Subscribe
Sign in
Seeing AI — Talking camera for the blind, by Microsoft
46
Replies
Best
@rrhoover Nice! Love seeing companies build products like this to help people. A company like CloudFactory might really be able to help them help others. 😄
https://www.cloudfactory.com
It's incredible how the shift to AI and voice interface is drastically advancing the UX Designers approach to this type of app! At Venture Beats Mobile Conference, yesterday, I was talking to a guy from Amazon about using visual interfaces to recognize contacts for LinkedIn, etc. This has great application even beyond visual impairment, so it's really good to see Microsoft thinking about very real problems.
My only complaint is how unnatural the voice sounds. It's about the only thing Siri has been destroying the competition at.
Great product! I believe that the internet companies like FB, Google etc should invest more to make internet more accessible for people with disabilities.
Great cause and impressive execution! My only question is - how much do you have to actually be able to see to use it? It seems like a lot of features hinge on seeing what you're doing with the app but I would love to be wrong.
@katologic People who are blind do use apps & touch screens. The only caveat is whether the sites/apps are set up for accessibility. http://www.businessinsider.com/h...
@katologic You use the phone's OS level Accessibility controls like "Voice Over" to navigate the UI of the app. Here is a cool marketing video Apple put out showing how a blind user navigate's their phone with this feature - https://youtu.be/0-EEPydo2SU
So cool. Serious question here - why is there this type of visual UI? / why is most of it a viewfinder for the camera?
Pretty impressive app there, I'm surprised its launched only on IOS though, but if Google glass had of been more of a hit then building this app into something like that would be an amazing tool.
No holding a phone it's all, where you are looking is what is being described.. ohh then add bone conductive audio, and you are basically a cyborg!
I was discussing with a blind guy dreaming about an app like that on his iPhone. Many improvements have been made for blind people, but this one will improve lives.
The dawning of a new AI-powered age. My grandfather would have loved this....all he had for his tunnel vision was talking book tapes, and loved them. Humankind just keeps making things better.
I've been following the creation of this app for a while because it fascinated me. But it's annoying that it's not available for Android. I understand launching iOS first since it's easier, but they don't even discuss offering it for Android at some point in the future.
This is cool but how does the user navigate the touch screen without seeing the icons?
@bootstrapc I found out answers to questions I had re: how people without sight people did random things from this funny guy named Tommy Edison who is blind. He's actually included in this article which goes into more detail re: how touch screens are navigated: http://www.businessinsider.com/h...
@bethmccrea Thank you very much for sharing this. I haven't read it yet but at quick glance made me think about how annoying this must be for people. People that see can get instant feedback (hovers, characters shown on keystroke, etc.) I can't imagine how difficult this must be but I think this article will provide some insight. As a developer I admit accessibility is an after thought/or no thought... which annoys them even more.
@bootstrapc Glad to help. A number of years ago, I color-coded a document & presented it to a higher up...who I then found out was color-blind. He could differentiate some colors, but not others so the document was useless. I work on the product side & because of that experience, I try to keep visual impairment/problems in mind. If you add up the numbers of people who fall into these categories (blind, colorblind, older, etc.), it's not a small number. And simple things can make a big difference with accessibility (e.g., underlined or bolded links may not look as sexy, but if someone is colorblind to the colors used for a particular link, how else can they tell something is a link).
@bootstrapc by using Voice-Over: you can go from icon to icon by swiping, selecting by a single tap, and clicking by double tapping, voice over actually reads everything you are currently on; people who are depending and using this technology are mostly pretty damn fast using it
This is an impressive stuff described in this post!! shAIp offers a complete Human-In-The-Loop platform to acquire, label, and annotate diverse unstructured datasets for your most demanding artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives. https://www.shaip.com/
Nice app. Maybe in the future, someting like this will be available on a Google Glass device.
Wow, products like these really show us that nothing is out of reach. Kudos Microsoft :)
Product Hunt