[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOE BIRCH: I haven't seen any of these photos in ages.
SPEAKER 2: You'll be surprised.
Look at this.
JOE BIRCH: So I started playing guitar
when I was about 10 years old.
I remember getting my first guitar from a classified advert
website.
Four years later I picked up the bass.
I think music helped make me a lot more confident as a person.
I was in several bands throughout college
and university.
I spent quite a lot of time playing music.
I have this condition that runs in my family called
retinitis pigmentosa.
And that essentially leads to tunnel vision.
And my grandmother had it and my mom has it.
My family's condition really got me
started thinking about the things
that I might have missed out on if I didn't
have that music stuff in place.
And that started to get me to think about what
other people might miss out on.
And, for example, the confidence boost.
Like, that was a huge thing for me growing up.
Everyone should be able to experience that.
And I wanted to take my learnings and the things I'm
building and be able to give that to people.
So last year I built a guitar called Chord Assist.
And the aim with this guitar is to make
learning guitar more accessible for more people,
specifically, for blind, deaf, and mute people.
And the way that this guitar works
is that you essentially have a conversation with the guitar.
So you can say to the guitar, tell me
how to play the C chord.
And then it will take that information
and it will tell you how to play the chord using
either the Braille reader, the speaker, or the screen.
So in the guitar, there's a Raspberry Pi.
It's like a mini computer.
And what that is software which I've
written which contains all the logic
for the conversational aspect, which is powered
by the actions of Google SDK.
When you talk to the guitar and the actions from Google SDK
handles all the conversation, it will receive a response
from the dialogue flow API, and it will use that response
to output how to play the chord to the different components.
Tell me how to play the D chord.
So you have the Braille reader, which are
the pins which pop up and down.
It will also have an HDMI display, which
will display the chord diagrams which are fetched from Firebase
Storage, and it will also have a speaker, which will speak out
the chord pattern, which is translated
from the textual output from the [INAUDIBLE] Google SDK, using
the cloud text to speech API.
Tell me how to play the F chord.
CHORD ASSIST: [INAUDIBLE] Three, D fret three, G fret two.
JOE BIRCH: So when it comes to my career,
I'm definitely most passionate about helping others
and creating things which make our day to day tasks
more accessible for everyone.
There's so much we can do with the tools and technologies
that we have to create accessible products that
make the world a much more inclusive place.
I just want to share everything that I do with others
and inspire other people to do those same things.
[MUSIC PLAYING]