A TALKING CAMERA APP

Designed with input from 12 visually impaired Microsoft employees, the Seeing AI app has given 150,000 visually impaired people around the world this year new insights into their surroundings by empowering their phones to tell them what it sees. Thanks to image recognition and artificial intelligence, users can aim their phones at almost anything and receive a vocal announcement of what it is. Facial-recognition technology enables the app not only to name friends as they approach but also suggest whether they appear to be in a good or bad mood. It can also read printed text in books or newspapers aloud. Microsoft engineers continue to refine Seeing AI as they process userengagement data. “We learned we can’t anticipate how the app will be used,” says Anirudh Koul, senior data scientist at Microsoft and Seeing AI project lead.