by Joe Lonergan

On September 25, 2023, Be My Eyes announced the release of Be My AI to all its existing iPhone users in an open beta stage. The full roll-out will take several weeks, so keep your app updated so you can access the Be My AI feature as soon as it is available.

Mike Buckley, the Be My Eyes CEO, said they are releasing the Be My AI feature in batches of 10,000 to prevent pressure on the server, as there are over 500,000 vision-impaired Be My Eyes users, and as you can imagine it might be too much to release it to everyone at once.

On average a Be My AI user in beta testing used the feature 5/6 times a day. Over 19,000 users who are blind helped evaluate the product in beta over the last seven months.

Be my AI coming to Android.

There is also good news for Android users of Be My Eyes.

Be My AI has started its closed beta testing on Android devices and is expected to get a full broad open beta testing release before the end of the year.

So, if you have not heard of Be My Eyes or the Be My AI feature already, Be My Eyes is an app on iOS and Android that helps connect blind and vision-impaired people with sighted volunteers to get help via a video call to help with all sorts of things like selecting colours and distinguishing food items, reading text and anything else you can think of.

Be My Eyes has also connected with many big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn, and Sky to mention a few, so it is like our own dedicated hotline for people who are blind to these tech giants.

The story behind the Be My AI feature

Approximately seven months ago Be My Eyes started working on a feature called Be My AI, a Chat GPt4-powered AI assistant, The testing on this came back with some great results and descriptions so it was open to beta testing to some users of the Be My Eyes app.

This went well so it was opened to many more users in July and August and then the feature started to gather interest as more people started to explore it and talk about it online. There was even a controversy called bring back the faces that happened during testing. In testing, it worked with photos with faces and then one day the feature stopped recognising photos with faces in them because of a privacy issue. Some people got so upset with this that it made headlines all over the world. Hans Jorgen Weberg, the founder of Be My Eyes, said they got around this issue by blocking the feature in Illinois. He said this was not the perfect solution, but it allows users from all over the world access to Be My AI while they try and negotiate with politicians in Illinois to get the privacy laws changed in the future. You can listen to the full interview with Hans on the Talking Technology podcast.

So that issue is out of the way for now and users are enjoying getting their photos with faces described again. The Be My AI feature has been a very liberating feature for some users as they have never gotten descriptions like this before. I hope I am not insulting anybody by saying the reports that Be My AI can give better and more detailed descriptions than most humans would give.

To access Be My AI, open the Be My Eyes app and tap on the Be My AI tab at the bottom of the screen, a take picture button will appear, point it at an object, Be My AI will send it to the Open AI chatbot and a few seconds later you will hear a detailed description of the photo. The other great thing is because it is a chatbot you can follow up with more questions or even more photos and get extra information on the subject of the described photo, and then If you like what Be My AI described, you can send its response and photo to others, or use its description in social media.

What kind of things are people using it for?

• Some of the most common use cases include tapping on a photo in your photo stream and then tapping on share and describe with Be My Eyes. This gives you detailed descriptions of those memories in your photos app.
• Describing photos in a WhatsApp conversation and getting descriptions and staying involved in the conversation.
• It’s good for reading menus and asking follow-up questions like what chicken dishes are available.
• Take a picture of your fridge’s contents and follow up with a question asking for a recipe from those ingredients.
• Get descriptions from magazines and newspapers that do not have alt text.
• Get descriptions of artworks or paintings.
• Be My AI also will give deaf-blind users a new way to get information if they use, a braille display to access text on their smartphone.

So, there you have it we are closer to a full release of Be My AI. We would love to hear what interesting situations you are using it for.