Microsoft has used Azure cloud platform computing to help blind people "see" images in front of them.Seeing AI Development Project, established on the International Day of Persons with DisabilitiesAvailable on Android, and provides the same features as the version built for iPhone.
This development project already supports 18 languages, including Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. Microsoft plans to increase the number of supported languages to 2024 by 36.
Like the iPhone version, the Seeing AI development project launched on the Android platform is also designed for people with low vision, blindness, and other visual impairments. It allows people to more conveniently understand the world around them through mobile phones and artificial intelligence. In the future, automatically generated artificial intelligence will be added to make device-side computing more efficient. At the same time, it can also help more visually impaired people "see" the scene in front of them through technological means by leveraging the Android platform's cumulative global user base of over 30 billion people.
The Seeing AI development project has accumulated a lot of user feedback, which has made scene descriptions more accurate and more concise, allowing visually impaired people to understand more quickly. They can even click on the "More Information" icon to learn more about the description. Microsoft will also add more features in subsequent updates. For example, the Seeing AI development project will allow visually impaired people to describe the items and amounts displayed on the bill or menu, and even describe the specific location of objects or the specific details of photos imported into the device.
In addition, the Seeing AI development project can automatically detect the content of photographed text and read it aloud to the visually impaired. It can also obtain product information by photographing barcodes, such as helping the visually impaired to distinguish the contents of medications. It can also assist in identifying facial expressions, currency, color, brightness, or specific handwritten text.
Not only Microsoft uses mobile devices to help visually impaired people "see" the scene ahead, but Google also announced the launch ofAn application service called Lookout, similarly, the system uses the mobile phone camera to capture images in front of it, and through artificial intelligence recognition, it enables the system to describe the scene conditions in front, the location of obstacles, and the possible direction of travel through the mobile phone's loudspeaker.
