As we addressed last week’s topic to Augmented Reality with Augment – the Augmented Reality App, now we need to get into the other technologies emerging around us as well. Companies are experimenting with lots of new technologies to make their businesses more successful and, if they are not planning to travel to mars or do a hyperloop, for a lot of them there is AR, VR and AI.
Artificial Intelligence is getting really popular around us with facebook announcing their future plans (we wrote about Chat Bots and how they are already impacting our lives here). Lots of new initiatives are growing among us and predictions mingle around bots becoming a reality, algorithms that will do all sorts of jobs for us and robots automating a lot of tasks for us is next.
Other than that, Artificial Intelligence is starting to be used in more and more contexts and industries, but this in fact is not something new. AI started emerging in late 90’s but due to the AI effect, many applications are not perceived as AI. The AI effect refers to the situation when something becomes useful and common enough it’s no longer labeled as AI.
Industries ranging from medical diagnosis, stock trading, robot control, law, remote sensing, scientific discovery, toys etc. are all integrated, in a way or another, with Artificial Intelligence but the current evolution of the technology disrupts the way AI is applied. One business got our attention and impressed us in a very pleasant way.
It is called Aipoly and gives vision through Artificial Intelligence, through your mobile phone. It is targeting the Visually Impaired and puts mobile vision in their hands!
The app is based on image recognition and every time you point it on something, it recognizes the object or tells you the color of the object depending on what you’d like to know. The artificial intelligence is able to understand your camera’s input and describe what it sees. It has the ability to continuously learn and the cool thing is that you don’t even need internet to use it.
Aipoly can identify several hundreds of objects just right after you install the iOS app, without any training. There is no need to take pictures, the app will constantly see and think and is able to identify 3 objects in one second. When it comes to colors, the easiest is to compare it to a color picker in real world.
AIpoly’s website also tells us about a new feature that they are currently working on, it will enable it’s users to describe more complex scenes such as a dog near a lamp post.
Aipoly’s co-founder Simon Edwardsson says it recognizes images by using deep learning, which is a machine-learning technique inspired by studies of the brain. It’s the same technology used by Facebook for recognizing faces and Google for searching images.
It is very easy to use the app right after you install it. By pointing the phone’s camera at objects that you would like to identify, Aipoly will speak what it sees in real time (or, at least, what it thinks it sees) and show the object’s name as well on your display.
It is really simple to see what patterns is the app taking into consideration. Shape, lines, curves and colors are the main characteristics that let this mobile app identify objects. Even if the app doesn’t recognizes your objects, it is really cool that you can train it by typing in the correct word that identifies your object. This helps the app learn constantly and once you send inputs, they are uploaded on the server and the startup adds the new descriptions to you app every time they release an update.
“Thanks to the input of many of our users, Aipoly’s algorithms began adjusting to some of the items that have been captioned through the teaching tool. Everyone is getting a smarter app.” sais Aipoly on their blog.
What’s HOT:
(be merry but modest: these are just some bits we found really interesting in this app)
Aipoly’s features help both visually impaired and color blind
It is really good that they thought about the color recognition as well. The app is definitely a step towards helping completely blind people live an easier life and it is great that they help the colorblind in the same time.
Constant learning
Everyone can help Aipoly grow and learn. It is great that the app let’s it’s users collectively gather knowledge for a better app experience. It is becoming smarter with every use and this for sure helps to improve the app faster and make it more accurate so that the visually impaired can have a better experience.
Fun way to recognise objects
If you are looking for a more fun way to recognize objects around you, Aipoly lets you do just that. In settings you can set how you want Aipoly to recognize objects. You got Standard, Likelihood and Fun modes and you should definitely give a try to the fun one. Although, we are not sure how would a visually impaired get to make these changes in settings on his own.
What’s NOT:
(don’t despair: they’re just things we could see done better in the mobile app)
Takes a lot of storage space
The app is huge compared to other apps that we usually use. Although, this is not a big surprise because it runs offline and in a way it is really cool that they managed to optimize so many objects in this space. But for a lot of people this can be a problem.
Not that accurate, YET!
Going through our office, Aipoly was able to recognize a lot of objects although it still needs some more work. Reading more about the app, we discovered that now it can recognize about 1000 objects and that the company is looking into extending this number. This sounds normal taking into consideration the number of different objects around us. But we have a dilemma, how will it run offline with that number of objects to recognize?
Design
In our opinion the UI is very far from what it should be. Taking into consideration the target user of the app, it’s small buttons from the bottom of the screen that change from objects to color recognition is really hard to tap. Get him into setting or Info and he needs to shut the app down to get back into objects recognition again. We believe it is the biggest issue with the app and they really need some improvements there.
Luckily we know a full stack mobile development agency that has some brilliant app designs that they should check out – it’s called Tapptitude.
Bottom line
All in all, it is a good app that you should definitely share with the people in need, but also see how it uses Artificial Intelligence as it’s main technology. For sure it needs more work but as in the application’s release notes is also explained, it is not a substitute for human or canine visual assistants, but slowly it will certainly be of use for visually impaired iOS users.
(Note: We are not affiliated or endorsed by this app. We just really love mobile apps and we want to share them with the world and give people great mobile experiences)
Website: http://aipoly.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aipoly
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aipoly1/
App proposed by:
Tamas Viski
Content Marketer at tapptitude
Sinziana Chitea
Content Marketer
Content Marketing Specialist, teasing everyone into taking cute pictures for Instagram. Discovering the tech world bit by bit, and writing it all down on the agency's blog. Enthusiastic about everything visual. And sweets and dogs.
