AGIGA CEO Xiaoran Wang’s talk at National Federation of Blind 2026 National Convention in Austin

Hello everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Xiaoran, CEO and co-founder of AGIGA. 

It is an absolute honor to stand before you at the NFB National Convention. Today, I want to talk about AI, wearable technology, and community-driven innovation. Mike May will share his journey with Echovision. After that, we will show demos, and then we will have a Q&A session.

Part 1: Introduction: The Twin Revolutions

To truly understand why EchoVision exists today, we first have to look at a massive, silent shift that has transformed the world of artificial intelligence over the last three years. For decades, computers were simply rule-following machines. They only did exactly what engineers explicitly programmed them to do. But everything changed with the invention of the Transformer architecture.

Think of the Transformer as a completely new kind of engine. Before it existed, AI looked at information like a person trying to read a book looking through a straw—one word at a time, frequently losing the broader meaning of the sentence. The Transformer changed the rules by allowing the AI to look at the entire page all at once. It developed a capability we call "Attention"—the capability to understand context, nuance, and the complex relationships between different pieces of data. This was the "Big Bang" moment for AI. We started not only trying to teach computers how to read, but we started teaching them how to write, how to code and how to work.

But while the Transformer completely changed how AI speaks, it also reinvented how AI sees. In the past three years, Computer Vision has undergone a radical transformation.

In the old days, a traditional camera system could look at a scene and pick out a list of individual objects. It would tell you it saw a "person" and a "knife." It was just a cold list. Today, using Vision Transformers, the AI doesn’t just label objects—it understands Scene Intelligence. It sees the relationship between those objects. It looks at that same scene and tells you it sees a "chef skillfully dicing onions in a busy kitchen." Three years ago, an AI camera saw a "red light." Today, it sees a "red light at a busy intersection with a car approaching too fast." It doesn't just see pixels anymore; it understands the human situation.

Simultaneously, wearable hardware has hit an incredible tipping point. We have finally reached an era where smart glasses are almost indistinguishable from regular eyewear. They are stylish, lightweight, and comfortable, allowing you to capture information or listen to audio without looking like you are wearing a bulky computer on your face.

EchoVision exists at the exact intersection of these two revolutions. We took that state of art AI, customized it, and integrated it directly into a lightweight wearable frame. But here is the critical distinction: EchoVision is the first and only smart glasses built from the ground up specifically for the blind and low-vision community. We didn’t just take a pair of mainstream lifestyle glasses and slap an app on top of them. We co-designed this entire architecture alongside you to ensure that this massive wave of AI power is channeled directly into real-world independence. It isn't just another gadget; it is a tool built by your community, for your community.

Part 2: Claiming a Seat at the Table

Building a tool for a community, however, requires a deeper philosophical commitment. We often hear the corporate phrase "having a seat at the table." But what does that actually mean?

I had to learn the answer the hard way. I grew up in East Asia and moved to the United States for school and later for work. As an immigrant and a woman engineer, which is definitely a minority, entering the fast-paced world of US corporate, I experienced a massive culture shock. I quickly realized that the corporate world does not automatically hand you a microphone. If you want your voice heard, you have to speak up for yourself. If you want a seat at the table, you have to pull up your own chair—because if you don’t do it, no one is going to do it for you. I learned that when doors close and executive decisions are made about who to support or who to promote, you need someone in that room who truly understands your journey, who looks like you, and who can advocate for your perspective.

As I look at the landscape of assistive technology today, I see the exact same pattern. Wearables are becoming an essential, life-changing part of daily life for the blind and low-vision community. But in order for these tools to actually serve the blind and low vision community, the blind and low-vision innovators must claim our seat at the design table. We need a product that represents the blind and low vision community, voices for the blind and low vision community, and thinks with the blind and low vision community. Because if the blind and low vision community don’t do it, no one else will.

Earlier this year, AGIGA was honored to be at CES, where EchoVision was awarded for Innovation for All. While I was there at the accessibility roundtable alongside brilliant advocates. The room was filled with intense discussions about what a tech giant like Meta should do for the blind and low vision community with their Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Now, let me be entirely clear: I respect Meta immensely. I have close friends and former colleagues who work there. But we have to be clear-minded and fiercely realistic. Meta is a tech titan. Their entire business model is built around serving hundreds of millions of mainstream users. To a company of that scale, the blind and low-vision community represents less than 3% of the population, which is a fraction of a fraction. Financially and logically, you cannot expect a mainstream giant to completely pivot their core product architecture or move the needle for less than 3% of the market.

So, how do we change that?

We don't do it by waiting, and we don't do it by begging tech monopolies to notice us. We change it by taking matters into our own hands. We change it by creating our own product to show them exactly what true accessibility looks like. We built EchoVision to set the standard, giving our community the leverage to say: "This is what we need. And if you won't build it, we have our own product to turn to."

More importantly, we change the narrative by proving that accessibility is not a charity case—it is a thriving, viable business. When we build a superior product and capture the loyalty of this market, we show the tech giants that serving the blind community is an excellent business to invest in. We permanently claim our seat at the table.

Part 3: Powered by the Community

But claiming a seat at the table means absolutely nothing if we build in isolation. True representation isn't just about a founder leading a company; it is about active, daily collaboration with the community. And that is exactly how EchoVision was born.

We didn't wait until we had a polished, finished product to ask for your opinion. We involved this community before our concepts were even finalized into a prototype. This is actually my third year attending the NFB national convention. I first started coming here before our product was even out in the world, listening to what worked and what didn't. Since then, hundreds of pioneers have joined our mission to help shape EchoVision.

To our pioneers who are in this room today, and to everyone who has shared their time and insights with us: I want to say a profound and deeply sincere thank you.

Behind EchoVision are hundreds of lines of emails, countless hours of feedback, and raw, honest voices telling us exactly what you require. We don’t just listen to that feedback—we build our product around it, even when it goes against conventional tech industry norms.

Let me give you a concrete example of this collaboration in action. When we first started designing our smart glasses, we included a standard privacy LED light on the frame to indicate to the public when the camera was active. It seemed like a standard tech industry requirement. But during one of our Pioneer office hours, a user asked a simple, powerful question: "Can you remove this? It makes me feel incredibly awkward in public." They explained that the glowing LED light draws unwanted public attention. It made us realize: for a blind person to wear a device with a bright, active LED is the social equivalent of a sighted person standing inches away and staring directly into someone’s face. That was our 'lightbulb' moment. We realized that standard, mainstream design guidelines were inadvertently creating a social barrier for our users. So, against immense industry pressure, we changed it. We built an option that gives blind users total control over whether that LED is on or off while the AI is capturing data. Because our AI doesn't save your data anyway, your social comfort and freedom shouldn't be restricted by a flashing light.

We see this same need for independence in how we handle information. Mainstream tech companies want to censor, filter, and decide for you what you are allowed to see or know. But we receive constant requests from our community asking for raw, unfiltered data—whether you are scanning a highly confidential legal document, reading a prescription bottle, or navigating a complex road sign.

We fully understand that AI makes mistakes and is not perfect. But our philosophy is fundamentally different from big tech. We believe in your complete autonomy. We want to give you an unfiltered tool alongside your other resources, allowing you to combine our technology with your own lifelong judgment, orientation, and experience to decide what is true, instead of a room of sighted corporate executives deciding what you are allowed to hear.

Conclusion: Building Our Future Together

Every single time we host an office hour, read an email, or gather for a meetup like we are doing today in Austin, I am reminded of how deeply rewarding it is to build alongside you.

It is absolutely critical for the blind and low-vision community to have our own technology, to manufacture our own products, and to permanently claim our seat at the table.

You are not just our customers; you are our co-designers, and our foundational partners. Thank you for helping us build EchoVision, and thank you for helping us build a future where technology truly serves us, represents us, and respects our independence.

Thank you very much.