This smartphone app is 'eyes and ears' for the disabled

Technology is making everyday tasks easier for all who remain tech savvy but this revolutionary app is winning hearts with helping the blind and visually impaired people.

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Named ‘Aipoly’, the free app tells you what it sees and promises to give blind, visually impaired and color-blind people a great experience of the world.

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), this revolutionary app actually “sees” for the blind.

This uses convolutional neural networks directly on your mobile phone. This AI is able to understand your camera’s input and describe out loud what it sees.

Aipoly has the ability to identify thousands of things. You just have to turn your application on and hold it before an object and it will almost immediately tell you what it is. It also has the ability to differentiate among a range of colors.

“In the near future, Aipoly will also understand complex scenes, and the position of objects within it, so it can describe the relationships between the items it sees, such as “a dog near a lamp post”, ” reads an Aipoly statement.

It does not just stop here. An object’s different description can also be fed into Aipoly as you get option to teach Aipoly about new objects.

Aipoly on its website has shared feelings and experiences of some people who used this app.

“I can see this changing the way that I walk down the street. The exploration, the willingness to investigate something more than I would otherwise do if I didn’t have an immediate assistance from a fellow bystander,” shares Deputy Director Lighthouse Center Scott Blanks.

“This has a lot of power, and I really can see it completely changing the way that I get from one place to another,” he said.

CEO Santa Clara Valley Blind Center Steve Mahan said: “The power here is in helping us construct the mental picture. And not everybody has the same skill at creating mental images, but most of us are trying to do that.”

President Silicon Valley Council of the Blind Rob Turner is amazed at the way this app works.

“When I’m walking around it would be wonderful to have access to street signs, maybe even just being able to get a perspective. Hey, what’s around here, what am I looking at? What building is in front of me? What kind of car is this? I might not even have all the possible ideas of how much this will be useful to me.”

“I would love to take it to the wild: Take it to the gym and see what equipment is there, take it hiking, go on a walk with my kids and see what we’re all seeing and explain things to them,” said Vice President Lighthouse Center for the Blind Lisa Maria Carvalho.

Aipoly is designed by a team of engineers and entrepreneurs “on a mission to build scalable vision intelligence”. Aipoly won 12 national and international awards including the CES2017 ‘Best of Innovation Award’.