This App Helps Blind People Recognize Objects Without Seeing Them

With the right motivation, app developers can do more than just offer us entertainment on the road. One example is the team behind Aipoly, an app that helps blind people “see” the objects around them #mobilemagic

By using artificial intelligence and a phone’s camera, Aipoly can recognize a multitude of objects in real time. There’s no need to snap pictures to make it work. Users simply have to keep the app open, which in return will open the camera, and point in the direction of an object. Aipoly will enable the microphone in order to say aloud in which category it fits or which features it has.

At this moment, the app can recognize both objects and colors, works in seven languages and is available on the App Store (an Android version is going to come soon).

As for what the future holds… the Aipoly Vision team says that it’s working to make it “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.”

At CES 2017, the app won the Best Innovation award and is now free to download on mobile.