Since 2015, Be My Eyes has worked to connect our 6.9 million volunteers to users to assist them with everyday tasks. Our mission is to make the world more accessible for people who are blind or have low vision, which is why, seven months ago, our team began working with the blind community to incorporate AI into the existing Be My Eyes platform. Since then, over 19,000 blind and low-vision beta testers contributed to the design and function of our new AI feature.
Today we are thrilled to announce that Be My AI is officially entering an open beta phase for iOS users and in coming weeks will be available for hundreds of thousands of Be My Eyes users worldwide.
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Using Be My AI in your everyday life is quick and simple. Once you have access, open the Be My Eyes app, click on the ‘Be My AI’ tab, and take a picture. Be My AI will give you a detailed description about it, and you can chat and ask Be My AI further questions to get more information. If you like what Be My AI described, you can send its response and photo to others, or use its description in social media.
And don’t worry - if Be My AI can’t answer all your questions, if you want to check its results, or if you just need a little more description than Be My AI can provide or crave the magic and humanity of working with people, you still can easily reach one of our dedicated volunteers, just like before. They will always be there, in 150 languages all across the globe.
If you want to learn more about Be My AI and how to use it at its best, we have collected the most common questions (and answers!) in our Help Center. Make sure to check them out!
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Wondering what the catch is here. How does this company make money? The resources needed to run something like this at scale is crazy.
They make their money through private partnerships. Google licenses their technology to provide customer support to blind customers, for example.
Okay, but how do you know that, and what is Google purchasing exactly? Nothing obviously explaining this on the site except their generic page: https://www.bemyeyes.com/partners
I have no idea what their business model is, but this would be a great way to collect more data for training various forms of AI. Arguably without harvesting people’s personal data or their creative works.
I also suspect that because it’s an assistive tool, it can probably get a fair bit of grant money.