I just learned about BeMyEyes from a Léonie Watson post she wrote last year:
BeMyEyes is one of the most remarkable apps to have emerged in recent years. You sign up either as a sighted volunteer, or a blind or low vision person. If, like me, you fall into the latter category, you can then borrow a pair of eyes from a randomly selected volunteer.
The app is smart enough to connect you with a volunteer who speaks your language, and for whom it is daytime when you make your request. This is especially useful when you’re somewhere that makes it inconvenient to call someone you usually would for help like this – because it’s the middle of the night for them for example.
I’ve used it to remind me of settings on my stove, to figure out air-con controls in hotel rooms, to check the results of a rapid COVID test, and much more besides.
I think I’ll sign up as a volunteer to how it goes.
Léonie’s post was actually more about “BeMyAI”, a new feature of it, that uses ChatGPT to help describe images (of what a visually impaired person needs help with). They says this can help solve “90% of cases”. Leonie’s experience was more mixed. It’s nice that you can use it any hour of the day, not have any guilt you are taking up someone’s time, and ask questions you might be otherwise embarrassed to ask. But it’s also suffers from what a lot of AI suffers with right now: being blatantly and confidently wrong.
(Tagging Matt’s post for his birthday.)
I’ve volunteered and answered a few calls through the app. It’s an interesting experience. I think the hardest part was finding good wording to communicate location and direction, like does “up” mean “up” spatially in real life or “up” in the field of view of the camera… but callers are generally patient and appreciative, even if it takes a few tries.
I’ve signed up for it and so far I’ve had two calls. Would have been 3 but I missed it.
I helped a guy sort laundry and tried to help someone activate Cortana which was sadly deprecated. With the later one, it would help if there was a team viewer type thing.
Though I wonder how Leonie would find iOS’ built in object detector, I wonder if it’s better than BeMyEyes AI.