Blind developer creates app to help him and other navigate the world more easily

“I designed the app I wanted”, Saqib said. He has been blind since he was seven. He wanted to invent an app that would help blind users navigate the world more easily.

So now he leads the Seeing AI project, at Microsoft. This project’s product consists of an iOS that brings together image recognition, with a "talking camera" and a natural interface, so that blind users can walk around more easily.

Seeing AI relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and image recognition. The tech analyses the image and identifies what’s there.

“Image recognition is really the key. This idea of deep neural networks is the technical term, where we are able to show the system many, many photos and teach it about what's in those photos. You teach it over time, and then when it sees one it's not seen before, it uses the patterns it's found from the training to give you a description”, the inventor noted.

The app features nine different channels, for different purposes: reading a short text or recognising products, currency, or people.

For instance, if a user takes a picture of a person (the app indicates the location of the subject) and it will describe the person. Or, the user can take three photos of a person and tag them. Subsequently, the app will "recognise" the person.

“I think of it as this multi-tool, which I could pull out whenever I need. So maybe I pick up the mail in the morning and want to just wave the phone over it to see if it's for me or for my wife. Or maybe later in the day, I went to get a drink out of the fridge and they all feel the same, so I can use it to find which is which. Or maybe at work, identify who my colleagues are. So it's throughout the day, all these little tasks that it can assist with”, the developer explained.

Seeing AI is available for free for iOS.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/2KwmJlK

More info: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/seeing-ai
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2mC-NUAmMk