"You Are My Eyes", Technology Companies Use Technology to Bring Light
By Super Neuro
Scenario description:Technology companies are bringing "light" to the visually impaired through wearable devices, AI and AR technologies.
Keywords:Assisted services, AR, technical care
For some people, their understanding of the world is not as colorful as that of ordinary people.
According to statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2018, there are 36 million blind people worldwide and 217 million people with moderate to severe visual impairment.
How can we help people with visual impairments better experience and explore life? Many people would think of "lending" them a pair of eyes. In fact, some people are really doing this.
Aira, a technology company located in San Diego, USA, provides assistive services to people with visual impairments through wearable devices, AI and AR technologies. Their employees call users "Explorers."
Aira, using technology to "lend" eyes to others
In 2015, Suman Kanuganti (later the founder of Aira) established a deep friendship with Matt Brock, a blind communication professional. After a series of discussions, they decided to use smart devices such as Google Glass, combined with some technologies, to help people with visual difficulties and provide them with convenience in life.
This idea eventually developed into Aira, a company that uses smart glasses to provide assistance to the visually impaired in the form of information services through graphic recognition and voice interaction.
On their website, you can see that Aira has been used in many scenarios.
| Home | Identify drugs, match clothing colors, read recipes, identify verification codes, and read stories to children |
| School | Tour the campus, find a seat, choose a restaurant, find the library, read the exhibition boards |
| Work | Find elevators, browse websites, explain PPTs, organize emails or documents |
| travel | Explore the city, visit parks or zoos, find fitness equipment, visit places of interest, assist with walking |
In the early days, their services required trained professionals to provide them. But in just four years, they have evolved from providing purely human remote services to using technology to improve service quality, including developing hardware equipment and launching an AI service platform. The service experience of their products has also become more complete.
Aira was listed in TIME magazine's list of the 50 most valuable inventions of 2018. In addition, they have also won other awards, such as the 2018 Edison Award (vision enhancement category).
How to help people regain their sight
Aira's name comes from the combination of AI and RA (Remote Assistance). Simply put, their concept is to use the image and audio devices on smart glasses, combined with GPS and Aira's mobile app, to allow remote assistants to become special eyes through visual interpretation services.
Aira has helped many people through their paid services, including navigation, shopping, boarding, etc. There was even an "explorer" who completed a marathon with Aira's glasses.
As the times change, they are also using AI technology to gradually replace manual dependence. Last year, they launched the Horizon smart glasses and launched the AI platform.
This AI platform uses technologies such as natural language processing and image recognition. When working, the AI assistant Chloe can automatically identify objects through the camera on the glasses and provide assistance to users.
Chloe is still undergoing continuous training and improvement, and can now handle some routine tasks, such as recognizing text in books, capturing images of checks, completing common conversations, and giving some suggestions.
But for now, AI cannot handle overly complex tasks, and some scenarios still need to be completed manually.
Aira says the sky is their limit
A few days ago, NVIDIA published a blog post saying that they are using high-performance GPUs to help Aira's development. The article mentioned that Aira uses RTX 2080 Ti GPU arrays to train convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. With such hardcore support, Aira's AI capabilities are bound to be more powerful.
The previously accumulated service data is also of great benefit to Aira's AI model training. According to statistics, they have accumulated about 3 million minutes of labeled data. In addition, they also look for data from ImageNet, Instagram, and other public resources to train their own models.
Aira has been actively working on product applicability in recent years. Their free service Aira Access can already be used in many restaurants, shopping malls, university campuses and airports, and is expanding to more places.
AT&T (the largest Internet service provider in the United States), Wegmans (a large supermarket chain in the United States) and Lyft (Uber's competitor) have currently established partnerships with Aira. In many places, the visually impaired community can feel full of care.
In an interview, when asked about future plans, a person in charge of the company replied:
“In the future, we plan to further enhance the product experience through AI. When it comes to how AI can help the visually impaired, perhaps the sky is the limit.”