Microsoft released a mobile application for the blind. It describes what is happening around

Microsoft's Corporation has released the Seeing AI mobile application designed for visually impaired and blind people. It works on the basis of neural networks: when the user leads the phone camera to the object, the application recognizes it and tells what is happening around.

The free Seeing AI application is still available only on iOS and only in the American App Store. When it appears on Android and in other countries, they do not specify Microsoft.

The user first needs to indicate the application that it should recognize: a person, a short inscription, text, bill, product in the store or all that it will see.

If you bring the camera to a person, the application will call his approximate age and appearance features (for example, whether he is wearing glasses), and also describe his expression. The user can take a picture of his friend, then his image will remain in the database, and next time Seeing Ai will simply name him by name.

Microsoft built the recognition of barcodes into the application. Thanks to this, you can find out the name of the product in the store and get its brief description. The Verge notes that the recognition of bills is especially relevant in the United States, where all dollars are the same and color, regardless of the face value.

Seeing Ai tells the user where to move the camera so that the desired object or inscription is entirely in the frame. Describing a person, the application indicates how far it costs and in what corner of the frame his face.

Most standard functions in Seeing AI use neural networks operating on the phone itself. Thanks to this, the recognition of objects will work without communication. The Internet is needed for experimental functions - such as description of the scene in general and recognition of manuscript text.

Finally, Seeing AI taught to recognize the images that the user encounters in other applications. So that it describes what is happening in the picture, it is enough to import the picture into it.