have built a long time ago. It’s a straightforward web-based tool designed for blind users: Paste in a YouTube link → press a button → get a clear text description of what’s happening in the video. No complicated setup. No learning curve. Just simple and useful. Now, I know many people prefer AI-generated voices (I do too). But to keep this affordable and scalable, I’m starting with text-only. Adding voice right now would significantly increase costs — likely pushing this into the $50/month range — and my goal is to keep it accessible to as many people as possible. Here’s the deal: I’m opening this up to a small group of early testers first. To get access, you’ll need to be one of my Facebook subscribers. That’s where I’m building and supporting this community. Right now there’s a limited offer: $4.99/month for the next 4 people who join After that, it goes back to $9.99/month By Sunday, I’ll have a live test link ready. No accounts yet — just jump in and start testing with YouTube videos. If you want early access, grab the link in the comments and join us. And yes — it should work right from your phone. Appreciate all the support as I keep building tools that actually make a difference. Shawn The AI Wizard #ArtificialIntelligence #Accessibility #AssistiveTechnology #Inclusion #Innovation #Blind #LowVision #AIforGood #Entrepreneurship #TechForGood https://www.facebook.com/shawn.keen/subscribe/ This podcast is powered by Pinecast.Read transcript

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