Microsoft has launched its Seeing AI app on Android. The app, which helps blind and low-vision people understand the things around them via AI-powered narration has also been updated with new languages and features.
Microsoft Seeing AI was previously made available for iOS users in 2017 as a research project. The app’s founder and lead Saqib Shaikh said in a company blog post that the latest generative AI features that were released on iOS have been added on the Android version of the app as well.
Microsoft Seeing AI App Comes to Android
Microsoft Seeing AI takes advantage of generative AI to assist low vision and bling people with several tasks. For instance, the app can help them identify everyday products, read mails, narrate descriptions of photos, and more.
The app was made available on Android on the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD). For those unaware, IDPD is a UN (United Nations) day, which is celebrated on December 3 every year.
As of now, the app is available in 18 different languages. These include Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmal, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. However, the company plans to 18 more languages in 2024.
“There are over 3 billion active Android users worldwide, and bringing Seeing AI to this platform will provide so many more people in the blind and low vision community the ability to utilize this technology in their everyday lives,” Shaikh said in the post.
Microsoft Seeing AI Updated Features, How It Works
Microsoft Seeing AI app has been updated to generate richer descriptions of photos. Users can tap on the ‘more info’ option to get greater details about what is in the image. Previously, the functionality was limited to providing a brief summary of photos.
Users can also chat with Seeing AI to get more information from a document, apart from just hearing it aloud. Once the document has been scanned, users can ask questions about items on a menu, the price of an item on a receipt, to summarise an article, and more.
The app works with different kinds of content as as short texts, documents, scenes, images in other apps, etc. It can also scan barcodes of products, identify users’ friends around them, identify a perceived colour, and even read handwritten notes in some languages. All a user needs to do is point their phone’s camera, or take a photo to hear a description.
Microsoft Seeing AI Android app is available for download via the Google Play Store. The iOS version of the app can be downloaded from the App Store.
