App for blind people: Aipoly helps the blind 'see'

App for blind people: Students at Singularity University at NASA Research Park, CA, have created an app that allows blind people to identify the world directly in front of them using machine vision technology.

The app for blind people, Aipoly, is an intelligent assistant for the visually impaired that empowers them to explore and understand their surroundings through computer vision and audio-feedback.

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The app for blind people: Aipoly

“The power is in helping us construct the mental picture. And not everybody has the same skill at creating mental images,” says Steve Mahan, president of the Santa Clara Blind Centre and Google’s self-driving car’s first user. “Most of us are trying to do [that]. Knowing where we are is sometimes more than an address.”

The user takes a picture that is automatically uploaded to the Aipoly servers, where it is analysed and tagged, and a description is sent back and read out loud using text-to-speech. This means that blind people may be able to see what their kids are wearing each day, recognise street signs, find objects that are out of reach, and have freedom to purchase gifts for their friends by themselves.

“We are a team of seriously ambitious engineers and entrepreneurs on a mission to build scalable vision intelligence. We work towards a future where human intelligence is enhanced through artificially intelligent agents able to outperform our memory and recognition of reality”, say Alberto & Simon, co-founders of Aipoly.

Aipoly has helped over 350,000 people

“Aipoly has helped over 350,000 people with visual impairment explore the world through Aipoly Vision, won 12 national and international awards including the CES2017 Best of Innovation Award and is a competitor in the $5M AI Xprize.

We are always looking for exceptional talent to join us. You’ll be able to work on challenging real-world vision AI problems alongside other remarkable individuals. Our office is based in the heart of San Francisco.”

The machine vision algorithm is optimised for use by the visually impaired with training in street signs and objects commonly used by blind people.

Machine vision, or computer vision, is an exponential technology that has more than doubled in accuracy between 2012 and 2013. Convolutional neural networks are used to identify the elements within a picture and neural image caption generation to feed back a semantic description of its content.

There are 285M visually impaired people in the world and in the next 5 years, two thirds of them will become smartphone users.

As for the bigger vision, “developing this technology further could help us identify and search for objects around our homes and outdoors like we do with websites online,” says Aipoly cofounder Alberto Rizzoli.

Singularity University was founded in 2008 by Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer in blind technology having created optical character recognition (OCR) and the first text-to-speech synthesizer, with over 40 years of experience in the field.

“This complements the work that Ray Kurzweil has done,” says Aipoly cofounder and 2012 Young Australian of the Year Marita Cheng. “In every focus group, people mention a Kurzweil technology they use to get about their daily lives.”