Microsoft Seeing AI app lands on Android
by Lance Whitney,
Navigating the world around you is certainly challenging if you're blind
or sight impaired. One tool that can help is a free mobile app from
Microsoft called Seeing AI. Designed to alert and inform people about
their environment, the app is now accessible to Android users after
having been limited to iOS.
In a blog post published Monday, Saqib Shaikh, founder and lead for
Microsoft Seeing AI, announced the expansion to Android and highlighted
some of the app's latest features.
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Available in the App Store and Google Play, Seeing AI works by
identifying and describing people, objects, text, and other elements
around you. The goal is to help you better navigate your surroundings
and understand documents and other physical items by hearing them read
aloud.
First up is text recognition. Fire up the app and hold your phone over a
piece of printed or written text. Upon recognition, Seeing AI will start
reading the text aloud until it gets to the end.
Next is document recognition. Hold your phone over a full document, and
the app will scan and display the words. You can then listen to the
document read aloud by playing, pausing, skipping ahead, or going back
as needed.
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Another handy feature is a barcode reader that will identify and speak
information about a product based on the code scan. Next, you can snap a
photo of your surrounding environment, and the app will describe the
overall scene as well as individual items in the photo.
A people reader will scan a person captured by the camera and then
highlight their visual characteristics, adding in their distance away
from you. Finally, a currency scanner will analyze a bill or coin to
tell you its value.
As part of the transition to Android, the app also sports a couple of
recent enhancements.
Scanning a photo now provides richer descriptions of the details
captured in the image. Plus, you're now able to ask Seeing AI more
questions about a scanned document. As a few examples, you can learn
about dishes on a menu, get the prices of items on a catalog page, or
hear a summary of an article.
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"There are over 3 billion active Android users worldwide, and bringing
Seeing AI to this platform will provide so many more people in the blind
and low vision community the ability to utilize this technology in their
everyday lives," Shaikh said in the blog post. "We will continue to work
with the community to understand feedback to improve the app. And as
additional versions roll out, customer feedback will continue to be
critical for new AI-powered enhancements to future versions of the
Seeing AI app."
Shaikh, who lost his sight at the age of seven, said that the Android
version and new features were launched in celebration of International
Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD). Seeing AI is now available in
18 languages including Czech, Danish, English, French, German, Greek,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and
Swedish. Microsoft plans to expand support to 36 languages in 2024.
Artificial Intelligence
CDNet
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