Seeing AI

Seeing AI

Seeing AI is an app produced by Microsoft that uses a phone camera input to describe the world. It can identify people and guess their emotions when pointed at them, and it can describe products when pointed towards them. The app utilizes AI running locally on the device and is designed to help people with visual impairments "see" the world around them. It allows them to read menus, navigate conference rooms, and fully participate in activities that were previously difficult or impossible.From: Everyday Technologies in Healthcare [2019], Foundations and affordances of workplace assistive technology: The case of mobile and enabling IT for workers with visual impairments [2020]

Pervasive and Emerging Technologies and Consumer Motivation

View Chapter

Purchase Book

Published in Christopher M. Hayre, Dave J. Muller, Marcia J. Scherer, Everyday Technologies in Healthcare, 2019

David Banes

Underlying much of the emerging technology described is the use of AI. AI allows people with a disability to gather and share data through consumer devices and represent it in different formats. It is used to transform data between one medium to another such as auto captioning on YouTube or face recognition on Facebook. Seeing AI, produced by Microsoft, is an app using a phone camera input to describe the world; pointed at a person, it can say who he/she is and guess how he/she is feeling; pointed towards a product, it can describe it using AI running locally on the device. The technology has many applications but has been welcomed by the visually impaired community amongst others.

Foundations and affordances of workplace assistive technology: The case of mobile and enabling IT for workers with visual impairments

View Article

Journal Information

Published in Assistive Technology, 2020

Don Heath, Rakesh Babu

“We recently launched a new app called ‘Seeing AI’ … What it does is it takes some of the cutting-edge work from computer vision and makes it available for someone with visual impairment to be able to see. A colleague of mine at the company has visual impairment. So for the first time, she was telling me, she can go into our cafeteria, read the menu, order the right food, walk into the right conference room knowing that it’s the place where her meeting is, and fully participate, in some sense, at Microsoft, because of AI.” (Fareed Zakaria, 2017).

Explore chapters and articles related to this topic

Pervasive and Emerging Technologies and Consumer Motivation

Foundations and affordances of workplace assistive technology: The case of mobile and enabling IT for workers with visual impairments