I agree that this is not the phone for the techy blind person.
And that in general such specialized products leave us in the blind ghetto.
I’ve played with the Ray and like many other blind specific products it’s not as polished as mainstream products.
It also doesn’t run regular apps, just the specialized apps created for the blind.

The thing you missed about Ray during the podcast is the fact that neither IOS or Android have a Hebrew TTS. The only Hebrew TTS available for phones runs on Symbian.
This is a serious issue especially for the less techy user that also usually isn’t very good with English.
That is why Ray has a market.
Once a Hebrew TTS is developed for IOS and Android Ray will pretty much be irrelevant for anyone but the most basic user.

For speech Ray relies on recordings of human speech or a server that turns the text into speech and sends it back to the phone over 3G. That is one of the reasons the system is clunky.