Exploring the Seeing AI App for Android TalkBack

[Ricky] Today we're gonna check out how to use an app along with the camera on our phone to read, text and identify things around us. The app is called Seeing AI and we can use it to read street signs and room numbers, menus, mail, and even to figure out the money in our wallet and the products in our pantry. With this one little app, our phone can speak aloud. So much useful info about what's around us. It's really cool.

We are using talkback in this workshop so that we can do everything on our phone without looking at the screen. If you'd rather do things on your Android device without talkback, check out our series on using Seeing AI with Low Vision. And if you're using Apple, we have a couple series just for you as well. Now, if you're checking out these workshops and you've not used talkback much before, it may help to get a little more familiar with it before you dive into this series. And hey, we've got you covered with a great group of workshops on learning everything you need to know to get up to speed with TalkBack. Alright, so let's talk about seeing ai. The app is totally free and if you don't have it yet, head over to the play store on your phone, type in seeing ai and it should come right up.

Seeing AI is already open on this phone. So we're gonna explore the app a little bit just to get familiar with how it all works. Then in the next few workshops we'll take it for a spin by reading some short text, reading a longer document, identifying products and reading some money. If you're opening seeing AI for the first time, there's probably gonna be a quick little tutorial that pops up.

The tutorial will give us some good info, plus there will be instructions on how to get through the tutorial and onto using the app. The quickest way to get started is to use the TalkBack Swipe right gesture to find the skip button and then double tap that to skip the tutorial. There will be a couple more things after that, like accepting terms of service and giving, seeing AI permission to use your camera to read and recognize things. So again, just use the TalkBack swipe gestures to move through the screen, skip button, then double tap to select those options to agree to terms and camera access. One last thing and then we're done with the complicated stuff. If you get through the tutorial and find yourself in a help screen, there's a close button, which again you can find using your TalkBack swipe gesture,

- [TalkBack] Close button,

- [Ricky] Double tap that

- [TalkBack] Seeing ai.

- [Ricky] And now we're ready to start exploring seeing ai. So here we are in our app. After the tutorial is all done, seeing AI is actually active right now, so I'm just gonna set my phone on a flat surface to make sure that the camera isn't gonna spot some text and start reading it. Now to explore the app, we'll start at the top of our screen. We'll touch our first button, which is in the top left corner. What we'll do is just find the top left corner of our phone and then place our finger there.

- [TalkBack] 1:24 PM

- [Ricky] And if we don't land right on the button to open our menu, we'll just slide down a little until we do

- [TalkBack] Open navigation drawer button, double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] Yep, that's our button to open a menu with some cool stuff like settings and help information to open it. We would just double tap. We're gonna go ahead and keep exploring though. So let's swipe right

- [TalkBack] Quick help button. Double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] Seeing AI has several different modes called channels for reading text, reading money, identifying products, and lots more. This quick help option is where we'll find info about the specific channel we're in. We can always swipe to it, but it's in the top right corner of our screen so we can get right to it just by touching the screen there. Now let's check out the buttons that let us choose the kind of task we wanna do. We'll start from the very bottom left corner of the screen and move up just a bit until we hear. TalkBack, say read tab,

- [TalkBack] Selected. Read tab one of three, enlist three items.

- [Ricky] Yeah, we'll be using this one a lot for reading, text and documents. Let's keep on swiping right.

- [TalkBack] Describe tab two of three. Double tap to select.

- [Ricky] This is really awesome. If we explore this tab, seeing AI will let us take a picture and then we'll get an AI description of it. We can even ask more questions about the image and get specific details described. Okay, we'll swipe right again,

- [TalkBack] More tab three of three, double tap to select.

- [Ricky] So this tab is where seeing AI has put a number of features that don't fit into the read or describe categories. We'll check this out. So we're gonna double tap to select this tab.

- [TalkBack] Product selected.

- [Ricky] Awesome. This is our channel for identifying products. Now if we continue to right, we'll find several more features and when we find the feature we want, we'll just double tap to select it since we're not ready to scan for a code yet. Let's get to our next channel. We'll swipe right

- [TalkBack] Person channel. Double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] Great. Now this channel is for teaching, seeing AI to recognize specific faces. And again, we'll swipe right

- [TalkBack] Currency channel. Double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] Here's our channel for reading money. And again, if we actually wanna select this channel, we just go ahead and double tap to do that. Okay, we'll swipe right

- [TalkBack] Color channel. Double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] Yep, this one will tell us the color of what our camera is pointing at. And let's swipe right one more time.

- [TalkBack] Light channel. Double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] So this will give us a tone to indicate the brightness of the available light in a room. The higher the pitch, the brighter the light. Wow, there are so many amazing features in this one little app. Up next in the series, we're gonna dive into how a few of these features work. So to get ready for next time when we're gonna check out how to read text and documents, let's make sure a read tab is selected. We can go ahead and swipe left several times until we get back to it, or we can touch our screen close to where the button is and slide our finger around until we hear TalkBack, say read tab. So let's try it. A read tab is located at the bottom left corner of our screen about an inch down from the top. So let's touch the bottom left corner of our screen and slide up a tiny bit.

- [TalkBack] Read tab one of three, enlist three items. Double tap to select.

- [Ricky] Yep, there it is. And we'll double tap to select it.

- [TalkBack] Read, selected,

- [Ricky] And there we go. Now we're ready to learn how to use Seeing AI to read text on envelopes, signs, product boxes, documents, and more. Join me for the workshop on reading, and we'll find out how it works. I'm Ricky Enger, and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today exploring the Seeing AI app. See you next time.