The following is an auto-generated description of a photo provided by Be My Eye, an AI app being offered through another blindness assistance app called Be My Eyes. The best and most exciting part of this app and the AI skill it offers is independence. A smart phone user can now take a picture, then ask Be My Eye to describe it. It’s mad cool to do this. I read a blog post that states over three million photos have been described with this app.
Have you, the non-blind reading this, ever given thought to just how many questions we, the disabled, must ask our family and friends? Reading labels, finding a dropped object, coordinating colors and clothing, etc., etc. “What does that say?” I ask this of my husband quite a lot each and every day. It’s nice to have someone around to help. But when he isn’t here or I am alone or with other blind folks, this app has the potential to do more than describe a photo and I cannot wait to be part of its future development.
Currently there are video conferencing apps, like Be My Eyes and AIRA, that connect a blind person with a sighted operator via the phone’s camera who can assist visually. There is an app called Seeing AI, the skills include OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for reading text aloud with a smart phone’s speech output. The app will describe faces, colors, currency and street signs/landscapes and more skills are on the way, I am sure; the app includes a scanner to read product labels. Imagine an app doing both and adding more skills and possibly being voice-activated. I won’t go all Sci-Fi on you but one day this app might one day become a little electronic dot one could mount on an eye patch or on the rim of your eyeglasses or maybe even a contact lens. Until then, friends, let’s have fun with this cool app, Be My Eye.
The picture shows a happy moment in a backyard. A woman with light skin and grey hair is sitting on a black metal chair. She is wearing a beige t-shirt with a circular design on it and grey shorts. She has a big smile on her face and is looking at the camera. She is holding two dogs. One dog is brown with black stripes and has a sturdy build, while the other dog is a cream-colored Labrador. They both seem very content and are sitting close to the woman.
In the background, there is a house with a brick lower half and beige siding on the upper half. There is a window and a sliding glass door visible. There is also a small black table with a red cup, a white plate, and an orange ball on it. The ground is a concrete patio with some fallen leaves, and there is a patch of green grass to the left. The atmosphere seems very homely and joyful.
