Be My Eyes: A Free Smart Phone App for Vision Loss

Hadley

Be My Eyes: A Free Smart Phone App for Vision Loss

Presented by Ricky Enger

Ricky Enger: Welcome to Hadley Presents. I'm your host, Ricky Enger, inviting you to sit back, relax, and enjoy a conversation with the experts. In this episode, we discuss getting visual information through the free Be My Eyes app. Our guest is the CEO of Be My Eyes, Mike Buckley. Welcome to the show, Mike.

Mike Buckley: Thanks so much for having me, Ricky. It's a pleasure.

Ricky Enger: I am delighted to have you here. I mean, if there is one app on my phone that gets used at least once a day and often way more than that, it's Be My Eyes. So, it's wonderful to have the chance to chat with you and just to get the info out there for people who may not be familiar with Be My Eyes. Before we do that though, I'm wondering if we can get a bit of info about you. Just tell us a bit about yourself.

Mike Buckley: I'm a husband and a dad of two daughters, aged 18 and 16. I grew up in New York City, primarily in Brooklyn and Queens. I spent most of my career working in consulting until 2007 when I opened an office for a consulting firm on the west coast of the United States in San Francisco and became kind of immersed in technology.

After the consulting gig I had a role at Facebook and then I worked at Tulio. In the middle there I worked on the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign, and December of 2022 I took the job as CEO of Be My Eyes after having been an investor and board member of the company.

It has been a wild year and a half ride since then, but I wouldn't trade any piece of it. I've learned so much and the interactions that I've had with the blind and low vision community have been the most rewarding of my career, and I've learned more in the last year and a half than probably the prior decade.

Ricky Enger: That's fantastic. And you are so right that a lot has happened within that year and a half that you've been with Be My Eyes, and we're going to dive into at least some of that here on the show today. Be My Eyes has been around since about 2015, and they started with this feature where you call a volunteer and get some information. So I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind just talking about that initial feature. What exactly is this and what do people need to have to be able to use the call a volunteer feature?

Mike Buckley: So in about 2013, our founder Hans, who's a Danish furniture craftsman, who's losing his eyesight, got frustrated by having to call family and friends all the time to help him with some of his sight needs. He decided to launch this app, which works on any smartphone, so any phone that has a camera and the ability to do any kind of video.

He launches this app in the world where someone who's blind or has low vision, through the press of one button can be immediately and seamlessly connected with a volunteer who speaks their language and is in their time zone and literally can help with anything.

And how it works is, the blind or low vision user points their smartphone at whatever visual interpretation they need, and the volunteer answers the questions. This could be everything from, hey, is this my green sweater? Where is the can of tomato soup? Is this the shampoo or conditioner in my hotel? Am I at the right airport gate?

It's this beautiful merging of technology and human kindness. We now do over a million calls a year in 150 countries in 180 languages. Well over 90% of the calls are successful and the ones that aren't successful are usually because of connectivity issues or telecom issues.

There are over 7.4 million volunteers of Be My Eyes, and what I would say to anyone listening to your podcast is, the volunteers love these calls. They talk about it as the best day of their week or the best hour or 10 minutes in their day. Most of the calls are really short. Someone just wants a piece of information. Does my sweater match my pants?

Ricky Enger: Exactly.

Mike Buckley: Am I at airport gate C9? So they're really short, most of them, and very successful. But we've also had calls where I helped a guy kind of walk through the streets in a town in India because he had lost his way and just was showing me the street signs.

I've helped someone find their dog's bone in a very big field. It took us about 15 minutes, but it works, and the volunteers love it. If you look at the ratings from the people who are blind or who have low vision using our app, they rate it very, very highly. And I know you've used the app, Ricky.

Ricky Enger: Oh yes.

Mike Buckley: I certainly don't want to speak for you, but feedback from our community is magical and beautiful and I'm very thankful for it.

Ricky Enger: Oh, I absolutely love it. It's been fascinating to see just how many volunteers there are, and I've heard volunteers say, "I didn't get a call this week. I'm so disappointed. I was really hoping that I would."

You have gone through some really great examples of just some practical things that people can use Be My Eyes for. One of my favorites is, “I'm in a hotel, please tell me the difference between this decaf, which I will not drink, and the good stuff, the caffeinated coffee, which I do need.” So many different things that you can get assistance with. I dropped my pill on the floor, and I need to get it before my dog does.

So yeah, all of these things are so helpful. And in fact, there's a community tab where people can sort of share their stories. I'm wondering what is the most unique story that you've heard that someone was using Be My Eyes that you just never would've thought about?

Mike Buckley: I had an experience personally where I read a woman's holiday cards to her and described the images of them as well. It doesn't strike me that that's too surprising, but it was just this beautiful moment that I had with this person for seven or eight minutes, and I don't think I would've thought that would be a use for it. People have helped someone find a lost bird in their home.

Ricky Enger: Oh wow.

Mike Buckley: Any and all sorts of navigation. Literally the only limits of the service really are the limitations on imagination and human kindness. And I don't know, I'm a pretty positive person, I think our imaginations are boundless and I think human kindness is exceptional. So there are all sorts of remarkable and beautiful use cases all the time.

Ricky Enger: Yes, indeed. If that weren't enough, I mean one app can do all of this, but Be My Eyes didn't stop there. You've been adding features and one of these is the service directory. So this has been around for a bit, but you've recently done a pretty interesting update to it.

I'm wondering if you can talk about number one, what the service directory is, how does it help people, and two, what is this latest update where it's a bit better even than it was say a year ago?

Mike Buckley: Yeah, thanks for asking about that. In the thousands of conversations I've had with people who are blind or have low vision, one of the things that you hear a lot is how frustrating and painful it can be to try to navigate customer service if you have to call a provider of services, whether it's Amazon or Apple or it doesn't matter.

There are a couple of challenges there. First is actually finding the number to get a human being. A lot of companies have gone to these systems where they kind of hide that number a little bit because it costs money to have people in a call center and service a call. And so, what we've done is, starting with 600 companies but eventually we're going to have many, many thousands of companies that will allow you as the blind or low vision user of Be My Eyes to press one button and seamlessly be automatically connected to that company's customer service operations.

We think that this is an important service to the community. We also added additional services for businesses that work with us and actually enhance this customer service experience. So, you press the button for whatever the name of the company is, and you just get connected to the normal audio call. But folks that pay us a yearly fee and have a yearly contract with us, we enable a one-way video call with those customer experiences, which makes them so much better. Right?

Imagine that you're trying to figure out how to hook up your cable box or your kid's PlayStation or you have a computer problem or you're trying to determine a defect in a product that you bought, being able to show that to a customer service representative makes that experience so much better for you as the consumer, but also for the agent and the company providing the service.

So, a service directory is really about putting the world's biggest customer service repository of information in your hands every day, whenever you want it, whenever you need it.

Ricky Enger: I love this because even as an experienced technology user, as you say, a lot of times they will bury the contact information really deep somewhere. And if you are struggling with your technology right now or if it's all pretty overwhelming and all you want to do is call someone, having this ability where you just press one button on your app, and you're connected is a beautiful thing.

For example, if you are struggling with getting logged into Hadley, Hadley is one of these partners that you can get connected with by video so that you can point your camera at perhaps your PC screen where you're trying to log in and we can give you that idea of where you are and here's where you need to be. So, what a fantastic service, I love it.

I'm surprised we've made it this far and AI has not come out of either of our mouths, but it's time to change that now. I think AI is everywhere. People are talking about it. It seems to be in everything, sometimes with good results and sometimes maybe not so much. However, with Be My Eyes this is just one of the incredible uses of AI that I've seen. Before I give a few examples, I'm wondering if you can just talk about what this feature is within the Be My Eyes app called Be My AI?

Mike Buckley: There's basically a tab at the bottom of our app that just says Be My AI. When the consumer presses that button, what pops up is a screen that allows you to take a picture. When you take that picture, in about four to seven seconds you will get a really quite robust description of what's in that photo.

Obviously most blind and low vision consumers have voiceover enabled on their phone so that just allows them to get really high-quality information about anything that they need. You can take a picture of a restaurant menu, for example, and literally it will tell you everything on the menu, or you can ask it a secondary question and say, "Please tell me the vegetarian options on this menu," or "Please tell me all of the wines listed for less than $6."

And so what it is, Ricky, is it's another choice for the blind or low vision consumer and user of the Be My Eyes app to get visual interpretation, to get information about their world in the way that they want. The thing that I would say about the artificial intelligence that we use in our application is that it was tested with 19,000 blind and low vision beta testers. I think it's the largest group of blind and low vision testers, literally, of any kind in the history of the world. We partnered with OpenAI to really try to make this product phenomenal. As a result, we're seeing faster response times on these pictures and we're seeing high, high degrees of accuracy. I don't want to claim perfection because we're not there yet, but the accuracy has improved dramatically, and we just view it as power. It's an additional power lever for the person who's blind or low vision to interpret the world in the way that they want.

A woman once told me, Ricky, she said, "You know why I love the AI? Because sometimes I just don't want a volunteer in my kitchen." She uses the AI feature when she's cooking a lot. Maybe the kitchen's messy and I don't want to show the person my messy kitchen counter. That's what this is about. It's about her choice. So, that's what AI is, and I would certainly encourage any of your listeners to play with it, test it out. The feedback we've gotten on this has been remarkable in terms of the usefulness for the people using Be My Eyes.

Ricky Enger: Yes, and I think it's worth mentioning you're not going to break anything by taking pictures and playing around with it just to see what is there. If you are accustomed to seeing things, I think you gave a great example of I don't want someone in my kitchen because it's messy as I'm cooking, but maybe I want to take a picture of the bread that I've just taken out, for example, and is it golden brown yet? The AI can tell you that kind of thing. Is my meat done? Do you see pink? You can ask questions of the AI and it will tell you things like that. One of my favorite uses for Be My AI is photos that have already been taken. You can actually share those to the app.

My best friend is one of these people who really loves to take pictures and before now she would take a picture and she would text me and say something like, "Oh, I just took the funniest picture of my cat. He's in the cat bed that's up on the shelf by the window, but his head is hanging over the side with his paws and he looks really goofy." That was fine, but now we've had fun with her taking the picture, sending it to me and saying, "Hey, what does the AI say?" And so I get that sort of objective description that is not colored by her viewpoint and then we get to talk about what the AI got right, what it got wrong. Sometimes it sees things in the image that she didn't notice, but it's such a fun way to share a moment with someone.

Mike Buckley: I think what surprises people, Ricky, when they use it, and you tell me, is the depth of the information that it gives. You can take a picture of a piece of art in a museum, and it will talk about the patterns, the colors, the content of it. Sometimes it will even know the artist's name. It's just another tool for leveraging and accessing information.

Ricky Enger: This sounds so great and so amazing just as we're talking about this, but I actually think it would be even better if we have an example to show. You have this painting that a friend did for you of some family members, and let's take a listen and see what Be My Eyes says about this painting.

VoiceOver: The picture shows a painting of four beagles lying on a grassy field. The background is a mix of green shades suggesting a natural outdoor setting. The puppies are positioned side by side, facing forward, and appearing content. The painting catches the puppy's characteristic features such as their floppy ears and expressive eyes.

Ricky Enger: Oh wow, now I want to pet the actual puppies. What a cool painting.

Mike Buckley: Yeah, well, I clearly need my head examined for having four beagles at the same time, but that's a whole separate story. I try to avoid exaggeration, Ricky, and I never want to do pat ourselves on the back because we've got so much more to build and so much more to do to make the Be My Eyes product phenomenal for as many people in the world as we can. But the direct comments we've had from people have been, they've said things like, "Life-changing." "I've got my independence back." And I'm very wary about saying words like that so those are actually direct quotations from people.

I've talked to them, and they've said, "I use this 10 times a day. It's become an absolute utility in my life." And that makes us proud. And like I said, we're not resting on our laurels. We've got a lot more to do and a lot more to build. But I'm really pleased with the reception. We are currently doing more than 1.6 million AI sessions a month amongst our community, and that's up from one million three or four months ago. So the product is working for people. When you see that usage increasing like that, you know it has usefulness, and that's everything to us. That's all we want. We want maximum usefulness of the product.

Ricky Enger: And it's so easy to use. A lot of times I think when we talk about technology, it sounds as if, hey, that's great for the people who love their smart phones, or they get into the love of gadgets for their own sake. This, however, is one of those things that if you have an Android phone, an iPhone, or a BlindShell phone, anything like that, and you are familiar with how to use it in general, the Be My Eyes app is so straightforward, really easy to use, and as I say you're not going to break anything by playing with it, and there are plenty of uses for it. Mike, this has been fantastic.

Usually when I get to the end of an episode and start wrapping things up, I always ask about, hey, what's in the future? What can you tell us is coming soon? But it occurs to me that as of this recording you maybe have an exciting announcement that has just recently happened that you want to talk about Be My Eyes.

Mike Buckley: Yeah, there are two. One is we've begun testing out a brand-new AI capability with OpenAI where it literally will allow the user of the Be My Eyes product to have a full conversation back and forth and get immediate information. So, imagine if you're holding your smartphone up to your computer screen, you can say, "Hey, what's on my screen?" It will literally start telling you what's on the screen. You could say, "No, no, I'm not worried about that. How many emails do I have?" Or things like that. And it will answer that in real time without any delay and truly conversational. The second thing that we launched just this week with Microsoft is an app that will allow you to use your Be My Eyes experience on your desktop.

So you can literally describe your computer screen. You can describe images that are stored on your computer. You can describe online images. And it can also, if you're in the habit of making video calls with anyone, it can get you ready for a video call by making sure you're centered in the frame, letting you know what your background looks like, et cetera. So it's just an extension of the capabilities that are offered in our app that will now be offered on a desktop as well. The other thing that's coming, Ricky, and I can't say too much about this, but you're going to see the Be My Eyes experience available on wearables as well. So what we're seeing is a lot of innovation out there in the market and whether it's glasses that you could wear, or a pin, but imagine if you could get this AI experience and get this visual information and interact with the world without having to hold that phone.

How cool is that going to be, right? Whether it's in the workplace or whether it's in your home. If you're wearing glasses or you're wearing a pin or you're wearing a pendant or something like that, and literally you can say, "Hey, tell me what's in the room." Or "What's on the screen?" And that's coming very, very soon, and I'm really excited about that.

Ricky Enger: It is really exciting for sure. So many options for people even now and there's more to come. If you have not yet switched to a smart phone but you've got your trusty Windows computer and you want to be able to look at all those pictures of the grandkids that people have sent you or maybe your old photos of yourself and think, oh, what was I wearing at that event?

So much fun to go through things like that, and even the practical things, as you say, how many emails do I have? What's on my screen right now? The possibilities are endless. Mike, thank you so much for stopping by just chatting about Be My Eyes. I love hearing your enthusiasm about this because it's clear that it's not just a job. You really do appreciate the community and you like what you do. That's important.

Mike Buckley: Gosh, it's fun to get out of bed every day. And like I said, there is so much more to do to make it better, faster, easier. I also just want to say, and maybe folks know, Ricky, but our philosophy, our ethos, our values dictate that we provide all of these services for free to the blind and low vision consumer, and we charge our corporate customers on the customer service side to help pay our bills and to make sure we do this, but we want to make sure that these tools are available for free for the community. Again, it's just a core part of who we are.

Ricky Enger: Yes, thank you for that, and it really is important so that it's within everyone's reach, not just those who could pay for it. If you want to grab the latest from Be My Eyes, we'll have that URL in the show notes for the Be My Eyes website, as well as where you can get the apps for iOS, Android, and now Windows. Thank you so much, Mike. It's been great.

Mike Buckley: Thanks for having me, Ricky. I really appreciate it.

Ricky Enger: Got something to say? Share your thoughts about this episode of Hadley Presents or make suggestions for future episodes. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at [email protected]. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T at hadleyhelps.org or leave us a message at 847-784-2870. Thanks for listening.