While the Microsoft Seeing AI has proven to be successful for assisting the blind by describing objects and text, the only issue has been that it’s only been available in English, so you’re crap-outta-luck if that’s not your first language. Thankfully, Microsoft recently updated the free (and currently) iOS-only app with five additional languages that it can support: Dutch, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. This means that Seeing can now process and describe things like signs or the facial expressions of other people to help the blind use the proper words in their (at least from the current six) home languages.
It’s very interesting that other languages (like, I don’t know, the largely-populated countries on this planet that predominantly speak Chinese or Hindi). However, Microsoft is slowly-but-surely making their Seeing computer vision technology AI more accessible in a few European countries (and not just the North America and the UK). It’s pretty concerning that there’s official Android app — especially due to the low barrier to entry (i.e., price) and higher availability of Android phones compared to iOS devices — so here’s hoping that more blind people and more countries are able to gain access to this technology in the near-future…
[Thanks Microsoft and the Apple App Store]
