CBT Live From #CSUN16: Freedom Scientific And Optelec Join Forces

March 27, 2016 12:23 pm

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS | More

Tyler Donnelly from Optelec shows us the new Traveller HD and just how portable and easy it is to use. He also discusses the recent merger with Freedom Scientific and how, combined, the two companies are now providing low vision products to a much wider audience.

eSight enables people with legal blindness to actually see.
Want to try eSight? Get in touch with their team by calling : 1 855 837 4448
You can fill out the Try eSight form here.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE CBT Live From #CSUNATC17: Aira, Real-time Visual Interpreter for the Blind

About Joel Ramos

Joel Ramos joined Cool Blind Tech in November of 2015. He hails from sunny Southern California and works for a major financial institution. A self-taught geek on Windows, Mac, and Linux, he has also been a DJ for over 20 years, having ditched the old-school vinyl for digital turntables. When not on adventures with his two kids, he can often be found taking on long distance runs or obstacle courses that push him to the limit.

Artificial Intelligence and Text Recognition unite in Microsoft’s Seeing Ai iPhone App

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS | More

Not a month has gone by since We posted an article on Narrator including AI-driven image tags and Microsoft is back at it yet again, though with an older project which finally has made public fruition. Introduced at Build 2016, this project had a goal of bringing powerful image recognition technology which could be used to augment every day life, especially when combined with the power of the cloud.

Today, The app is available in the iOS app store in the United States, Canada, India, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore, for free.

In a post to the Microsoft Accessibility blog, Microsoft explains it in this fashion .

The app uses artificial intelligence and the camera on your iPhone to perform a number of useful functions.

Reading documents, including spoken hints to capture all corners of a document so that you capture the full page. It then recognizes the structure of the document, such as headings, paragraphs and lists, allowing you to rapidly skip through the document using voiceover.

Identifying a product based on its barcode. Move the phone’s camera over the product; beeps indicate how close the barcode is – the faster the beeps, the closer you are – until the full barcode is detected. It then snaps a photo and reads the name of the product.

Recognizing people based on their face, and providing a description of their visual appearance, such as their gender, facial expression and other identifying characteristics.

Recognizing images within other apps – just tap Share, and Recognize with Seeing AI.

In our experience, the app is able to even read computer screens in the short-text channel mode, and does so instantly as you move your arm towards and away from text. Reading coupons in a newspaper is more intuitive than having to wait for a picture to be snapped, and bar codes are often recognized in under 30 seconds thanks to the way it guides the user to it. Face recognition works well and can be taught to recall faces of loved ones after you take 3 pictures of them. Easily, this app rivals more expensive solutions and will become a must-have tool within any vision-impaired iOS user’s arsenal. The incredible power of Seeing AI lies in not just the cloud, but also at being able to perform this recognition offline and in real-time. Turning airplane mode on during a page scan still kept up with scrolling printed text, however features such as bar code and face/scene detection will require one.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE Sounds and Haptics On the Apple Watch - No More Embarrassing Meetings

Join Jessica to understand just how intuitive the app really is in this podcast and see for yourself what Seeing AI can do, as not even ten thousand words could give it full justification. She walks through the app, from the quick start guide to the various channels in great detail.

The official tutorials for the app, comprised of 9 videos, can be found at this link of a YouTube playlist.

About Joel Ramos

Reader Interactions

Footer

Follow Us