Very inspiring. Why don't someone attempt utilizing all ML advances in driving/OCR to make this work even when offline? This could pre-eliminate lot of cases.
It's not offline, but the Microsoft Seeing AI app for iOS uses ML to cover a lot of basic use cases like recognizing text, products, currency, describing scenes, etc: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/seeing-ai
Don't underestimate the importance of human-to-human contact. Reminding a blind person that people do care and what can be a very lonely world for those who cannot see!
Ever thought about how a blind person strikes up a conversation with a stranger whose body language or eye contact cannot be read?
That doesn't really mean less would be in contact, but has chance to increase number of available volunteers, reducing respond time of the call. I care because I could be blind one day and use it everyday.
I've been a volunteer for a couple of years now. It's so rare to get the ping for volunteers (maybe once every few months?) and you really have to be very quick to accept the call before another volunteer does, but when you're able to connect and help it's such an rush of joy. The project such a simple, elegant application of smartphones and real-time crowdsourcing.
I recently heard of BME from a blind person. He doesn't need it often because he's usually with someone, but he said it worked very well. This was a good reminder as I forgot to sign up after he told me. I didn't know it was so widely used!
There is also a paid service that does similar to this, except the assistance is provided by trained agents. I have the service and have found it to be invaluable in the few times I've actually needed to use it. I still have some vision, so it actually makes it harder to decide to use the service.
The paid service is http://aira.io. I'm glad BME exists too though, as there are a lot of blind people that currently can't afford Aira. The unemployment rate for blind people is something like a staggering 70%.
The idea behind the app is great, and I do use it occasionally. All of the volunteers I have spoken to have been very helpful. The main problem is video quality, and the fact that you can't just send the volunteer a clear photo to look at. It must be extremely frustrating to read something on a shaky blurry video call.
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 26.3 ms ] threadAira is trying to integrate this kind of technology into smart glasses for the blind.
http://vizwiz.org/data/
Ever thought about how a blind person strikes up a conversation with a stranger whose body language or eye contact cannot be read?
Interesting episode that touches on things like their monetizations strategy, unexpected use cases etc. Definitely worth a listen.
The paid service is http://aira.io. I'm glad BME exists too though, as there are a lot of blind people that currently can't afford Aira. The unemployment rate for blind people is something like a staggering 70%.