Identifying Products with Seeing AI and Android TalkBack

[Ricky] Today we're gonna check out how to use an app along with the camera on our phone to identify products, you know, that giant can of pineapple chunks in the can of tomato puree feel just the same, but probably only one of those is gonna taste good in spaghetti. With the Seeing AI app, we'll be able to make sense of all those mystery boxes, bottles, and cans 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.

We're gonna jump right in and find out how to identify a product using its barcode. But if you haven't had a chance to explore the app a little bit and get familiar with it, we do that very thing in our workshop on exploring the app. So yeah, go ahead and check out that one first if you haven't already. Alright, so identifying products. We've got seeing AI open on our phone here and we need to make sure we're in the right place in the app before we move forward. The products channel is where we wanna be and it's under the more tab. We can always get there by starting at the top of the screen and swiping right, but here's a little trick for getting there a bit faster. The more tab is in the bottom right corner of the screen. So we'll touch the bottom right corner. And now we'll slide up a bit

- [TalkBack] More. Tab three of three, enlist three items, double tap to select.

- [Ricky] Yeah, and we'll double tap to select

- [TalkBack] Channels. One of five, enlist five items.

- [Ricky] Great. So when we tap the more tab, we get our list of channels to get to our product channel. Let's swipe right.

- [TalkBack] Product channel, double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] Yep. And we'll double tap to select

- [TalkBack] Product.

- [Ricky] Now we're ready to identify our mystery item. We've got a square shaped bottle here. And turns out I know which side of this bottle the barcode is on. This part is not always straightforward, unfortunately, so be prepared for a little guesswork. It may help to know that barcodes are often on the back or sides of boxes on the bottom of bags and on the side of bottles and cans.

Okay, so we'll place our product on a flat surface, like a table so it's easy to orient ourselves. We've got the phone in portrait mode with the charging port facing us camera side down. And now we'll position our phone over the bottle. How far away should it be? The larger the product, the farther away we'll need to be. What's cool is that seeing AI will give us a little tone when it sees that a barcode is nearby and that tone will play faster and faster the closer we get until seeing AI grabs the barcode. So for our bottle here, let's just slowly lift our phone above it to about six inches.

- [TalkBack] Processing close, close method and to back bathroom cleaner, seeing AI navigate up button, double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] Wow. Nice seeing AI automatically read the name of our product as soon as it scanned the barcode. This is fantastic, but what if we need more info about the product, like directions or ingredients? Well, there just so happens to be a more info button and we'll find it in the bottom right corner of our screen. So we're gonna just touch there, but just a quick reminder that we can always swipe left and right to get to the various items on our screen that way. So yeah, let's touch our bottom right corner.

- [TalkBack] More Info button, double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] And we'll double tap.

- [TalkBack] Seeing AI, navigate up button, double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] Alright, awesome. We're now on a screen with product info and we can swipe right from here to go through a couple of buttons and then hear our product info. Or we can two finger triple tap to read everything, but if we just want to hear our product info without anything extra, let's head down to the bottom right corner of our screen to find the play button.

- [TalkBack] Play button, double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] And we can just double tap here to hear our info. We'll go ahead and double tap with one finger.

- [TalkBack] Method antibac bathroom cleaner. "Method antibac spearmint bathroom cleaner. Let's kill 'em with kind sense."

- [Ricky] Yeah. And there we go. And we'll just double tap the play button again to stop. Wow, what an incredibly useful feature this is. It's so awesome to be able to tell what the product is and how to get more info on how to use it. If you wanna know more like how to share the product info with someone else or how you can ask AI questions about the product, check out the resources by scrolling down the workshop page. Okay, one last thing. Once we're done with our product info and we're ready to identify something else, we can get back to our main Seeing AI page with just a couple steps. Let's touch the top left corner of our screen,

- [TalkBack] Navigate up button, double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] Yep, and we'll double tap that

- [TalkBack] Navigate up button, window Seeing AI.

- [Ricky] And one more time, we'll touch the top left corner of the screen.

- [TalkBack] Navigate up button, double tap to activate.

- [Ricky] And we'll double tap to close.

- [TalkBack] Selected product channel.

- [Ricky] And there we go. We're ready to identify another mystery item. How cool is that? I'm Ricky Enger I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today identifying product with Seeing AI. See you next time.