E45 Seeing AI, Aira

This week’s podcast focusses on technology that gives blind people easier access to visual information.

The hot topic in the blind community on social media since its release a couple of week’s ago is an iOS app from Microsoft called Seeing AI. It’s a Swiss army knife of visual tools, offering some functions available in some other apps, but also breaking new ground in the use of artificial intelligence to give blind people descriptions of people and scenes. An app like this has been the dream of Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer who has worked for Microsoft for over a decade. Thanks to Microsoft’s technology and resources, he’s seeing that dream becoming reality, and is able to share that dream with us in the form of a free app. Jonathan Mosen speaks with Saqib about Seeing AI, then demonstrates the app and how he is already using it daily, including to transform his use of social media.

There is a second service that has gone live recently [...]