Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) has recently updated its popular accessibility application, Seeing AI, with powerful new features that allows people with vision impairment to explore their surroundings using their smartphone.
Using the devices camera and advanced artificial intelligence, the application narrates a users immediate surroundings, giving them the opportunity to situate themselves in their environment.
In addition to the ability to hear information about the users immediate surroundings, the app provides features that reads aloud text from signs, handwritten notes and documents. It will also describe objects in detail, including their distance from the user.
Amazingly, this also applies to people. Using facial recognition, the app can identify how many people are in a room and provide a description of them. You can even teach the app to learn peoples faces and simply announce their presence when they enter a room.
The new update also assists vision impaired users in places like supermarkets. By holding up the camera to a product, the app will scan the products barcode and describe the contents of the label and the product itself.
In our testing, the app provided accurate descriptions for most of the products that it scanned, including common household items as well as food and beverage products. Some obscure products were not recognised.
The app also successfully identified a host of every day scenes, including a living room, a vase with flowers on a table and a laptop computer on a desk.
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Features like these will help empower people with vision impairment to gain independence and confidence in their everyday lives.
The smartphone application was adapted from an app that was originally written for a smart glasses concept that did not eventuate. A team of over 100 specialists worked on the accessibility app from Microsoft’s growing artificial intelligence department.
While the technology is not perfect, the application has come a long way since it was first introduced in July 2017 and should be a useful tool for most users.
Android users may wish to explore similar alternatives like Envision AI and Be My Eyes on the Google Play Store.
Are you vision impaired or do you know someone who is? Let us know in the comments below if you think this app could help you or a loved one.
Download Microsoft’s Seeing AI application here.
Digi Access 