Innovative technology ‘Disrupts’ Charity Sector With Its First Voice-Based Platform

NCBI Launches myNCBI Smart Hub and smart speaker devices.

On Global Accessibility Day, May 19th, NCBI, National Council for the Blind of Ireland, announced the launch of myNCBI Smart Hub on Alexa, the very first innovative voice-based platform of its scale within the charity sector. The platform allows voice service users and their families access to the latest information on sight loss and a full suite of features.

Kyran O’Mahoney, Chief Technology Officer at NCBI, says: “This is the first time an innovative voice-based platform of scale such as this has been developed in the charity sector. There are many barriers for people with disabilities and we wanted to remove some financial and location restrictions to our services and supports. “

“The use of disruptive technology enables us to expand and further reach and help people who are blind or live with visual impairments. The launch of myNCBI Smart Hub will have profound impacts to support people with disabilities world-wide.”

Providing a rich features set, the myNCBI Smart Hub provides information regarding the requesting of referrals, call backs from the NCBI and provides access to media content such as podcasts, newsletters, magazines and audio books.  Users can stay connected to NCBI, accessing information and technology such as their audio library service, day to day living techniques, employment readiness, Mobility training etc.

To provide a future proof framework for the NCBI team, the platform was bootstrapped with Parly, Cation Consultings conversational AI platform. This enabled the rapid delivery of fundamental components to build a complete conversational system to support a wide range of user features; and a management platform; which allows for the realtime, cross-platform, integrated management of users, services and content. 

100% AWS Native and Serverless, Parly presents a low cost, AWS control tower based solution, offering the best of AWS managed services. In addition, the project's goal included the migration of NCBI product and feature websites to a central IDP, powered by AWS cognito. The implemented NCB platform has been built to meet Accessibility Standards. Seamless integration with the NCBI’s existing backoff services was paramount; Cation Consulting operates to augment and unlock value in existing business investment for services such as callbacks and library services.

For more, see https://www.ncbi.ie/smarthub/ ; a tour at https://youtu.be/SoBTLqYK8Jk and the NCBI podcast at https://www.ncbi.ie/copy-of-talking-technology-with-ncbi-labs-episode-9-introducing-the-myncbi-smarthub/ or contact Cations Parly Team at info@parly.ai