by David Redmond

Aira is a really unique and valuable service. While it offers paid subscription tiers, I’ve only used their free 5-minute option for occasional assistance.

For quickly finding a taxi outside a train station for example Aira is the way to go. AI has become a big player in this space, however, and until recently we hadn’t heard much from Aira on the subject. But that has now changed.

Not wanting to be left out of the group chat, Aira has joined Be My Eyes, Seeing AI, And Envision by announcing a detailed AI image description service.

Aira Access AI is allowing people to sign up for early access now, but unfortunately, I haven’t got to test drive it yet.

The new feature lives within a tab of the Aira Explorer app, and sits nicely alongside Aira’s visual interpreter service. It will reportedly be similar in features to Be My Ai, allowing users to either take images or share images from the share sheet.

One key difference is that Aira will be utilising its team of trained visual interpreters to validate AI responses. Presumably, once you get a response, you can then request validation and get feedback from a real human. This genuinely has a lot of benefits.

Competition is good

I think this is brilliant news. Right now all the existing players have advantages and disadvantages. Be My AI is the best at describing images but is only really useful to VoiceOver users, Envision is miles ahead of everyone for document analysis, but its image description tool hallucinates a lot in my experience. Seeing AI haven’t got the interface right in my view, so are still playing catch up.

I think it’s clear that AI is the next big leap in assistive technology, and companies realise there’s money to be made in this area. We are now reaching a point where the players in this space have some competition, and that only leads to better products in the long run.

I hope Aira offers a good service and I hope the visual interpreter integration is well done. If they can nail this at a reasonable price, then I think we might see a serious shake-up in the AI apps race.

How very exciting

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