Exploring the Seeing AI App for Android

Vikki: This first workshop. In this series, we'll explore the layout of seeing ai. Seeing AI is an app that uses the camera on our phone to read text aloud. This app not only reads text, but also identifies products, describes pictures and identifies currency.

Best of all, Seeing AI is completely free. If you don't have it yet, head over to the Google Play Store on your phone, type in seeing AI, and it should come right up. You can also find a link to the app in the resources below this workshop. This series is designed for people with low vision using Android devices. If you use an Apple device, you'll be happy to know. We also have a Seeing AI series that's made just for your phone. If you use your device with a screen reader, be sure to check out our series for using Seeing AI with voiceover on your iPhone or talk back on your Android phone.

Seeing AI is already open on this phone, so let's jump right in and explore the app. When we open the app, it's ready to start reading text. So for the purposes of this workshop, we'll lay our phone on a flat surface. This will allow us to explore the app without activating our reading functions. The first time we open the Seeing AI app, a short tutorial pops up. The tutorial gives us some helpful information, so it's a good idea to check it out.

Before moving on to using the app. For today's workshop, we'll press the skip button to move to the next screen. Let's accept the terms of use by checking this checkbox. Then we'll select the get started button. We find a prompt that reads Allow Seeing AI to take pictures and record video. Let's select the while using the app button.

We are now in the help window for the read channel. Select the X in the top right corner of the screen to move into the read channel. After we've gone through the tutorial, we find ourselves in the main menu. In the top left corner of our screen, we have three white horizontal bars. This is our menu button. Let's open it with a tap.

Here we find lots of cool stuff like history, help, feedback, settings, what's new and about. Let's tap the X in the top left corner to close the menu. In the top right corner of our screen, we have a circle with a question mark inside. This is our help button. Let's tap it to find out more.

Seeing AI Voice: Read

Vikki: Seeing AI has several different functions such as reading, text, and identifying money. We access these functions by selecting tabs or channels in our app. This quick help option is where we'll find more details about the specific tab or channel we're in. Let's tap the X in the top right corner to close this option.

Moving down the screen, we find a small rectangular button on the left side of our screen. This is our document detection button. We use this tool to guide us when we're taking a picture of a document. By default, this button is inactive. When we touch it, we activate the detect feature.

Seeing AI Voice: Document detection on.

Vikki: Seeing AI then gives us audible cues to align our document to the camera on the back of our phone.

Seeing AI Voice: Document detection off.

Vikki: Moving to the right in the middle of this row, we find a large round button. This is our cameras take picture button. We tap this button to capture an image of the text we wish to read. The final button on this row is our language button. It allows us to select the language we wish to have our apps recognized.

Now this button changes depending on the tab we're currently in. For example, when we select the currency channel, the button allows us to select the currency we want to identify.

Moving down the screen, let's explore the tabs at the bottom of the screen. The first tab on the far left is labeled Read. This tab helps us with reading text in our environment like menus and signs. We also use this tab to read printed documents as well as handwritten documents.

Moving to the right, we find the describe tab.

Seeing AI Voice: Describe.

Vikki: We select this tab to have the app describe our environment, including photos we've taken or photos and videos saved on our phone. We can also use the app's artificial intelligence to get more details about the image. The final tab is more.

Seeing AI Voice: More.

Vikki: When we tap it. It opens a channel selector along the bottom of our screen. It contains icons that represent different channels. It's a good idea to know how to change the channel so we can use seeing AI to read all kinds of different things. When we want to select a different channel, we tap on the desired icon at the bottom of our screen. Let's start at the far left. The product channel

Seeing AI Voice: Product.

Vikki: This option allows us to identify products and hear more about their contents. The next option is the person channel.

Seeing AI Voice: Person.

Vikki: This channel allows us to use our app to tell us how many people are around us and how close they are. Now moving to the right, we find our currency channel.

Seeing AI Voice: Currency.

Vikki: This option identifies our paper money. Moving to the right, we find the color channel.

Seeing AI Voice: Color.

Vikki: No surprises here. This channel identifies colors. Our final channel is light.

Seeing AI Voice: Light.

Vikki: This channel uses audio tones to tell us how much light our phone sees. The more light there is, the higher the pitch of the tone.

I'm excited to try out some of these channels, aren't you? Be sure to join us for the rest of this series There. We'll take a deeper dive into several of these channels. I'm Vikki Vaughan, and I thank you for joining me as we explore the layout of the Seeing AI app.