14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has released another exclusive app for iPhone users, this time using artificial intelligence and neural networks to narrate the world for blind people.
Called Seeing AI, the application, which is only available in the United States for the time being, requires visually impaired users to point the phone camera at the objects or persons around them to have a complete description of what the camera is seeing.
The application can recognize a wide array of objects, as well as persons they’ve seen before, while also being able to guess the age and emotions of people scanned by the camera. This is technology that Microsoft has tested in the past with web services based on artificial intelligence and which attempted to guess the age and emotions using just a single photo.
Currency support also coming
The application comes bundled with many more features, and it can also speak text as soon as it’s scanned, while also being able to capture a printed text and describe the formatting. The app provides audio guidance to the user to capture the page, with similar assistance provided in the case of products, where the camera needs to be pointed at the barcode to identify them.
Seeing AI has been developed to also recognize and describe a full scene around you, though this feature is only experimental for the time being and it requires an Internet connection, while the rest of the functionality runs locally.
And last but not least, the app will soon be able to recognize currency bills, which should come in handy to blind people given the similar dimensions of dollar bills.
Microsoft hasn’t said a single thing about bringing this app to Android devices or to its own Windows phones, but there’s a good chance a version for devices running Google’s mobile operating system is also in the works.
The app can be downloaded only by users in the United States for the time being and only supports English. It’s available free of charge and it requires iOS 10 or later.
