RealSAM: Recent Episodes
RealSAM
RealSAM Pocket has now been part of my life for over seven months, and it's difficult to remember life without it. But Pocket has been around for longer than that.
In the first of a new series of interviews, Red Szell chats to Pamela Hanson-Abbott who has been enjoying Pocket since 2019. Red rang her at her home in Frinton-on-Sea to share her thoughts.
Following on from last week’s blog about the ‘dangerous’ new Bookshelf feature on my Pocket, I feel the need to make a public service announcement!
I suspect that I am far from the only one to be feeding a serious audiobook habit through my Pocket and experiencing the side-effects of having a loaded Bookshelf and several titles on the go at once.
It’s easy enough to find the last book you were listening to by asking Pocket to ‘Find Recent Books’. The title will be number one on the list and simply saying ‘Play’ will return you to your last reading position. And, likewise, asking Pocket to ‘Find Bookshelf’ will give you a list of the titles you have selected, most recent first.
But, if like me, you have got carried away and now have dozens of titles on your Bookshelf, you might be wasting valuable reading time going through them looking for a book whose title you only vaguely remember. So, in the interests of decluttering, here’s a tip that I learned from the ever-helpful Technical Support Team at RealSam.
Earlier this week I received a very exciting email from Louise at RealSam, telling me about a new feature on my Pocket called Bookshelf.
It enables you to search for and curate a collection of books by subject, rather than having to know the title or author. So, it should save me a tonne of time asking my Google Home device to give me the correct details of books I half remember hearing about before I ask Pocket to find them for me.
As you’d expect from RealSam, it’s simple to use with straight-forward voice commands. So, all you need to do is press the Home button, wait for the bleep, and say ‘Find books about’ whatever you are looking for.
I’ve never been particularly good at remembering calendar dates. It’s about as much as I can manage to keep track of my immediate family’s birthdays, and of course my wedding anniversary!
And so, to be honest, for much of my life, annual events like Father’s Day have rather passed me by. As I have got older though, and particularly since my mum passed away, things like Mother’s and Father’s Day have taken on more significance, and now my wife and I both look forward to discovering what small novelties our daughters have conjured each year.
Not that this helps me remember the calendar dates in question! Which is why I am so glad to have mastered the Reminders function on my Pocket and Google Home devices.
Fortunately, my post-vaccination sojourn in bed was as short-lived as my research on my RealSam devices had said it would be.
Feeling as rotten as I did for a couple of days afterwards, I was really glad that all the information I needed was just a simple voice command away. And with both Pocket and my RealSam Google Home speaker by my bed, that I had a wealth of radio stations, newspapers, magazines, books and podcasts to keep me entertained while I recuperated. I couldn’t help thinking that if this was a mild dose of Covid-19, then I was glad to be protecting myself against its full force.
But as I began to feel better, it was also good to have some time to reflect. A year ago, had I been laid up in bed for a couple of days, I would have had the radio for company. However, because it sits on a chest of drawers on the other side of the room and doesn’t have a remote control, I would have been stuck with a single station, unless I felt up to getting out of bed to change channel, or switch it off.
This week I was fortunate enough to receive my second Covid vaccination. Having checked out all the latest information provided by the various sight loss charities and made instantly accessible through both my In-Your-Pocket and RealSam Google Home speaker, I felt confident I was making the right decision and knew what to expect.
Before leaving the house, I put through a quick video call to Be My Eyes, to check that I had indeed picked up my vaccination card (and not the window cleaner’s business card!), and then used Pocket’s Location’s function to guide me to the health centre.
As lockdown eases, so my diary starts to fill up. Friends and family I haven’t met up with for ages have begun to plan evenings out, and theatres and music venues are taking bookings again.
Of course, Pocket has filled some of the gap over the past months, with its wealth of books, podcasts, magazines and radio stations. But there really is no substitute for meeting up with people in person, or to attending live performances.
If you read last week’s blog, you will know that I’d already done some groundwork by setting up Locations on my Pocket and wandering round my neighbourhood, saving some local landmarks and frequently visited places into the app. And I’d been very well-behaved and resisted temptation when I had stood outside the pub and asked Pocket to ‘save location as The Duke’. So, this really was going to be my first draught pint of the year.
I’d also asked Pocket to check the weather forecast for my part of London this evening, which is another feature I’ve only just discovered. So, I knew that I didn’t need my raincoat but that an extra layer or two and a woolly hat wouldn’t go amiss, since we would be sitting outside for a couple of hours.
A few weeks ago, in the depths of lockdown, I vowed to take Pocket to the pub. And with the latest relaxation of restrictions, I now have my chance.
RealSam has kindly sent me a SIM, which comes as part of the package for all Pocket customers giving access to the O2 mobile network. Once I’d acknowledged receipt and RealSam had activated it, I was free to roam.
Setting up Locations on my Pocket was nice and easy, and as usual I found clear step-by-step instructions in my RealSam Pocket Handbook. I simply pressed the home key and said ‘Start Locations’ and after agreeing to the one-off disclaimer, I was in.
Last week I introduced myself and you to Google Home and the RealSam Information Hub. Rather than the name of some groovy new jazz-funk fusion band, this is the latest way to access all the great, specialist content of In-Your-Pocket but via a Google Home smart speaker, rather than through a smart phone device.
This has the advantage of enabling users to access even more online content through Google’s everyday search function, while still allowing BVI users easy access to the services we most want and need via RealSam’s bespoke information hub. And it’s all voice controlled!
Put simply, with my new device I can ask for and quickly access even more great entertainment and info.
In this week’s blog, Red shares his experience of getting to grips with the new RealSAM smart speaker service. As a self confessed ”technophobe”, he’s put our sign up processes to the test!
A few months ago, if you’d told me that I would be happily using cutting edge technology, and writing articles about it, I would have laughed and said, ‘in my dreams!’! But such is the transformation that the arrival of Pocket has made to my life. Its simple to use voice commands have revolutionised the way I enjoy my audiobooks, podcasts and radio stations and reintroduced me to the joy of newspapers and magazines. But more importantly it has made me feel more included in our increasingly digital world. The change has even been noticed by my colleagues at RNIB Connect Radio, where in meetings I feel, and act, far less like the analogue dinosaur I used to be.
So, when RealSam asked me whether I would like to test drive a new Google Home device for them I leapt at the chance.
Earlier this week I was chatting with a friend who has recently lost the ability to read following a series of strokes brought on by Covid. Up until then, he had been looking forward to retirement this year and spending more time with his three young grandchildren.
Like me he is passionate about books and, being a former newspaper man, he was also planning to introduce them to the world of current affairs through some junior news publications.
However, he was depressed that all these plans had been scuppered by his inability to read print anymore. Of course, he was delighted at the prospect of finally being able to meet up with his grandchildren again, but as he said, ‘how am I going to keep them entertained?’
As regular visitors to this blog will know, I’m a bookworm. And as the presenter of Read On, I am lucky enough to have a job that feeds my habit.
I’ve never counted how many titles I get through in a year, but it’s a rare week that I don’t read at least three audiobooks, and if there’s a literary award shortlist to work through, or in the days of book festivals and long journeys, I might get through half-a-dozen audiobooks in as many days.
I’ve written about how to access the tens of thousands of audiobooks on offer in an earlier blog, so today I’d like to share some tips on finessing the way you search and some of the playback options.
It was the First World War poet Edward Thomas who coined the phrase ‘first known when lost’. He was expressing how surprised and bereft he felt on noticing that a small and previously unremarkable copse of trees he’d walked past many times, had been cleared.
The poem perfectly catches our tendency to take things for granted and our remorse at only appreciating their value once they have gone.
And that’s exactly how I felt yesterday morning as I emptied drawers, checked down the back of the sofa, and generally turned the house upside down in search of my Pocket. But it was nowhere to be found!
Having been the proud and happy owner of my Pocket for almost three months now, I should, if I were conforming to middle-aged male stereotype, be busily investigating all the additional accessories on offer to ‘enhance my user experience’.
Over the 33 years since my diagnosis of Retinitis Pigmentosa I have become well-acquainted with the restrictions that progressive sight loss imposes upon an individual. In some ways this has prepared me for the restrictions on personal freedom that successive lockdowns have brought; or at least made the situation feel less alien.
That said after nearly a year spent within a one-mile radius of my home in London I am craving a bit of variety. In fact, I have never felt so drawn to the wild open spaces of The Scottish Highlands or Sardinia, and miss the ability to climb, swim and explore them by tandem almost more than I miss my sight (which is now little more than a distant memory).
That said, if my three decades of shrinking boundaries have taught me anything, it is to find alternative ways of doing things I used to take for granted. For instance, when my family and I went to Egypt in 2007 and I knew that I would not be able to appreciate the beauty of its antiquities I explored them instead through the accounts of others, and so discovered the joy of great travel writing.
And so, I have been combating the lockdown travel ban blues by exploring The World through my Pocket, and from my armchair.
This week, I had planned on writing about the joys of armchair tourism and some of the places I have visited through the various libraries that my RealSam Pocket gives me access to.
However, when I asked Pocket to ‘find my recent books’, I discovered that even here I was now subject to a travel ban as the device took me straight to the Librivox library (from whence I had borrowed my last book) but then allowed me to go no further.
I tried saying ‘go back’, and ‘cancel’, and even that solution so beloved by everyone who works in Technical Support, turning the device off and on again, but all to no avail: I was stuck.
This came as quite a surprise. I have now had my Pocket device for two months and this is the first time I have had a technical issue; if only I could say the same for my iPhone or those masters of mediocracy, Virgin Media!
And so, it was with a slight feeling of dread at the prospect of a frustrating morning being stuck on hold that I found and called the ‘In Your Pocket’ helpline number (which, should you need it for future reference, is 0333 772 7708).
"Like so many people with a degenerative eye condition, I spent many years, and many hundreds of pounds, on increasingly elaborate reading aids until, about a decade ago, I had to admit defeat and give up reading visually.
Before I received my RealSam Pocket device just before Christmas, I hadn’t picked up a newspaper or magazine in about ten years and was relying entirely on the radio, TV or the nuggets picked out by friends and family from what they were reading, for my news''. (Red Szell).
With unlimited access to today's newspapers and magazines, find out how Pocket could help you as a #ReadingAid. http://www.inyourpocket.net/reading-aids-for-blind-people/
”It’s Saturday as I write this; the week’s work is done and under the terms of my New Year’s resolution (which so far is holding strong) I am resisting the temptation to allow my work to spill over into the weekends. As so many people have discovered recently, working from home blurs the boundaries and, whether out of a desire to be busy and have a distraction from the news headlines, or because it is so easy to check my work emails when my RNIB laptop is so close to hand, I look back on 2020 as the year that my work/life balance was most definitely out of kilter.
Under normal circumstances I’d have lots of fun things to keep me busy on a Saturday, starting with a couple of laps of Highgate Men’s Pond and a slow stroll back over Hampstead Heath with a few of the other swimmers, but under lockdown there’s no hope of that. However rather than sulk about it, this morning I decided to ask Pocket to find me articles about wild swimming, and spent the next hour happily immersed in newspaper and magazine articles extolling the benefits of a life-affirming dip and suggesting a wish-list of locations to visit".
This week I celebrated having had Pocket in my life for a month. And it really was a celebration (well as much as we can in these restricted times!)
I can genuinely say that, alongside my white cane, I have never had an aid to living with sight loss that has been so immediately liberating and simple to master.
With just a small lexicon of voice commands I can now access thousands of books and hundreds of radio stations and podcasts without having to resort to using a screen reader on my laptop, or fiddly touch screen commands on my smartphone. After a long day at work it’s a relief to put those work tools to one side and pick up what I have come to regard as my entertainment centre!
For a number of years now I have been hearing from other blind and visually impaired (BVI) people about the benefits of ‘Be My Eyes’.
If you haven’t yet come across it, ‘Be My Eyes is a free app that connects BVI people with sighted volunteers who can provide visual assistance with everyday tasks via a live video call.
With nearly 4.5 million sighted volunteers lending their eyes to about 300,000 BVI people in more than 150 countries (and 180+ languages) it’s a truly international community that is helping people with sight loss lead more independent lives. And it operates 24 hours-a-day, every day.
One of the many advantages of RNIB In Your Pocket however is that it provides free access to the more-than 200 magazines and newspapers offered in accessible format by Newsagent; for which the annual subscription is usually £39.
The titles on offer include all the national broadsheets and red-tops, The Times, Guardian, Mail, Sun etc), and many popular magazine titles (including The Economist, The Oldie, Which, and a wide range of BBC publications).
There is also a fair sprinkling of local newspapers and special interest mags (including Beer!)
The search and selection process is similar to that for books or podcasts. So a simple search might be: ‘Read me The Times newspaper’.
Like a lot of people who received a new toy for Christmas, I’ve spent many happy hours getting to know my In Your Pocket (Pocket) device.
And as you might have guessed from last week’s blog, much of that time has been spent exploring the various libraries Pocket offers access to. So long as I know the author and / or title of the book I’m searching for, I’ve continued to find Pocket the quickest and easiest way to listen to Audiobooks.
Following on from last week’s blog, I was keen to explore Pocket’s podcast catalogue and try to track down my favourite show after having missed it live on Radio 4.
As with searching for books and radio stations searching for podcasts is very straightforward. The keywords to remember to use are the same, (‘’Find’, ‘Listen to’, ‘Play’ etc) and you just need to substitute ‘Podcast’ into your instruction after you press the home key.
If you just want to browse what’s available, press the home key and say ‘’Listen to podcasts’ or ‘Find me a podcast’ and Pocket will bring up the whole catalogue for you to go through, five at a time – and there are a lot of them!
We’re delighted to welcome renowned writer and broadcaster Red Szell to the In Your Pocket team. Red hosts Read On, the audiobook show on RNIB Connect Radio, and is a regular contributor on BBC Radio 4.
Each week Red will be sharing his experiences as a Blind user of In Your Pocket, explaining how to access useful features and his top tips on recommended audio content.