November 6th, 2024 BT Speak® System Upgrade Posted By: BT Development Team

Introduction

Blazie Technologies is excited to be releasing a new update for the BT Speak, which is free for all BT Speak owners. It includes many new features and improvements, such as putting the Getting Started audio tutorial into smaller sections, determining the level of punctuation you’ll hear when reading in a file, improved navigation when reading by characters, support for streaming YouTube videos in traditional mode and accessing files on Google Drive, just to name a few. Keep reading to learn about what’s been added.

The Help System’s 'Getting Started' Renamed to Guides and Tutorials

The help system, which you can access by typing O-chord followed by the letter H, used to have a section titled Getting Started. We have expanded this section and have renamed it to Guides and Tutorials. It includes the Getting Started guide, an updated recording of the Getting Started audio tutorial and a document explaining what’s new in this update. The Guides and Tutorials section also includes a complete copy of the first edition of our new users’ manual.

To access these documents, type O-chord for the Options menu, H for the list of help files, G for Guides and Tutorials followed by dot 8.

Updated Getting Started Audio Tutorial

The Getting Started audio tutorial has been updated. We have also made it much easier to move through the tutorial as we have divided it up into sections, rather than only providing one long audio recording.

First, to access the Getting Started audio tutorial, press O-chord for the Options menu.

Next, press H for the list of help files.

Press G for Guides and Tutorials, followed by dot 8.

Press the letter T as a shortcut to open the Getting Started audio tutorial.

The first option in this menu is “the Whole Tutorial”, with T being the shortcut.

The next set of options in the list are the various sections of the manual, such as Introduction, What Is The BT Speak, etc. You are free to choose any of these sections individually, based on your need and interest.

If you choose to listen to “the Whole Tutorial”, you are now able to skip forward or backward by sections.

To skip ahead to the next section of the tutorial, Press dots 1-2-5-6-8-chord.

To move back to the previous section, press dots 1-2-5-6-7-chord.

As an example, suppose you are listening to the “Introduction” section of the whole tutorial. At that point, pressing dots 1-2-5-6-8-chord would skip ahead to the next section, which is “What is the BT Speak?”

You can pause or resume the tutorial by pressing dots 1-2-5-6-chord.

You can restart the current section of the tutorial by pressing dots 1-2-5-6-7-8-chord.

Speech Settings is Now Called Speech Controls

When pressing S-chord, the BT Speak now announces “Speech Controls” instead of “Speech Settings.” This change was made because we already have a Speech Settings submenu, which you can get to by pressing O-chord followed by S for Settings.

A New Setting to Change Punctuation Level

After pressing S-chord to enter Speech Controls, you can now type the letter P to adjust how much punctuation is spoken while reading your files. Typing the letter P cycles between four levels: none, some, most or all punctuation. This setting is for traditional mode, since the Orca screen reader in desktop mode contains its own method for adjusting punctuation.

Improvements When Reading Character by Character

When navigating character by character in a file, BT Speak now speaks all punctuation and symbols which are present. This improvement applies to reading files in traditional mode.

New Editor Menu

A new Editor menu has been added, which provides a list of commands for performing tasks in the editor. From any file, press E-chord to open the Editor menu. It contains the following commands, along with their respective shortcut keys.

Save Current File Without Closing it: S
Close Current File, Saves Changes: C
Quit Current File, Without Saving Changes: Q
Quick Text Note: T
Quick Braille Note: B
Run Host Command: R

Notes: the Save, Close and Quit options have been moved from the file browser to the new Editor menu.

Please see the section Running a Host Command From the Editor in this document for more information about this particular feature.

Quick Notes Feature

Our new Quick Notes feature allows you to create either a new text note or a Braille note. The notes are stored within the BTSpeak/QuickNotes subdirectory of the home directory.

After pressing E-chord to open the Editor menu, you can either type the letter T to create a text quick note or the letter B to create a Braille quick note. You'll be prompted for the name of the quick note, and, as part of that prompt, you'll be told what the default name will be if you just press Enter. Also, when in this prompt, you can type z-Chord to cancel the quick note.

The default name is the word "note" followed by a number. The number is one greater than the highest one already in use. For example, if you already have files with the names note1, note2, and note3, the default name of the newest quick note will be note4.

Therefore, if you press Enter at the name prompt, you'll always get a new note file. The first line of that file will tell you at which time and date the note was started.

If you explicitly specify the name then you can add to an existing note. In this case, the time and date line will be added at the end of that file, and the cursor will be placed just after it, i.e. at the bottom.

YouTube Streaming Application

You can now use your BT Speak to stream YouTube videos in traditional mode. You'll find the new YouTube app in the Applications menu O-chord for Options, A for Applications, M for Media and Y for the YouTube Stream app. This app allows you to access and stream YouTube videos from the Traditional side of BT Speak Pro. To use it, you'll need to log in to your Google account once via the desktop web browser, just as you do with other Google features on BT Speak. Note: You must have a BT Speak Pro device to use this application.

The YouTube Stream main menu currently offers the following options, along with their respective shortcut keys:

Search YouTube Videos: (shortcut: S)

This option allows you to search video titles across YouTube's public library by entering a keyword. It will display the top 50 matching titles. Selecting a title gives you several options: play the video through the media player, view video details, or see more videos from the same YouTube channel.

View Subscribed Channels (shortcut: V)

This option lists your subscribed YouTube channels, making it easy to access your favorite content. Selecting a channel will display its 50 most recent published videos. You can then choose to play a video or view its details, just like in the search option.

The YouTube Stream menu also provides the following media controls:

Pause/Resume Video Playback: P
Volume Down: D
Volume Up: U

Google Drive Application

Our new Google Drive app allows you to upload files from your BT Speak to Google Drive and manage files stored on your Google Drive. Please note that this feature requires a BT Speak Pro.

As with the other Google features, you will need to authenticate (sign in) the first time you use the Google Drive application.

To save files or directories to Drive, use the 'Save to Google Drive' option in the File Manager (shortcut: S). To view and manage your Google Drive contents, open Options, Applications and then Personal and select the Google Drive application (shortcut: G).

More Context Sensitive Help

It is now possible to type H-chord from even more applications to receive context-sensitive help. Specifically, you can now press H-chord from the YouTube Stream app, Google Drive, PhoneBook, Calendar, Thunderbird, Chromium and Firefox.

Changes to the Stopwatch App

Commands in the stopwatch app have changed. Here is a list of the commands, along with their new keystrokes:

Start the stopwatch: S
Pause or resume the stopwatch: space or P
Check elapsed time: C or enter
Repeat the last reading: backspace or L
Reset: R
Switch to the countdown timer: T

Quit: Q or Z-chord

Improvements to the Agenda Calendar and PhoneBook Applications

The calendar now displays dates based on your locale. If you're in North America, you won't notice any changes. If you're outside of North America, dates will be presented in DDMMYYYY format. This also applies to date entries (searching by date and adding new entries), so the calendar will expect the day to be entered before the month in non-North American locales. Please refer to the calendar help file for examples.
When using the export feature in the Calendar and Phonebook options menu, the exported files will be saved to 'CalendarBackups' or 'PhonebookBackups' subdirectories of the BTSpeak directory.

Computer Braille Has Now Been Localized

Computer Braille has been localized, based on the BT Speak’s locale setting. This will be noticed with locales where the language is not English or where the territory is not a North American country. The locale can be changed by going to Options, Operating System, System Administration, Customize This Device.

As a result of this change, adding both dots 7 and 8 to a character in order to type its control variant now only works for letters. Also, adding dot 8 to a character in order to type its meta variant now only applies to lowercase letters.

Shutting Down Desktop Mode

When in traditional mode, you can now press dots 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-chord to stop desktop mode from running. When issuing this command, you will be asked if you really want to stop desktop mode, and you can press Y or N at that point, followed by dot 8. This can be helpful if you were previously working in desktop mode and would like to go back to traditional mode and increase your battery usage without being forced to restart your device.

Updates to the AI Chat App

The AI Chat utility has been updated to support the latest Open AI models and has vastly improved key and error handling. If you previously ran in to an issue setting up your key, please try running the new version and see if getting up and running is easier. These new changes attempt to remedy situations where some customers were stuck with an invalid key file.

The help files for ai-chat and OpenAI-key have been expanded and include several additional commands for advanced users.

An audio demo of AI Chat and how to use it is available at https://timnoonan.com.au/ai-chat

The ai-ask utility (the little brother of ai-chat) has also been updated. Ai-ask allows you to ask a single question of Chat GPT and have its output written to the current file or a new file in the BT Speak editor. It makes use of the expanded run host command feature of the editor. You can also use ai-ask in the shell. ai-ask usage is fully documented in the ai-ask help file. As with AI Chat, you need a funded Open AI key installed to use ai-ask.

Running a Host Command From the Editor

The editor has a feature that lets you run commands directly while you're working. You can press Control-T to open a command prompt where you type the command you want to run. The command’s result will be saved in a new file (called a “buffer”) for you to view.

With the new update, there’s another way to run a command without being prompted. If you start a line with either the < or > sign, the editor will run the rest of the line as a command:

Starting the line with < will run the command and insert its result right below the line.
Starting the line with > will run the command and save the result in a new buffer, just like with Control-T.

This feature lets you run commands without leaving the editor. For example, to open the calculator, you would just type calculator.

If you place the following line in your file:

<calculator 3+6

The editor will run the command (in this case, it’s calculating “3+6”) and then put the result (which is 9) directly into your file, right below that line.

Another example is with the AI-Ask utility, where you could ask a question, such as:

<ai-ask What is a prime number?

The editor will run the AI-Ask tool and put the answer right in your file. This is handy if you want quick answers while working, and extended functionality is planned for the future!

If you’d rather not type commands directly into your file, you can also run them by opening the Editor menu and selecting “Run Host Command.”

Miscellaneous Updates

BT Speak now reports a line as being blank if that line only contains spaces. Previously, lines which only contained spaces were silent.
Changes to the current file are now automatically saved when the Options menu is opened. Changes to a file are also saved when invoking the interactive shell from the editor by typing all nine keys at the same time.
In the editor, an extra blank line is no longer automatically added at the end of a document.
If you were editing the same file multiple times, the editor used to contain multiple copies of that file. This has now been fixed.
The option for Power Down has been renamed to Shut Down (O-chord for Options, O for Operating System, S for System Administration and now S for Shut Down.)
When pressing Z-chord to exit a menu, responsiveness has been improved.

When creating an archive of the help files, the Getting Started guide will be included in the zip archive. (O-chord for Options, O for Operating System, T for Tools, H for Make Help Archive)
If line numbers are enabled (dots 3-4-5-6-chord), moving through text line by line in the editor should now behave as expected.
Some users reported a problem where quickly pressing the power button caused the BT Speak to shut down instead of going into sleep mode. We believe we have corrected this problem.

Conclusions

As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have questions or feedback. You can email us at support@blazie.net. You can also call us at (772) 214-1616.

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