Recorded September 27, 2026. Bryn Rice demonstrates the physical device in conversation with Scotti Smith. Both participants remain visible alongside the shared device screen or slides.
This machine-assisted transcript has been checked for evident terminology errors; it is not a certified verbatim transcript. It includes the device's spoken output as well as the conversation.
All right. Hey there. Welcome. I am Bryn. I'm the creator of the Luma R1 and you're Scotti, right? Yes. All right. Nice to meet you, Scotti. Thanks so much for joining this call and for your interest in the Luma. I'm going to show you a couple of slides, just an overview of the device and then jump into hands on walking through some of the features, and hopefully you'll see that even though I created this, I have a background in classrooms and worked in assistive tech as a practitioner.
So this device really was created from the ground up to try to meet real needs that I've seen and bridge some gaps with some other products that I've seen students use. So I'm going to jump into this. But again, interrupt me anytime with questions.
So this again is the Luma R1. The idea is it's a focused device, the focus of a reader pen, but with the power of a tablet. So there's some more computing power that this device has some more capabilities. But then every tool works offline. There's going to be one thing I'll show you where it can have very optional internet connectivity. But it was important to me to make sure that assistive tech practitioners can get this device and not have to go through a lot of loopholes or hurdles to get connectivity for it to work. So and that's what I'm kind of saying with sometimes with a device, the support can be right.
But then to actually get it in students hands can be really heavy. I know I've seen scenarios even with something as common as different tablets that are available today. They have a lot of great built in features, but you're getting into different profiles. And restricting apps and all of the updates. So this device is meant to be where you could purchase and get it, unbox it and really have it in students hands right away. So then there's a focus path for reading and writing where we're going to capture some kind of text on a piece of paper. It can work with environmental print or screens, read and listen to that and then write and respond.
And a key to that, again, with the device being offline, is that we're not sharing work digitally. We're keeping the pencil in the workflow. So we're supporting the work. We are not removing the pencil. So with that, I want to jump in and show it to you. The actual device, let me get it right here, looks like this. So that's about the size of what we're talking about. I'm going to put it back on a stand. So you're about to see that I am sharing it through a computer. Student devices cannot do that. This is a special demo set up to be able to show the features.
But when students get their devices, it won't be able to plug in, file share or do anything like that.
So this is the home screen of the Luma. I'll tell you up front. So we have four tools, but actually, the math and the plan tools can be configured and removed if you don't want to have students to access those. So one of the features of this device is real granular control over what students can and cannot change themselves. Now, I want to draw your attention to this little banner right here. So where it says LumaRead2 Update Available, that is the only part that an internet connection is required. So it does have updates through the settings in the system. There may be new voice models that are available or software updates.
But so that will require an internet connection. But the device that you receive out of the box is fully functional. It's been classroom tested. So if you chose to never connect it to the internet, and just use what you get, you'll have a device that's ready to go fully featured. But some exciting things planned for the future. And so if you can get it connected, then then that would be great. And I can work with you with your IT department through some different configurations. If you're going that route to get it like on a on a district network happy to work with teams on that. So I'm going to go ahead and dismiss that little
banner, and then go first into kind of one of the main starting points, the read feature. So here we go. We've got a worksheet here. There's a manual and automatic mode.
For some of your students who may have some of the fine motor control to balance and capture it can show a countdown I'm going to go ahead and cancel that out for a second we can zoom and then we also have a flash to help improve the accuracy of the character recognition so I'm going to go ahead and start the capture you see it gives some on -screen feedback and there we go we're at the first kind of main screen where we have captured this image we can pinch and zoom in and out move along the screen we can also sometimes it generally this device will try to automatically orient but we can also rotate if needed and then there is a cropping feature so this device is set up to try to read non -standard layouts columns tables rows like any device it may not be able to do that perfectly.
it's going to depend on the format but students can learn to if they have something like that go ahead and crop and see just that area and listen and interact with that area and then we can always go back to the full page all right so from here looking at this we can it's
as simple as click the play button tap the play button informational text urban heat islands date name directions read the article use evidence from the text and table to end okay so we're listening we're highlighting could you hear that okay perfect all right so play button playback we can skip around segments um and listen that way I also want to bring your attention to that voice that you heard so I'm going to jump into the settings and go to our text to speech settings I started [unclear] hearing one of the advanced voices so this device currently has 10 different advanced voices that students can listen to I think they're respectable enough uh not not too bad if I turn that off and go back it's going to remember where we were answer the questions article cities often feel warmer than nearby rural areas scientists call this path okay and so you'll see that that's a pretty standard kind of generic text -to -speech voice that we might hear on a lot of devices but that voice the trade -off is that voice gave us the bi -directional highlighting so we see the active sentence and word by word I'll show that again pattern and urban heat island dark pavement rooftops and then with those advanced voices they may sound a little bit better but at this time they don't do the word by word highlighting so that would be a feature consideration with students do they need the word by word or not but those two different text -to -speech systems built into the device so then I'm going to zoom in just a little bit so I have this play button but I also have two other activation modes so on any word I can click and it's going to read that containing segment or generally at the sentence boundary communities can reduce heat by changing the surfaces around buildings okay and we heard just that sentence here's another one explain why pavement can stay warm after sunset okay so as you're working with students and we're teaching them some of those metacognition skills or how to go about their work maybe they don't need to listen to the whole thing at once maybe just certain sections and then we can also toggle to word planners maintenance playground and so for some of your students who may have some more advanced decoding skills they're reading a lot of it on their own they don't need this device to read every word but when they hit some of those multi -syllabic words that might be tricky they can try to read it themselves and then check themselves or just immediately get the support for just that word okay so that's an overview of the controls for the take a picture and see it
on kind of as a photo we can also up here at this little pencil jump to our write mode and see the same recognized text just without the image so some students some staff may prefer that let's just see the recognized text some may want to see it in the context of the picture and like you just saw, I can pretty effortlessly jump between those two, whichever one I want to look at at the time. So then we have a view mode here with the same kinds of playback controls. And then this is where we get to one of my favorite parts of this device. We have an input mode.
So unlike some other devices that you can maybe scan line by line and get the text to speech support, which is great, but then a lot of times students are in classes, they're working on standards and they have to respond, they have to spell, they have to write. So with this device, when I've worked with students, I like to tell them this is digital scratch paper, kind of like in math class where you're writing out, doing your problem, but you're not turning it into the teacher. They want to see maybe the final work. Same thing with this. It's digital scratch paper. So we can change stuff, whatever. We can always restore the original text.
So we have some other controls here where we can multi -select different things. Oh, that's not working well with my computer there. So we can select stuff and delete it. And again, we can always restore it. And so then as the student is working, you're going to see a prediction bar is going to pop up with predictions And then also we have full speech to text access through this microphone. So let's see if that'll work. This is a test of the speech to text system. Okay. And there we go. So now I've often heard people say like, wow, that's really cool. What do they do then? I wish they could share it through Google Classroom or whatever.
And that's again, the reminder that this is offline. We're keeping the pencil in the workflow. So the student's going to see this little small device on their desk, quietly get those spelling or speech to text helps, and then write it on their paper and turn the paper in. Okay. So that's kind of a lot. The camera, the picture screen, and then this writing screen. Any questions so far or something I haven't demonstrated that you want to see? No, I think we're good. Okay. Perfect.
Now, a really key, important idea of this device is one picture in, one picture out. So students - But it doesn't save anything. It does not. So privacy and behavior consideration, I've seen students with other devices who will fill that camera reel with off task pictures. This device does not support that. As soon as we go back to the camera, we just cleared out all of our work. It's like a new session. And so I can recapture this. It does have some rejection settings.
So if a student's trying to take a picture of a friend to be silly, it's going to, if it doesn't see any text, it's going to reject that image and encourage them to go back and take a picture of something with text. So that's that flow again from the camera. A couple of other things. In this, there's some Elkonin boxes. If you're... If students are working on blending, segmenting, that sort of thing. And then again, we have our input mode and our view mode. Jump back to the picture.
And then I want to go ahead and show you across all of these different screens, there's this little check mark. So if this is left on for students, we have a couple of executive functioning supports. So one of them is this tasks tool. This is in the planner from the home screen. So we can work with students, read your book and study for 25 minutes, and this device will keep track of that, pop up when that time is done. Or we may have students who get started on your work and let's see how long this is going to take and it can count up.
We can also either some students, maybe a staff member helps fill this out for them, or eventually they learn to do this themselves. So maybe my first task is... Worksheet. And you're going to see I'm typing that in, but it also has full dictation support for your students who may struggle to spell some of that. So worksheet and then study. And then we have this little task list that students can look at and... Worksheet. Study. Because I've seen tools where they may help the student with those sorts of things, but then they struggle to read that back. And so all of this is built in with that that kind of accessibility support. Okay.
So that's the task side of this. So let me stop our timer. And then the other side to this is called the focus side. So anchors and alarms are what I call them. Anchors are where we set a time interval. And it will... Let me turn this on. Okay. So I turned this on. Listen to teacher. So this would be a student who has... Again, some of those executive functioning challenges. Maybe they need some prompting support. And from nine o 'clock to 10 o 'clock, maybe that's a time when they struggle. We can set it every five minutes. It's going to pop up no sound, but it'll vibrate.
You can configure the vibration patterns and it'll show up with that prompt to remind them to listen to the teacher. They can tap and listen back to it if they don't know how to read that. So when we edit that, it looks like this. We can set the recurrence. How frequently to do that. And then the start and end time. And then also just single alarms. So that's kind of repeated. The anchors are recurring prompts. The alarms are specific times. At 2.45 every day, I need to pack up my backpack. Okay. So we can jump to those planner tools from any of these screens that we're working at to get that kind of support as well. Okay. So again.
I'm going to jump back to my camera and then my home screen. So that was the read and the write tools and then the planning tools. All right. That's a lot. Any questions about those three tools? I don't think so. Okay.
So now I'll show you the math tools and then the settings. So the math tools again can be left on for students or turned off depending on the needs of the students. We have a basic calculator tool. And then an advanced calculator, a scientific calculator for some of your older students. So then you're going to see here two papers. So we have the calculator, but also a full math paper, again, kind of scratch pad feature. So I can work on a calculation and send it here to this math paper for some of your students who may need support with lining up work on a grid and doing that sort of thing. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and erase that.
Or if I start at this math paper, then let me show as you're again working with the student who's maybe needs help lining up the place value, then we can set up that problem, draw that in, do our calculation, and from we can go back and forth and even draw a box and send this back to the calculator to be able to check our work. So that's calculator, the math paper. This also has a graph mode four quadrants in a grid if you have students who are doing any kind of graphing work. Okay. Then going left or right, I won't spend too much time on each of these tools, but just show that they're there.
Again, we have tens frames for students who are working on counting. We have a suite of money tools. So we can add different denominations. Students can interact with those. You're going to see it shows the total amount. Total $155.01, one penny, one $5 bill, one $50 bill, one $100 bill. Okay. So it's reading all of those components. We can count just the coins. We can count just the bills or count all of it. There is a change tool. So if you have students who are doing any kinds of job skills, maybe the payment amount is, it costs $3.25 and the person gives us $10.00, then we're going to get that change calculated.
It's going to show the bills and it can read all of that back to us. And then there's a simple budgeting tool where we can enter how much money we have available, add some shopping items again with speech to text and see if we have enough money. Okay. So tens frame, money tools. Okay. We have some time tools to work with analog clock. We can also do digital clock or we can do both and then show seconds. There's some math if we're working on adding time, subtracting time, elapsed time, and then time unit conversions, minutes, seconds, days. And then finally rounding those out is simple geometry tools.
So working on what these shapes are, it can read it back to us, small, medium, large. So I didn't say this to begin with. Every situation is going to be different, but these tools I had in mind, generally some of our students who might be on like a modified curriculum have some cognitive access needs. We have transformations, but other students may find this helpful as well, but those are the math tools. Okay. Like I showed from our math tools, we can jump to our planner and then always jump to our settings.
So to round this out, I want to show the settings. There's a lot of them. I'm not going to go through all of them. The Luma website gives more details about these, but you're going to see these little speakers because again, it can be read back to students who may struggle to read this. Bluetooth. We can change some of the navigation. I do want to draw your attention to this. We have a few different fonts and we can make some customizations to the display of the font. So let me set this, for example, jump back to our Write screen and there we have black background with white text. We can change that, customize that to meet the student's need.
All right. We have our text to speech setting. We can change colors on the highlights. We can get some feedback on our writing. And then there are also, I mentioned two text to speech systems. We also have two speech to text systems. So one is going to be a standard, no punctuation, no capitalization, normal kind of speech to text. We also have some advanced speech to text that will automatically punctuate and capitalize. It's a little bit more accurate. Okay. But we do have a risk as it indicates here that sometimes because of the models that this is based on, you might have a little issue here and there with some text hallucination.
So I would say this is more for advanced students who can handle that. But again, flexible options in the tools. This is where we can really customize the tools and choose what students can see and cannot see. What tools do they have access to? Down to the whole math mode, or again, specific tools that are available or not available. And then I'm going to jump down here in the system tab and show that we have a settings lock.
So once you configure those tools, you either leave the device open where you're trusting the student to be responsible, and some students might be and manage that themselves, or you're setting it up and locking it so that the student cannot see or change any of those tools. They get exactly what you give to them. Okay. And then the update things, the Wi -Fi, and that really is a quick [unclear] You can see here that I, in that example, turned off those planning features. So it's not even on the home screen anymore. Let me go ahead and turn that back on right here. And there we go. All of the tools.
Is there anything you'd like me to show again? Any questions that you have?
How long does the battery typically last throughout the day? Like if they're using it all day long, is it charged at night? How do you typically set it up for the student? Yeah. That's a great question. Pretty standard to other kinds of smart devices that we have in our lives. Yeah. So battery generally going to depend on usage, but I would expect it to definitely last a full day, maybe multiple days. I've seen that in some instances. But generally working with students or staff members who support them to have a charging routine.
So I'm going to jump to the end here and show the full box actually does come with the charger and it comes with a protective case and a quick start guide. So speaking of charging, you will have that provided with you with the device, the box that you purchased. So just kind of wrapping up the slides, we looked at primarily reading and writing tasks, but again, also some math and executive functioning supports. There is no web browser. There are no games. There's nothing else for students to get into with this device. It is truly a focused academic support assistive technology device.
And really the only prerequisite is just being able to hold and operate some kind of handheld device. And then we have that offline piece where we can optionally connect it for updates, but otherwise every part of this isn't touching the internet at all. So thank you again for your interest and for viewing this. The current price at this time is $329 plus shipping and handling. And I am. I'm going to stop that share and very happy to answer other questions or provide a quote. Just reach back out. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Yeah. Great to meet you. And again, please, please be in touch and love to work with you further. Thank you.