Jul 12, 2017 Microsoft has released Seeing AI, an app that can recognize people and how they feel, read hand-written documents and describe an entire scene.
Microsoft is using artificial intelligence to tackle a huge problem — helping visually impaired users interact with the world around them. To that end, it has developed Seeing AI, an iPhone app. Seeing AI app from Microsoft Seeing AI is a free app that narrates the world around you. Designed for the blind and low vision community, this ongoing research project harnesses the power of AI to open up the visual world and describe nearby people, text and objects. Seeing AI demonstrates how technology can make the world more inclusive.
Seeing AI is a Microsoft research project that brings together the power of the cloud and AI to deliver an intelligent app, designed to help you navigate your day. Turns the visual world into an audible experience. Apr 17, 2017 Aipoly Vision is an object and color recognizer that helps the blind, visually impaired, and color blind understand their surroundings. Simply point your phone at the object of interest and press any of the recognition buttons at the bottom of the screen to turn on the artificial intelligence, which will speak out loud what it sees.
Called Seeing AI, the app first launched in July 2017 with the goal of tapping the power of artificial intelligence to assist visually impaired people. Essentially, seeing AI works by describing people, objects, and even text, in an effort to 'narrate the world around you,' Microsoft said at the time.
The interesting thing about Seeing AI is not only that it narrates what it sees, but what it can recognize. The app leverages AI to recognize friends and describe their emotions. With people you don't know, it can describe their gender, estimated age, and what they're wearing. Seeing AI will also recognize and read short text snippets and full documents and read them back to you. Another feature of Seeing AI, appropriately called Scenes, will describe the general scene around you.
That's in addition to smaller capabilities, such as scanning barcodes and the ability to describe images shared from other apps.
The app is still a research project, Microsoft says, but prior to its UK and Australia launch, it was only available in the U.S., Canada, India, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore. One other limiting factor: Seeing AI is only available on iOS devices for now. Still, if you'd like to give it a try, you can download Seeing AI from the App Store now.
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Recorded November 22 2019On this week's podcast ... Surface Earbuds, Cortana mobile, and more
We're back with another exciting episode of the Windows Central Podcast, and this week, Windows 10 20H1inches closer to reality with a new build in the Fast ring. Cortana mobile apps are going away for users in most markets, except for the United States. The release of Surface Earbuds has been delayed until Spring 2020, possibly to address their value compared to other Bluetooth earbuds?
Microsoft's Build 2016 keynote passed by in a blur today, as the company crammed in all sorts of announcements - from the launch of its new Bot Framework and Xbox One dev kit functionality, to Bash support on Windows, new Universal apps, and the upcoming Windows 10 'Anniversary Update'.
But one of the most remarkable moments of the keynote came right at the very end when as part of its new Cognitive Services framework - which includes 22 new intelligence APIs - company CEO Satya Nadella showed off 'Seeing AI', an exciting research project that has the potential to change how people see the world around them, with a particular focus on those who can't see anything at all.
Saqib Shaikh is a Microsoft developer and software engineer from London, and he has played a key role in developing the Seeing AI project, having lost his sight when just 7 years old.
'One of the things I've always dreamt of, since I was at university,' he said in a video published by Microsoft today, 'was this idea of something that could tell you at any moment what's going on around you.'
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He was able to help take the first steps towards realizing that vision with the help of his colleagues. 'I teamed up with like-minded Microsoft engineers,' he explained, 'to make an app that lets you know who and what is around you. It's based on top of the Microsoft intelligence APIs... and the app runs on smartphones, but also on the Pivothead smart glasses.'
With a swipe across his smart glasses, Seeing AI tells Saqib exactly what's in front of him. 'I think it's a man jumping in the air, doing a trick on a skateboard,' it tells him, as the scene plays out in front of him. Saqib also said that 'the app can tell me the age and gender of people around me, and what their emotions are', pointing out the usefulness that this can have when engaged in conversations.
The app can also help with simple everyday tasks that many of us take for granted, such as 'reading' a menu. It's even intelligent enough to be able to deal with voice commands, such as 'read me the headings', rather than simply regurgitating every piece of text across the entire menu at once.
Saqib humbly notes that his efforts and those of his colleagues with whom he worked on the project would not have been possible without the years of Microsoft research that came before them - but even so, he says, a project like Seeing AI is 'just the beginning'. Nonetheless, while Seeing AI may be just a small step in the much broader picture of artificial intelligence development, with further development, it has the potential to genuinely transform the lives of many people around the world.
Seeing Ai App For Blind
You can view the full video below: