NVIDIA and Microsoft let the blind see via Seeing AI app

NVIDIA gives some attention to Seeing AI, a free app that helps blind and low vision people to recognize objects. The app is available via the Apple Store and essentially narrates the world. In a blog post, NVIDIA explains Microsoft researchers trained the neural network using a NVIDIA Titan X GPU, and offloaded the heavier lifting to an Azure cloud instance running NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs.

A live demo of the app showed just how powerful it can be. Koul had a colleague join him on stage, and when he launched the app on his smartphone and pointed it toward his co-worker, it declared that it was looking at “a 31-year-old man with black hair, wearing glasses, looking happy.”

It could’ve been even better if the colleague was on his list of contacts, as Seeing AI integrates with a user’s contacts to identify friends by name.