The device is based on haptic technology, which provides feedback or information in real time through touch. By linking to any Bluetooth device, the Dot smartwatch can pull text from applications like iMessage using voice commands. Co-founder and CEO Eric Ju Yoon Kim says that Dot gives users the chance to read text their own way.

“Until now, if you got a message on iOS from your girlfriend, for example, you had to listen to Siri read it to you in that voice, which is impersonal,” Kim explains. “Wouldn’t you rather read it yourself and hear your girlfriend’s voice saying it in your head?”

As a wearable, Dot is still without competition. Current industry leaders produce hardware in the form of keyboards with active Braille cells that connect to computers via USB, with price tags in the thousands of dollars. Kim tells Tech in Asia that when the Dot smartwatch goes on sale in the United States this December, it will retail for less than US$300. 

Going global

(L-R): Lead designer Mason Joo, CEO Eric Kim, CTO Ki Sung, and software engineer Juhwan Lim.

Kim founded Dot with Titus Cheng, a classmate from the University of Washington. The team they built in Seoul includes specialists in hardware, software, and design. In its first round of seed funding, Dot raised US$100,000 from the ActnerLab accelerator and an additional $500,000 from the South Korean government’s Tech Incubator Program for Startup (TIPS). The company will begin its second round of seed funding in August with a goal of raising US$1 million, and it’s hoping for international investors to help promote the company’s products overseas. Though the smartwatch will go on sale in the US and Canada first, Dot is trying out other applications for its active Braille modules in South Korea. In a push that Kim is calling “public Braille,” the company has installed modules at ATMs and in train stations. Like the smartwatch, these modules can be programmed to display information updated in real time, such as account balance information or a subway schedule.

“The Braille at ATMs currently tells you, ‘This is an ATM,’ which isn’t super helpful,” says Kim. “I think these sorts of public places, and the public sector in particular, could become our largest market in the future.”

That means expanding to other countries like Japan and China. Japan has a strong history of updating infrastructure to reflect the needs of its disabled citizens, as evidenced by the country’s ubiquitous tactile paving. China accounts for nearly one-fifth of the world’s blind population and boasts a rapidly evolving public infrastructure. Kim sees huge growth potential in both markets and says Dot’s next few hires later this year will likely reflect that.

Educating a clientele

Kim admits that part of the challenge that lies before his company is creating a broader demand for the product. Unlike Apple or Samsung, Dot has an immediate, vested interest in promoting literacy as a means of increasing its number of potential customers. By many accounts, Braille literacy has actually fallen over the past half-century; Kim attributes that to the lack of effective educational tools. “90 percent of blind people become blind after birth, and there’s nothing for them right now – they lose their access to information so suddenly,” says Kim. “Dot can be their lifeline, so they can learn Braille and access everyday information through their fingers, which is the goal of Braille literacy.” Everyday language has some existing haptic support in the form of single-line active Braille devices, but Dot is concerned that education requiring complex text and diagrams, like mathematics, is still off-limits to the blind. To solve that, the company is also developing a tablet device to display multi-line text, graphs, and shapes. Native educational apps could be part of Dot’s next developmental phase.