Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Hello from Humanware, and new maps coming on the VR Trek soon! (self.Blind)
submitted by VictorHWPM
Hello everyone!
My name is Mathieu (or Matthew if you prefer), and I'm the new Product Manager for the Victor Reader product line here at Humanware. :)
I'm an avid Reddit user, having been on the platform for, well, a little over 10 years now (under a different username, of course).
I've worked at Humanware for about a year and a half, with our tech support team at first, and now with the Product Management team for the last few weeks.
Part of my job is to be engaged with the community, our customers and users, and to have my ear to the ground when it comes to their needs. Which is why I'm happy to be joining this community!
As my first post, I wanted to introduce myself, but also to let you all know that we have new and updated maps coming on the Victor Reader Trek pretty soon! They're coming on May 3rd. We'll also be doing a Webinar on May 2nd and I invite whoever is interested in the Trek in joining me and my colleague Peter on Zoom so we can talk about it.
All the information on the new updates, new countries, and the Webinar, can be found here: https://www.humanware.ca/web/en/newsletter/220420221530-Trek-Maps-POIs.htm
So yeah, here we go, the ice is broken, and I'm looking forward to being a part of this community.
Thank you!
Mathieu from Humanware
My name is Mathieu (or Matthew if you prefer), and I'm the new Product Manager for the Victor Reader product line here at Humanware. :)
I'm an avid Reddit user, having been on the platform for, well, a little over 10 years now (under a different username, of course).
I've worked at Humanware for about a year and a half, with our tech support team at first, and now with the Product Management team for the last few weeks.
Part of my job is to be engaged with the community, our customers and users, and to have my ear to the ground when it comes to their needs. Which is why I'm happy to be joining this community!
As my first post, I wanted to introduce myself, but also to let you all know that we have new and updated maps coming on the Victor Reader Trek pretty soon! They're coming on May 3rd. We'll also be doing a Webinar on May 2nd and I invite whoever is interested in the Trek in joining me and my colleague Peter on Zoom so we can talk about it.
All the information on the new updates, new countries, and the Webinar, can be found here: https://www.humanware.ca/web/en/newsletter/220420221530-Trek-Maps-POIs.htm
So yeah, here we go, the ice is broken, and I'm looking forward to being a part of this community.
Thank you!
Mathieu from Humanware
CosmicBunny97 2 points 1y ago
I'm interested in getting the Victor Reader Trek. Will the webinar be recorded and put anywhere online? I'm in Australia and may miss it due to timezones.
VictorHWPM [OP] 3 points 1y ago
Yes, absolutely. It'll be posted on our Youtube channel and be advertised on our Facebook page a few days after the recording. :)
Wolfocorn20 2 points 1y ago
I used to have one of those battery powerd things with an sd card reader on the top. The thing was pritty shonky but man did i love it. unfortunatlly the headphonejack broak and by the time i could get a new one they kinda stoped producing audiobooks to put on it here. To bad caz i loved that thing so much.
Didn't know they had them with gps included. would have liked that in the day's befor my smartphone.
Didn't know they had them with gps included. would have liked that in the day's befor my smartphone.
Wooden_Suit5580 2 points 1y ago
Welcome to the community! I have a victor Trek and I love it! it is very convenient for me to have a good portion of my entertainment and one convenient package. I also enjoyed when I travel with my victory reader and have it pair to a Bluetooth speaker to enjoy said content.
I do have an issue with my GPS not locating a signal. That has been a pretty consistent issue with me. I don’t rely on the GPS that heavily, but it would be nice to use it once in a while. Hopefully the new update he mentioned will address my issues.
I do have one question who is Victor? Why was this device named after them?
Again welcome to the community and thank you
I do have an issue with my GPS not locating a signal. That has been a pretty consistent issue with me. I don’t rely on the GPS that heavily, but it would be nice to use it once in a while. Hopefully the new update he mentioned will address my issues.
I do have one question who is Victor? Why was this device named after them?
Again welcome to the community and thank you
VictorHWPM [OP] 5 points 1y ago
For your GPS issue, you're in luck, as I used to be in tech support ;) I'd recommend removing your battery for about a minute (a solid minute, not less), to fully reset the GPS chip, and then putting it back in, then start the Trek and leave it on a windowsill or somewhere with clear view of the sky. This does the trick most of the time. If that doesn't work, you can also call our tech support line- lovely folks who will be happy to help you.
As for your last question, the Victor comes from Victor Hugo, writer of little indie stuff like Les Miserables! ;-) I'm guessing some of my predecessors were fan!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo
As for your last question, the Victor comes from Victor Hugo, writer of little indie stuff like Les Miserables! ;-) I'm guessing some of my predecessors were fan!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo
retrolental_morose 2 points 1y ago
I never got the appeal of combining a book reader with a GPS tool. I mean of all the things to put together, it seems an odd pairing. I presume you've had reasonable sales and I'm just an outlying blind person.
My first ever book reading gadget was the Road Runner, must have been about 25 years ago now. I then moved on to the Book Courier. I did once have a CD-based DAISY device, A Victor something with no text-to-speech support, and even then I remembering thinking it terribly quaint because it was mains-powered whereas all my earlier products had been battery.
Sadly, shortly after that, every reading machine on the market seemed to use Human-sampled voices (Nuance, Acapela etc). I grew up with DECtalk, Doubletalk, Eloquence and Orpheus. I have still even today failed to make the switch and if I am reading a lengthy passage of text, won't do so on my iPhone because I can't use an older voice as easily.
My first ever book reading gadget was the Road Runner, must have been about 25 years ago now. I then moved on to the Book Courier. I did once have a CD-based DAISY device, A Victor something with no text-to-speech support, and even then I remembering thinking it terribly quaint because it was mains-powered whereas all my earlier products had been battery.
Sadly, shortly after that, every reading machine on the market seemed to use Human-sampled voices (Nuance, Acapela etc). I grew up with DECtalk, Doubletalk, Eloquence and Orpheus. I have still even today failed to make the switch and if I am reading a lengthy passage of text, won't do so on my iPhone because I can't use an older voice as easily.
VictorHWPM [OP] 3 points 1y ago
As they say, to each their own! Lots of our customers like the convenience of having the GPS and the book reader all in one convenient, easy to carry around package. :) But some people do buy the Trek only for its GPS and don't really use its other features.
The device you're talking about is probably one of our old Victor Stratus players, from before my time. The newer ones do have TTS and batteries (and have had them for several years now). Some even have wifi so you can do both CDs and over-the-air books!
The device you're talking about is probably one of our old Victor Stratus players, from before my time. The newer ones do have TTS and batteries (and have had them for several years now). Some even have wifi so you can do both CDs and over-the-air books!
SLJ7 1 points 1y ago
Fellow robot voice user here. My bookport classic says hi from the coffee table. Have you ever tried compact Samantha? It is the closest I've been able to get on iOS. It is 100% intelligible at full-speed and even though it was generated from a real person, it's more of a synthetic representation than anything, so it has none of the roughness you get from concatinated voices. I'd still prefer Eloquence, but I find myself reading EBooks at high speed on my phone now.
Btw, I agree that combining a book player and GPS is a bit strange; it's as though someone just said "Hey, we make this thing and that thing, why not smash them together and see what happens?" If you can't buy the original items anymore, it also seems like a bit of a cash grab. What you had was probably the Victor Reader Classic (or classic plus, if it had a full keypad instead of just arrow keys.) Canada switched to books on Daisy CD in the very early 2000's, so I had to get one of these to keep up.
Btw, I agree that combining a book player and GPS is a bit strange; it's as though someone just said "Hey, we make this thing and that thing, why not smash them together and see what happens?" If you can't buy the original items anymore, it also seems like a bit of a cash grab. What you had was probably the Victor Reader Classic (or classic plus, if it had a full keypad instead of just arrow keys.) Canada switched to books on Daisy CD in the very early 2000's, so I had to get one of these to keep up.
retrolental_morose 1 points 1y ago
I've kinda gone to worryingly sad lengths to maintain eloquence. Like, I have a software chain that takes Kindle books, turns them into eloquenced mp3 and zips them into the iCloud folder on voicedream. I'm down to £1.20 per month for running a VPS now - just under $1.50 USD - and I use it for that, among other things.
SLJ7 1 points 1y ago
That's really cool actually. Do you feel like sharing that? I have about one quarter of that software chain at my end. Did you figure out how to run both eloquence and iCloud on Linux?
retrolental_morose 1 points 1y ago
Hi,
iCloud goes through my synology, they did all the heavy lifting.
I extract everything to text using pandoc, then pass it to ... what's it called, Voxin? Then lame to make mp3, an ID3 tag library to set those up and zip. Nothing terribly complicated.
iCloud goes through my synology, they did all the heavy lifting.
I extract everything to text using pandoc, then pass it to ... what's it called, Voxin? Then lame to make mp3, an ID3 tag library to set those up and zip. Nothing terribly complicated.
TechnicalPragmatist 1 points 1y ago
Hi and welcome. Interesting never interested in the victor reader stuff. Much more in to the braille displays and the braillenotes but haven’t honestly used a braille note taker in a good few years I much more prefer mainstream and using a braille displays.
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