Recently, Microsoft has released app named “Seeing AI“- a smartphone app that uses the computer vision for describing the world for the visually impaired people. With the help of the downloaded app, the users can point their phone’s camera at the person needed to be clicked, and the app itself will speak who the person is? and how is he feeling? The app is not human-specific, the user can also point it towards any object and the app will detect it itself. All these challenges are met with the usage of Artificial Intelligence that runs locally on their device.
The company showed off its preliminary version of Seeing AI in March last year at its Build conference, however starting today, the app is available to be downloaded for free in the US for iOS. Moreover, there is no information yet on its availability for Android and other countries.
The app is useful in a number of ways. Along with recognition of people, strangers, their age, and emotion; the app also leads in recognizing household products by scanning bar codes. The app can also scan and read documents for the user and it also recognizes US currency. The best feature of this app is the recognition of all dollar bills. As these bills are of same color and size regardless of its value so; spotting the difference could be difficult for the visually impaired person or we can say, impossible. But the app like seeing AI can help them doing such difficult tasks easily.
The app uses artificial neural networks for identifying the world around it; the basic technology that is used for deploying self-driven cars, drones, and more. The app’s most basic functions can be carried out directly on the device. That means, the functions can be easily accessible and more quickly even in the situations where internet connectivity is rare.