The main difference is that Aira is not free, but you're helped by professional agents, who had to undergo various background checks and sign airtight NDAs. They have a 5-minutes-per day free plan, and businesses can also offer free service if you're using Aira with one of their products.
My biggest frustration with Aira is that you need to own a phone number in one of the supported countries, which is a pain to set up and maintain.
All agents also have TeamViewer installed, so they can quickly and efficiently help with computer issues. I've been using it for over a year now (with the free plan), and I definitely recommend.
Airtight, as in, people routinely use this to interact with sensitive corporate data, probably including PII (but not sure), with full approval from their legal department. Aira signing agreements with companies to provide accommodations for employees is not unheard of. It basically provides blindness accommodations as a service.
Edit: there's also a pretty rigorous screening / background checking process. As far as I remember, the number of people who actually manage to get through it is somewhere below 10%.
There are some useful one off things here for sure. Personally, I always feel awkward asking for help from strangers, even if I have my stick out. For me, these sorts of things have never delivered on the hope. Rideshare apps are quite the disaster, and I tend to just not go places instead of using them.
I know this off topic, but what I've found most helpful is good public transit, regular patterns I can grock, and of course friends (I fear getting hit every time I cross a road, unless I'm with someone).
I tend to be more free and independent in places like Japan or China than the US (I only speak English, and am American)
I've never used Be My Eyes, but I have it installed, just in case I guess. I feel the opposite about ride share apps. I feel like I have some freedom again finally.
I understand, and I am sighted. I don’t like asking strangers for help, either. But I love to give help, and I would be happy to help if you asked. I don’t know how to reconcile the difference.
You’ve hit on a strong point “independence”. Hypothetically if this was done via an app with advanced AI that could see and describe the world around you, would you feel more confortable using it? Knowing that it’s not powered by another human?
For me, definitely. Things that work off my input alone (blind stick, public transit, apps with no other person involved) really help me feel independent and I'm much more likely to use it.
I am glad that this (and ride share) are workin for other blind folk though.
I've found that behavior varies and almost seems independent of me informing them I'm blind.
-They will park far away or across the street and wait for me to come to them. But I have a hard time understanding that they are there or there for me.
-They will ask me things like,"Is this the place." to which the only thing I can say is,"I have no idea." or lie and say,"Yes, this is fine." Then get out and try to understand where I am. I've actually ended up further away than I started before somehow.
-I've had people be very short with me for my inability to locate them and leave (Or other forms of being upset with me for not being able to function in this relatively simple contract.)
I also feel this kind of shit fairly intensely and it heavily dissuades me. I don't know if the tech will get there, but a self driving car would be a complete game changer.
I’ve only received a couple calls in the time I’ve had the app but my overall experience was great. Helped a guy cross a busy intersection and another woman pick out some low-fat milk. Feels good to help man.
2 seconds lag is pretty long, and easy to notice. Nobody can cross the street in 2 seconds. So if there isn't enough margin of safety to be sure it is safe with the lag, then there wasn't enough without it too.
Most likely the help was just help find the button and then tell the blind person when the walk light lit up. Most busy intersections have a light for pedestrians, but many do not have any help for the blind. This is very much region specific - when I was in Germany all lights had a beep (in that one city). I've never heard such beeps elsewhere, but things can and do change faster than I travel to other cities.
We're also currently trialling Bluetooth add-on transceivers to the cone functionality to make crossing even easier.
One of the problems of the cones is that once the cone turns you often need to reposition yourself in the centre of the entry to the crossing before setting off (in order not to stray into traffic or bump into barriers).
With the prototype Bluetooth beacon your device can receive the signal when it is safe to cross whilst you're stood in the centre of the entry.
Australia has a very distinct sound literally everywhere that has a traffic light pedestrian crossings, and has for as long as I remember. To the point that I was shocked upon going overseas and finding places without them. There’s numerous YouTube videos of foreigners showing it off when they visit Australia.
The beep comes from behind a steel panel just under the button for the lights too, so if you’re both blind and deaf you can put your finger on it to feel the pulses of the tone.
Fun fact: Billie Ellish sampled it for the chorus of “Bad Guy”. Trance DJ Giuseppe Ottaviani also made a track prominately featuring it, “Crossing Lights”.
In the Netherlands we have a kind of rattle. Slow when red fast when green and intermittent when about to go from green to red. Although I must say they are not everywhere.
Yea, i'm with you. I worry about all the tiny little details and this type of app is wide open and my concern that i would get something wrong is near crippling my desire to help.
It's definitely my own neurosis here, but my desire to help is proportional to my desire to not hurt them. I'd love to help them, but i really don't want to mess something up for them either.
Well it’s entirely possible that they have to cross the street, so if nobody helps them on the app they just go ahead and pray for the best. But getting involved makes me feel responsible, not to mention the possible legal liability.
It's not like most of us are completely helpless when it comes to crossing streets. We know when it might be unsafe, and if a bus is approaching and you tell me to go, I wouldn't. But it might help a lot to actually reach the right street/find the second inaccessible traffic light/etc. You could also make sure that you describe the potential route to be taken, which might make it safer still. Sometimes a "A little left" or "You're turning onto another road" can be very helpful, which I assume was more or less the case. :)
I've had Be My Eyes installed on my phone for years but I never had the courage to answer a call. Part of it is that English is my second language, but fear of exposing someone to danger was even bigger. This situation sounds like the sum of all fears.
I helped a blind woman figure out why her computer wasn't working / talking to her -- it was off. I also helped an old woman figure out which pills to take. They were ordered numerically, but she couldn't read the numbers. To be fair, the printing wasn't very good.
I've received calls but by the time I pick up (between 2-3 rings) someone else has already picked up the call and is likely helping the caller. I've had the app on my phone for nearly a year and haven't yet been able to handle a call so it seems that people are getting the help promptly when they need it.
More importantly it means that a blind person isn't constantly bothering the same few people all the time. If every blind person needs help once a day, every volunteer only needs to help once a week. This means you can be helpful without being annoyed by how often a stranger is bothering you.
On that note, i made a comment in another thread here about how i'm terrified of getting something wrong/etc. However, if the app were to connect me more frequently with people i've positively helped, bonded with, etc (mutually i imagine, tinder-esque hah), it feels less intimidating to mess up if i knew the person a bit.
It seems to me part of my fear resolves around a vacuum of fire and forget - never being able to correct my mistake, or help them more to make up for it, or etc.
Speaking as someone who worked as a relay operator for the deaf and hard of hearing, there's likely a reason this doesn't happen. People using these services largely want them to be a transparent layer between them and the thing they're trying to access. Basically the person is there to provide the same access a sighted/hearing person would have. If they form a relationship with the person helping them, they may be less inclined to read sensitive documents. Additionally this gives the helpers a more clear window into the life of another person (which can be used nefariously) rather than, more often, bits and pieces without context.
It is pretty awesome. Honestly the one complaint I've heard is that helpers are sad that they aren't getting more calls and get super excited when they finally get one. Which really is the best kind of the problem to have.
Indeed, the ratio works out, at least for me. I get help even at night time. As far as I understand, the algorithms uses distance and language to find a helper. So if nobody near me is awake, I can still get help from people speaking my language which live in a different timezone.
Be My Eyes is my personal favourite service in the 21st century.
It has helped me in countless times since I use it. From identifying a dead mouse my cat apparently hunted to creating a makeshift talking LCD display by pointing your phone at it. There are OCR apps of course, but they dont always work in some situations. It is a total relief to have a pair of human eyes in your pocket available at every time of the day.
I’ve heard great things about this app from other blind friends, but I’m still not sure if I should try it out. I am introverted, and still don’t like talking to strangers on the phone, which is why I prefer using apps with OCR or object recognition.
I would encourage you to try it out. The expectation on the other side is extremely low -- no one expects a conversation or honestly more than a two-word pleasantry. And the camera defaults to the back camera, so no one sees anyone's face.
My last call:
Me: "Hello?"
Them: "Hi. Can you tell me which can is soup?"
Me: "Can I see the other one?"
Them: "This one?"
Me: "That's cream of tomato."
Them: "Thank you."
Me: "You're welcome."
There's 4+ million volunteers and less than 300k blind. You are very unlikely to ever run into someone you know and the volunteers are literally waiting and wanting to help you.
I get that you're introverted -- I'm the same way. With that being said, use the tools that you have! I have anxiety answering the calls but I do it anyway because I know that I can help someone that needs it.
The person that you talk to, you will never see or hear from them again. It's a fleeting moment of one human helping another.
The thing is: its totally anonymous and there is afaik no way to know who either party is. I feel you can benefit a lot from it.
The people I have helped range from a total computer specialist who could not read something (I was astonished at the things he did with te computer) to a lady asking me whether her dress was stained or not.
I suspect there are use cases that this is just a really good fit for. One session I had was helping a person find their friend in a park when they had got separated. I'm sure she could have managed other ways, but this was very quick (at least at my end).
I live independently in a household with two other blind people. We use Be My Eyes
alongside object recognition / OCR apps like Seeing AI. The two types
of app compliment one another quite nicely.
I'm introverted myself, but I feel a lot less anxious ringing up an
anonymous stranger and asking them for a few minutes of assistance than
I do about imposing on sighted friends / family.
I took some lessons about not being an imposition or a burden to heart very early in life.
For fiercely self-reliant blind people, the smartphone is a gift from the gods.
I worked with Google Glass (Enterprise) in the past and think this might be a really good use case for Glass... Realtime streaming without using hands. Voice activation and a speaker in your ear all could be really helpful.
This is like having a spy on the street 24/7, but instead of cameras above like in London, cameras everywhere sending data from all the world to the USA for being analyzed and recorded forever.
For me this is dystopia. You can't get out of your house without being recorded all the time, just like in China.
This is a really dark interpretation and I think doesn't fully consider the facts on the ground. Such cameras are liable to capture minutes per day of footage from a tiny minority of individuals conspicuously holding up their phones and talking to an agent.
Statistically probably zero minutes of your life will be captured by parties using this annually while you are constantly captured on security cameras everywhere you go in public.
Your concern is approximately like a gut shot individual worrying if they might or might not get a splinter.
A dystopia where blind people (>4% of the population if you include all major visual impairments) occasionally livestream (but don't store) video in public places? There's plenty of dystopian things about our world but this is about 1000x less invasive than CCTV cameras.
Glass always ran a custom version of Android. So like any phone, the camera could be run by good or bad actors. But, without hardware modification the 'recording' light would always light up to make those around aware that the camera is working.
And yes, the term "Glassholes" was used for 24/7 streamers.
Another cool thing is that you can turn their phone's flashlight on and off. A lot of blind people don't bother turning lights on because it doesn't make a difference to them.
In the early 2000's I created an app called ButtonWiz that made web buttons. I was in a funny mood and gave the buttons crazy descriptive names like "spicy fire red".
I started to get lots of registrations on the new version and then I started to get positive feedback from users with vision impairments. Apparently, they liked selecting the buttons with my quirky names. It was a pretty cool niche to serve.
I have has this app installed for at least a year, but only received one call that ended up being a training/example call. It seems well made, just perhaps more volunteers than users
This is a very cool service, I've been signed up for a while now.
It does have a small usability problem, perhaps because of the balance of "volunteers" and people it is serving. You get a number of incomplete calls or unclear notifications, and because it doesn't happen often it's hard to remember how it should be responding.
There's a little-known feature of iOS called "sound recognition" that constantly listens and pops up an alert when it recognizes certain sounds that need attention, such as a crying baby, doorbell, or siren.
There's of remote sign language interpretation and real time captioning services available. In the US, we have publicly funded video relay service (which translates between sign language and English for phone calls) and captioned calling (which provides captions for telephone calls). There are commercial equivalents of these services available for in person interactions and other countries.
I don't know of any apps, but 20 years ago at least there were state run services for this. You call a number and someone will translate between your voice call and the ttd that the deaf use. (20 years ago a friend of mine worked for such a service, we have both moved on but I assume the service still exists)
My understanding is that it's majority abuse -- people outside USA using it to call electronics stores to try to make fruadulent orders (to the point where stores refuse service to TDD users), and phone companies collecting huge fees for running the service.
My wife installed this app and waited so long to receive a call. She has now received a couple of calls and she was so happy her experience has certainly been great.
This begs the question - can a seeing-eye dog be replaced by a wearable camera, an ear piece or tactile feedback and an AI? I assume the raw power needs make this not tenable at the moment, but this will hopefully be the future - short of the Geordi Laforge visor/ artificial eyeball scenario.
(edit) saw the link to MS AI below. Cool stuff - the processing is done remotely, that's still awesome, my power needs comment was for local / low latency requirements.
I've been using this app (as a seeing person) for several years now and have received only two calls. It was pretty cool to be able to help people out.
I love the concept behind Be My Eyes and have answered a few calls as a sighted person.
I've always wanted to apply this short, synchronous (or not), crowd sourced community support to other areas of need.
What are other problems that could be addressed with widespread community support via smartphones or computers that require minimal commitment from the helper like Be My Eyes?
Beta readers/listeners. Sometimes I just want to have someone take a look or listen at something I made to see if my familiarity with it obscures a glaring flaw. Getting people who say they want to to actually follow through is often a blocking struggle.
This makes total sense. I've experienced the need for an impartial and non-invested yet thoughtful/knowledgable eye too. I was thinking more non-profit/greater good focused, but I like this and thank you for sharing!
I actually felt good and hopeful for the future after reading about this company/service. I am curious if you have any public articles written about your “purpose and profit” model and how it is working out / evolving. It could be quite inspirational for entrepreneurs trying to come up with ideas that help the world and are economically viable at the same time.
This is cool. But I'll admit to the one reason I won't install it: live video chats mean I might get completely stuck on the phone with the nicest stranger who just wants to chat and that gives me tremendous anxiety. I can't be rude.
I'd love an arms length version that pops up images or short video clips in "near" real time.
On reddit there is a group of volunteers that describe images - /r/descriptionplease. Something like this, perhaps, with short video clips as you mentioned, would be a nice feature.
This might actually be of interest to the developers. Maybe there is some reason you never get picked. I worked with someone who couldn't log into any company systems for his first month because it didn't like his name.
It's more just that they have a 16:1 ratio of volunteers to blind/low-vision people. Many others on this thread have reported the same. It's a great problem to have as a free service.
I was the one who needed help, not the one who helped, but my issue was some handwriting ion a piece of paper that OCR couldn't deal with. The handwriting wasn't in english, and Be My Eyes is the only service of this kind that lets you select a different language. I received help, and the process went pretty smoothly.
Pretty easy. You open the app, click "call first available volunteer", and you're good to go. There's also a "specialized help" button, which lets you quickly connect to accessibility support hotlines for some companies, like Google and Microsoft for example.
> I wonder if at least some of that might someday be done equally well by a computer which would be available 24/7
It already is to some degree. E.g. I have an application on my iPhone which reads the value of bills (in various currencies) with no noticeable delay, and another that can act as a colour detector although that is less reliable; maybe more useful if you want to know which is the light vs dark thing.
Is there something that's going to be able to output "black with a picture of 3 wolves on it, and also it's stained"?
For the cans, you might be able to have it identify corn vs green beans, maybe. But can you get it to tell you "hey rotate the one in the middle a bit, I can't see the label"?
The finding a friend in the park seems real hard, depending on parameters.
My point isn't that these are impossible problems. It's just that a human can currently do them better than a machine, even if the basic capabilities are doable in AI. At the very least it'd probably take a ton of engineering to expose all of that in any useful way.
First order color in good lighting is easy: is this sweater red or blue. Much harder "does this scarf match this sweater".
text recognition is only solved in pretty well controlled situations also.
Contextual adjustment in situations like this is something humans are really good at. You can easily imagine an automated system that works for some of these things, but is much slower and harder to use.
1. Woman asking what color a sweater was, to confirm its color. Was maybe a 30 second call.
2. Teenager with a box of paint supplies wondering if the box has an expiration date, since the paint felt weirdly thick. 2 minute call, then we chatted a few minutes.
I helped a person who needed to find out which container in his fridge contained low-fat or high-fat milk. Another person just asked me about the color of two shirts that were lying on the bed that he/she wanted to wear.
This. The number of calls I get from this app for people struggling to enter captchas in non-accessibility friendly websites is not funny. Such websites should be named and shamed somewhere in today's age. This is from India, BTW.
Other situations I got calls for:
- Help with navigating the installation wizard of some software.
- A person trying to locate his right-foot's slipper while he had the other one on. This was a really wild one where I had to ask him to walk around the room, show underneath the bed, around some other objects etc. But to no avail. Finally, he thanked and disconnected saying he was tired :(.
- Help with reading railway tickets, magazine articles, textbook chapters.
There was a lawsuit here in the US against dominos that stated that the ADA ought to apply to a company's online presence as well as to their physical location. Hopefully in the long term such sites will have to be accessible.
I wasnt able to find on their site how they use all the produced user data (and users waive any rights for it, if I got the user agreement right). While I like the idea of the service, I think some transparency on how it uses generated content would be useful.
It works pretty well anyway, they have some sort of request queue management so that if you don't pick up pretty quickly it will try others, and from the outside looks like they probably try multiple people anyway.
So if you get a notification and you are available, great. Otherwise someone else will get it.
Most problems that people encounter are synchronous. I cannot even think of a single scenario where identifying things in a picture would be useful to anyone after the fact. It's not surprising that they don't offer a service that wouldn't be useful to anyone.
I'm sitting at home unmotivated to do any serious work today, and I came across this and figured, why not, good deed time!
...
Installed the add, had to signup and give out an email address (why?) and then I did the tutorial video... And they said because there are so many volunteers it might take a few weeks before you even handle one call.
...
While I'd like to help, I'd much rather "sign-up" for a time, and then just handle say 30 min of straight calls. So I guess I won't be a big help here, but glad a lot of people are available for others.
...
Why don't we have something similar for...
(complete the list...)
The main difference is that Aira is not free, but you're helped by professional agents, who had to undergo various background checks and sign airtight NDAs. They have a 5-minutes-per day free plan, and businesses can also offer free service if you're using Aira with one of their products.
My biggest frustration with Aira is that you need to own a phone number in one of the supported countries, which is a pain to set up and maintain.
All agents also have TeamViewer installed, so they can quickly and efficiently help with computer issues. I've been using it for over a year now (with the free plan), and I definitely recommend.