Be My Eyes
Be My AI is now available on the BlindShell Classic 2 mobile phone
Many of you will have spoken to Quantum RLV’s software support person, Danny Keogh (our resident tech guru who also happens to be blind). In this article, Danny describes some amazing AI possibilities for BlindShell phone users.
What is Be My AI? Put simply: it’s an addition to the Be My Eyes app which allows you to take a picture with the phone’s camera and have it described for you without needing a sighted person to handle the description. It’s all done using AI. You can also type or dictate questions into the app to get more details about the picture if they’re available.
Some of the things I’ve used it for:
Many of you will have spoken to Quantum RLV’s software support person, Danny Keogh (our resident tech guru who also happens to be blind). In this article, Danny describes some amazing AI possibilities for BlindShell phone users.
What is Be My AI? Put simply: it’s an addition to the Be My Eyes app which allows you to take a picture with the phone’s camera and have it described for you without needing a sighted person to handle the description. It’s all done using AI. You can also type or dictate questions into the app to get more details about the picture if they’re available.
Some of the things I’ve used it for:
-
Getting descriptions of people on TV. Even if a program has Audio Description you really don’t get much of an idea what people really look like. Where you take the picture from depends on the size of your TV but for the most part you can get pretty accurate results.
-
Reading cooking directions from food packaging. There are other ways of doing this of course but Be My AI is pretty good at filtering out text I don’t want to hear.
-
Describing pictures sent by a friend or family member. You can usually get a lot more information than the person sending the picture remembers to give you. I tend to find people leave out details they don’t think are important but we may want to know such as facial expressions or what can be seen in the background.
- Describing my own photos. I have thousands of photos on my computer most of which don’t have meaningful file names. Using Be My AI to describe these is slowly changing this.
Note: You do need an internet connection for this to work; most phone carriers offer data plans, so BlindShell users should have internet access everywhere.