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While Aipoly's AI is not yet sophisticated enough to describe the details displayed in a diagram, it is able to understand certain images and communicate them to the user. "It can also be useful when you're in an unfamiliar area, as it could be used to recognize local landmarks, or in an education setting to describe diagrams in textbooks or images without captions."
![color identifier app for blind color identifier app for blind](http://www.utahcounciloftheblind.org/og1.jpg)
"Where this technology comes in handy is when you don't know what color something is or when there are items inside a container," he says. And for free.Ĭhris Danielsen, a spokesperson for the NFB who has been blind since birth, tells Newsweek that object recognition usually isn't a problem for blind people if they can touch it. Aipoly Vision aims to take this one step further. While some have criticized its relatively high cost ($99), the KNFB Reader has proved invaluable in helping blind and visually impaired people carry out tasks like reading menus in restaurants or understanding printed instructions. Developed through a partnership between the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and Ray Kurzweil (one of the founders of the Singularity University), the KNFB Reader app allows users to listen to an audio readback of printed text. Text recognition is another struggle for blind people, though this has already been largely solved through an app called KNFB Reader. What's more, users can "teach" the app about objects it doesn't recognize-benefiting both themselves (later on) and other users. In its current form it can also distinguish between different brands and explain to the user what's in an image printed or on a screen.
#COLOR IDENTIFIER APP FOR BLIND UPDATE#
An update expected to be released by the end of the month will be able to recognize around 5,000 objects. The version of the app that Edwards is testing is able to identify around 1,000 objects and any color. But with Aipoly, says Cheng "no one knows what you're looking at." Our system can recognize three objects per second." Bringing in a third party-like those volunteer apps do-also isn't ideal for those who want privacy. "Current methods require an Internet connection and can take anywhere up to two minutes. "The thing that's special about our app is that it's all done in real time," Cheng says. "We found that their biggest frustration was having to ask what things are." Before Aipoly Vision, a visually impaired person travelling solo had only one option besides asking for help: to rely on apps that use volunteers to help identify things via video calls. "When we were first coming up with the idea we spoke to 88 blind people and asked what they wanted," says Marita Cheng, one of the app's creators. The neural networks and deep learning algorithms that power it may be complex, but how it works is simple: Users point their phone at any day-to-day object and the app speaks out what it is seeing.
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Born out of the Singularity University in California-an institution set up in 2008 at NASA Research Park to produce "exponential technologies to address humanity's grand challenges"-Aipoly Vision combines recent advances in artificial intelligence with the standard technology found in an iPhone. Other early users of the app have called it "game changing" and on par with self-driving cars for its potential to transform the lives of blind people. "That doesn't happen very often to a middle-aged man." "When it immediately told me what was surrounding me, I was completely overcome with tears of joy," says Edwards. Edwards, 56 and legally blind since birth, had signed up as an early tester for the smartphone app that claims to help the visually impaired people "see" the world around them. The first time Mark Edwards used Aipoly Vision, he cried.