Benjamin Levicek The App Store is full of apps of all kinds – from social networks to educational software to those that help people with disabilities. Among those that can help, we will show you one that is completely free, but offers an abundance of very useful functions. This is an application Seeing AI from Microsoft. Although it is in English, most functions work perfectly correctly in the Czech Republic.
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Seeing AI consists of several screens. The first one bears the name Short Text and as the name suggests, it can read printed text aloud after pointing the camera at it. Surprisingly, it works even without VoiceOver turned on and even in Czech. This function is very useful mainly when a blind person wants to use devices without a reader and read information from them - for example, a coffee machine with a display. second screen, document, can scan text and save it as an image or text file. The biggest advantage over regular recognition applications is that it tells the user which edge of the document is not visible, and when the blind person manages to point the phone correctly, it takes a picture of the text. But that's all from the features for recognizing printed text.
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Let's go to the screen Product, which can read its composition after taking a picture of a barcode. Of course, there are tons of software for reading barcodes, but Seeing AI alerts you with a loud beep when recording that your phone is pointed correctly. The next screen is titled Person and its task is to recognize people, including determining age and gender. Logically, age does not always work completely reliably, but quite often it happens that even gender is not determined correctly by the application. Next screen, Currencies, it is unusable in our region. It can recognize banknotes in real time, but only supports US and Canadian dollars, euros, rupees, pounds and Japanese yen. Screen Scene but it is already significantly more interesting, because it can recognize any object in the photo after taking a picture. He will also tell all the details about it - if, for example, there is a dog on the floor near the chair in the photo, he will also calmly announce the color of the chair in English.
The last three screens are called Color, Handwriting a Light. The first one mentioned recognizes colors quite well, of course, but rather the basic ones. If the object is multi-colored or contains stripes, the results are not very impressive - but it is enough for sorting the laundry during washing or choosing clothes. Handwriting can read handwriting – this function is also not very reliable, but you can roughly understand the context based on the result. The last mentioned function serves people with visual impairments who cannot see even light. It can identify it and play the tone. The higher the tone, the stronger the light. As my light sensitivity continues to deteriorate, I have already used this function a few times.
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Pavel Jelic It's great that there are apps that can help the blind in this way. Being a Seeing AI for free is already a nice extra bonus. Most such applications are rather paid, and I would be willing to pay for Seeing AI.
Hello, thank you for the article. A perfect insight into the life of a blind person. I want to ask, have you been blind since birth? If so, how do you actually "recognize" colors? Are you able to somehow imagine that color when you actually recognize it? Thank you for your reply, have a nice day.
Good day. Thank you very much for the compliment and for the interesting question. I have been blind since birth, so color is only a concept for me and I cannot imagine colors at all. I tend to roughly remember which colors go well with each other.