Microsoft’s Seeing AI App Helps Users with Visual Impairments Identify Currency, Handwriting and other Every-day Items

December 2017 - In 2017, Microsoft launched Seeing AI, an app to help users with visual impairments more easily navigate the world around them. With 100,000 downloads to date, the app provides audio feedback to users in a variety of applications, such as currency recognition, clothing color, and now, handwriting recognition. The app is available in 35 countries and allows users to customize the speech rate and other features to improve accessibility. Cameron Roles, a blind lecturer at the Australian National University College of Law, wrote of his experience using Seeing AI, “I absolutely love Seeing AI. If my children hand me a note from school or if I pick up a book, I can use Seeing AI to quickly capture that text and just give me a very brief instant overview of what's on the document. I can quickly be right on top of it.”

 

Microsoft was been integrating AI into many of its products including its search service Bing and Word to provide users with personalized recommendations and behind the scenes assistive features respectively. Speaking of AI’s opportunity to help users with visual impairments Roles said, “Technology can be such an enabler of good and such an enabler for people to shrink the world, for the world to come closer together, and for people to be able to achieve so much more than they ever could without it.” The Seeing AI app can be downloaded from the Apple app store now for free. Source: Microsoft Accessibility Blog.