by Joe Lonergan
A lot of us will be familiar with the popular app Be My Eyes.
Be My Eyes was founded in 2015 and has millions of volunteers that have downloaded the app and helped blind and vision impaired users by being their eyes. The app uses the smartphone’s camera to help the vision impaired user do everyday tasks such as match colours, check dates on food products, distinguish similar items from one another, check the name of a building or place, and much more.
Loads of examples can be viewed in the learn section of the Be My Eyes app where you can read about use cases and testimonials from other Be My Eyes users. It is not until you enter into these areas of the app that you relies how much of a helpful service Be My Eyes can actually be!
Be My Eyes can also be set up with Siri shortcuts to make it even more convenient to use, so the user can say a Siri command such as “hey Siri, call a volunteer”.
But now Be My Eyes is trying to make things even better by introducing a Virtual Volunteer tool for people that are blind or have low vision. This tool, which uses a technology called GPT4 from Open AI, is currently in beta testing. You can register for the waiting list in the Be My Eyes app. This is as easy as tapping on the register button on the home screen of the Be My Eyes app and, because Be My Eyes has your details already, a message will come back to confirm you are registered and you will only have to tap OK. The small print says this service is only available in 12 European countries so far but hopefully by registering for the waiting list you will be notified when it comes available in Ireland.
Be My Eyes claims that this new technology will be transformative in providing people who are blind or have low vision with powerful new resources to better navigate physical environments, address everyday needs, and gain more independence.
The plan is to have the Virtual Volunteer feature from Be My Eyes to be integrated into the existing app and it will be powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4 language model, which contains a dynamic new image-to-text generator. Users can send images via the app to an AI-powered Virtual Volunteer, which will answer any question about that image and provide instantaneous visual assistance for a wide variety of tasks.
Just in case you have not heard of ChatGPT, it is an AI system from a company called Open AI that can generate intelligent human-like responses to a number of different requests. GPT4 brings this technology a step further by generating results by scanning an image and coming back with intelligent results to the user.
Be My Eyes hopes to make this virtual assistant available to all users later this year and it will be very interesting to see what real life use cases blind and low vision people will use it for. A marketing video on the project can be viewed by going to the Be My Eyes app on your smart phone and tapping on the community tab at the bottom, then tap on blog, and then tap on the blog called introducing our virtual volunteer tool for people who are blind or low vision.
AI tools are trending at the moment and there has been many discussions on the ethics of the technology in the roll of creating original content, music and art but this is one area we hope it can be put to good use and make a big difference to people’s lives in the near future.