Airpoly Vision is a free application made by Airpoly designed to help people with visual impairments to identify objects and colors in the environment. It is available for download on the Apple App Store. Here is a link to their official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMdct-5bERQ and supporting video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5g82YNmwmU
IxD
It has a really simple, easy to use and convenient design. Consider times when we have easily decided what to wear to colour coordinate with the perfect shoes, or walked into an office knowing we're walking into the right room or something as simple as knowing what's on your plate. While all these tasks seem ridiculously simple to those with proper vision, you can see the hardships involved in impaired vision. This app allows for users to overcome some very basic hardships. Asking for directions, reading road signs and even shopping alone is made easier. You only need to point the screen in the direction of/ at whatever needs to be labelled and take a picture for it to provide a speech or text of it. This allows people with visibility problems to visualize the space and things around them.
UI
The app has a simple and aesthetically pleasing look. How it works is, once the picture has been captured it gets uploaded to a server that uses a system of convolutional neural network to look through the pictures. It basically breaks it down to different points of interest that can be matched to a particular object. It not only provides an accurate name for the objects its given but also the description in terms of its color and its verb forms that show it being used example, "Man riding bicycle."
UX
There are other apps in the market that target this particular group, that rely mostly on crowdsourcing which works for the most part with extremely good accuracy, but has the downside of slow timing and not to mention the need for an internet connection. Airpoly on the other hand, works without an internet connection making it accessible at all times and even handy for privacy.
The user experience in general seems to be great. The app uses multiple language like English, Spanish, Portuguese etc to make it largely convenient and also allows other users to build on its knowledge of objects.
Another exciting feature of this app is the involvement of users. Its not the same as feedback after since it is just going to update its versions with more options and accuracy but anyhow, you can change its labeling if you know its wrong or not completely accurate. This is of course both extremely useful and also a little ironic since the target audience is the visually impaired who would be the ones needing the assistance and not the ones providing clarifications. Nonetheless this particular function would be useful to improve its accuracy as it has more and more items in its database.
Airpoly vision quite accurately recognizes plants, animals, colour and even currency. While USD is the only currency in its database right now, it is working on adding more. It has some other convenient functions like detecting darkness, it automatically switches on the torch in your phone and once the light is back on again, switches it off.
The app is also extremely sensitive with labeling a person as either man or woman and usually takes more time. It also has the ability to describe emotions at least the most visually visible ones like anger and happiness. However once again it takes considerable time before it calls someone angry.
Airpoly vision does not work in real time however, its best speeds are as less than 3-5 seconds with common day-to-day objects. According to their founders that is the one utility that they consider a true weakness. Its accuracies with objects seem to be increasing the more people use it. Another issue that is solved with more and more people using and correcting is misidentification. Another small issue is that you do need to direct it multiple times for smaller objects as it takes the background and surroundings into effect. So it might go "table..plate..food" to identify the food.
Apart from technological features there's a few other things I'd like to mention. Any sort of artificial intelligence always raises ethical questions about who can modify and use it and how much. One has to wonder who controls for the changes made by users as it is plausible to think of malicious users trying to affect its accuracy for competitive reasons. What's stopping a user from mislabelling things and considering this particular app is aimed at the visually impaired, a wrongful labeling could be, in the worst case, a matter of life and death. A signal colour being misidentified as green instead of red or construction warning signs being misidentified can be extremely dangerous.
I was unable to find it policies on user interference but I'd like to hope that like with any other AI technology, even Airpoly vision takes into account its ethical and moral dilemmas.
As with any tech innovation designed mainly for the disabled, I'd like to hope that feedback and considerations will be taken from visually impaired people.
In conclusion, this app seems to work great and I look forward to using it on Android as soon as its released.
Bibliography
https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/17/aipoly-puts-machine-vision-in-the-hands-of-the-visually-impaired/
https://coolblindtech.com/aipoly-vision-artificial-intelligence-for-your-ioss-camera/
http://tech.aipoly.com/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aipoly-vision-sight-for-blind/id1069166437?mt=8
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