Microsoft has launched an iOS app aimed at guiding the visually-impaired through the use of artificial intelligence.
Called “Seeing AI,” the app uses “computer vision” to scan the user’s surroundings with the phone’s camera and narrate what is being captured.
The app has a variety of assistive functions, including:
- Saving the appearances of friends to recognize them at a later time when pointed towards, and the app will even read Emotions, such as saying if they look happy
- Reading text from letters, documents and books and narrate accordingly
- Identifying currency (for example, the app will say “twenty American dollars” if a $20 USD bill is held up)
- Scanning barcodes with assistive audio cues find a food items, such as in a pantry or grocery store
- Importing content from other apps, such as Twitter, to be identified in Seeing AI
- There are also some experimental features available in the app at the moment, such as being able to narrate scenes. The example given is someone playing outside with a frisbee, and the app accurately saying “I think it’s a young girl throwing a frisbee in a park.”
The Seeing AI app can be downloaded for free on iOS here. There’s no word yet on a possible Android release.
