TEDxKC speaker Shantanu Bala: Tech moves communication beyond words
August 23, 2017 | Startland News Staff
Editor’s note: Startland News is exploring a few of the most impactful quotes from speakers at Friday’s TEDxKC event at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.
“The blind cannot only lead the blind, but lead any of us who can see to experiences that we’ve never seen before.”
— Shantanu Bala
Think about the technology you interact with on a day-to-day basis, Somatic Labs founder Shantanu Bala encouraged the TEDxKC audience.
“You’re probably looking at a screen, whether that’s a laptop, a smartphone or a tablet. You’re checking emails, notifications, messages or alerts,” he said. “A lot of this information is presented in a context that is inaccessible to someone who’s blind.”
Although modern technology users have access to a new era of voice-controlled interfaces, like Alexa, Siri and the Google Assistant, such artificial intelligences that respond to speech also add another channel of disruption and intrusion, Bala said.
Communication involves a lot more than just words, he said.
“Even if you’re not bilingual, you all understand a second language. You understand the meaning of a handshake or a warm hug. You understand to pull your hand away from a hot stove,” Bala said. “And you understand this faster than you can read words printed on a page or even hear them spoken out loud.”
For any of the 285 million people in the world who are blind, a task as ordinary as checking the time can involve asking another person or turning up the volume on a phone and having it yell out that information, he explained.
“This is a cumbersome experience and it’s an accessibility problem, but I would also question the necessity of occupying anyone’s eyes or ears when we can intuitively understand things that we grasp with our hands,” Bala said.
Imagine if you treated your entire body as a programmable computer, he challenged the crowd.
Bala’s Somatic Labs offers software and hardware products that aim to enable a future of wearable devices that communicate through human feeling and touch.
“I’ve spent past eight years working on systems of silent and invisible communication because I believe the same computer interface that could help someone who’s blind to check the time without needing a pair of headphones, is the same interface that could power the future of human-computer interaction,” he said.
2017 Startups to Watch
stats here
Related Posts on Startland News
Kauffman Foundation rolls out $1.2M microlending program to help underserved entrepreneurs
Amid a swarm of 160 events as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced a new microlending program to spur investment in underserved entrepreneurs. In partnership with four microfinance lenders, the foundation issued a series of grants totaling $1.2 million that a will change the way the nonprofit microlenders capitalize their…
Scared away from networking events? Anti-social introverts can turn to tech
Networking strength comes in numbers — even for anti-social introverts, Jeremy A. Smith told a crowd Tuesday at Global Entrepreneurship Week. “Anti-social people, myself included, hate events,” he said. But like all other entrepreneurs, such introverts still must build and maintain actionable professional networks from which they can request and receive value, Smith said. In-person networking…
Longfellow Farm coworking the soil amid KC’s urban food desert
In a city ripe with coworking office spaces, there’s a hunger for similar environments outdoors, Ami Freeberg said. As with maintaining individual workplaces, traditional urban farming also can be isolating and expensive, the Longfellow Farm manager said. By working together, however, the collaborative process allows for shared resources, greater human expertise and, of course, more…
Procrastinating? Eat the frog, don’t chase the squirrels
On the metal wall in front of my desk, I’ve magnetically fastened a famous recommendation from Mark Twain. “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day,” the humorist from Missouri wrote. Though it can become an aspiration rather than a rule,…