Be My Eyes has a mission: to help blind people explore the world around them thanks to smartphone technology. Born in 2015, the app developed by the Danish startup of the same name puts blind users in contact with a network of sighted volunteers who, through a video call, “lend” their eyes to observe and describe what they observe through the device’s video camera.
In the not too distant future, however, there may no longer be a need for volunteers. Be My Eyes is in fact developing a beta version of the application that relies on a virtual assistant based on GPT-4, the most recent version of the Open Ai artificial intelligence model. GPT-4, unlike its predecessor GPT-3.5, is in fact a multimodal system: as input it can accept not only text but also images, whose contents it can scan to contextualize them in response to a written command.
The function developed by Be My Eyes thanks to this ability is called, without too much imagination, Virtual Volunteer. Instead of video calling a live volunteer, users can send an image to the AI-powered virtual one, who then answers users’ questions about the content of the photo.
“We had access [a GPT-4] recently, but we have already seen unmatched performance of any existing image and object recognition system,” said Michael Buckley, CEO of Be My Eyes. “The implications for accessibility globally are profound. In the not too distant future, the blind and visually impaired community will use these tools not only for visual interpretation needs, but also to achieve a greater degree of independence in their lives.” .
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The Be My Eyes developers began experimenting with including GPT-4 in the app in early February. The results obtained so far and the feedback from the beta-testers have been so positive as to convince the startup to speed up the release times of the new function, which could already be open to all users in the next few months. The virtual assistant will not replace humans, it will simply be one of the options available in the application.
“What distinguishes the Virtual Volunteer tool from other image interpretation technologies available today is context, with a deeper level of understanding and conversational skills never seen before in the field of digital assistants,” explained the startup in a post presentation of the new function. “For example, if a user submits a photo of the inside of their refrigerator, the Virtual Volunteer will not only be able to correctly identify the contents, but also extrapolate and analyze what can be prepared with those ingredients. The tool can also offer a set of recipes and send a step-by-step guide on how to prepare them.”
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