microsoft seeing ai now in the uk app store, thoughts?

Have literally tried this app for around 15 minutes this morning. The bar code reading definitely works well. I suspect the face recognition and the location recognition will be of benefit but have not tried either of those to the extent need to make comment about them other than to say the face recognition to 25 years off of my admins age but added ten years to one of my other colleagues! I am looking at this app from the perspective of somebody with very limited vision and access was ok, not so sure how well a user with no vision would cope with it.

I’m glad this has finally come to the UK, and for those reading this in other places, I hope it becomes available in more countries soon, (the release notes for the latest version say it has also just been released in Australia).

I briefly tested it this morning, and I like that it’s been designed with blind people in mind. I’ve tried several apps of this kind, and quite a few of them will work if you have decent photography skills, which, for many blind people, is not the case. This app gives easy to understand guidance for placement of the camera, and because of that I’ve been getting good results quickly, instead of taking picture after picture just to find out what something is, which is what happens with many other apps.

Another aspect of this is that they’ve given a lot of thought to what’s likely to be actually useful. It seems as though nearly every week, there’s a new app that lets the user take a picture of an object and have it identified. It’s great that so many people are making tech for blind/disabled people, but I rarely if ever find simple object recognition useful. I generally want something more specific like having text or a bar code read to me, or hearing a description of an image from a webpage, and this app does all of that and more.

A couple of features I’d like them to add (please correct me if the app already does either of these):

1. The ability to scan multi-page documents, so that you could turn the pages of a book and automatically have each new page scanned and added to the end of the document.
2. A QR code reader (I know there are other apps that do this, including the iOS camera, but it would be a logical addition to this app, and having QR codes automatically detected and scanned would be a great new feature, especially if more people can be encouraged to use them for accessibility.