Identifying Products with Seeing AI and Apple VoiceOver

[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 and the can of tomato puree feel just the same, but probably only one of those is gonna taste good in spaghetti. So with the Seeing AI app, we'll be able to make sense of all those mystery cans, bottles, and boxes around us. It's really cool. We're using VoiceOver in this workshop so we can do everything on our phone without looking at the screen.

If you'd rather do things on your Apple device without VoiceOver, check out our series on using Seeing AI with Low Vision. And if you're using Android, we have a couple series just for you as well. Now, if you're checking out these workshops and you've not used VoiceOver 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 VoiceOver. 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. Now we can always start at the top left and swipe right until we get to our more tab, which is where we wanna be. 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 can just put our finger right there in the bottom right corner. And if we don't land right on it, we'll just slide up a tiny bit until we hear it.

- [VoiceOver] Tab bar, More, tab three of three.

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

- [VoiceOver] Selected More. Tab three of three.

- [Ricky] Great. We're almost there. We have a list of channels once this tab is selected. So let's swipe right to start going through our list of channels.

- [VoiceOver] Channel, Product.

- [Ricky] And there we go. That's the channel we want. So let's double tap to select it.

- [VoiceOver] Product.

- [Ricky] Now we're ready to identify our mystery item. We've got a square shaped bottle here and I just so happen to know which side of the 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 or 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 will need to be. What's cool is that seeing AI will us a little tone when it sees that a barcode is nearby and that tone will play faster the closer we get until it grabs the barcode. So for our bottle here, let's just slowly lift our phone above it to about six inches.

- [VoiceOver] Method Antibac Bathroom Cleaner. Button.

- [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 touch there, but just a quick reminder that we can always swipe left and right with one finger to get to the various items on our screen that way. Okay. Let's touch our bottom right corner

- [VoiceOver] Toolbar. More Info button.

- [Ricky] And we'll double tap.

- [VoiceOver] More Info. Back button.

- [Ricky] Alright, great. We're now on a screen with our product info and we can use our voiceover swipe down with two fingers gesture to begin reading the whole screen. Or we do have a play button and we're gonna find it in the bottom right corner. So we'll touch there.

- [VoiceOver] Toolbar. Play button.

- [Ricky] All right, let's double tap with one finger.

- [VoiceOver] Stop method, anti bathroom cleaner method, anti experiment bathroom cleaner. Let's kill again with kind sense play.

- [Ricky] Yeah. And there we go. And we just double tap our play button again to stop. Wow, this is such an incredibly useful feature. It is so awesome to be able to tell what the product is and get info on how to use it. If you wanna know even 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. So 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 of steps. Let's touch the top left corner of our screen

- [VoiceOver] Back button.

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

- [VoiceOver] Back.

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

- [VoiceOver] Close button.

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

- [VoiceOver] Menu button.

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