Iranian Knowledge-Based Firm Develops Smart Assistant for Blind People
“This product, which is now ready to be launched, consists of two main parts, one of which includes hardware parts in the form of smart glasses. This hardware part includes a camera, microphone, and headphones,” said Ehsan Darestani, the executive director of the project.
He described the second part of this product as a mobile application that sends images to the user's phone by the camera and allows him/her to make various requests, including reading product labels and bank cards, with voice commands.
Noting that the smart assistant for the blind is able to describe the scenes in which the blind person is located, Darestani said, “These processes are carried out completely without the need for the Internet and are carried out locally with the help of the mobile phone's GPU processor.”
“The received images are then analyzed by artificial intelligence algorithms and the output is announced to the blind person through the speaker,” he added.
Darestani explained that the blind user can hold the bank card in front of the camera and the system will announce the type of card.
In a relevant development in December 2022, a creative product was also produced by an Iranian company which makes the process of accessing the pages of different websites and reading their texts easier for the blind.
"’Follow’ service (internet assistant for the blind) is a product and among the measures by which the company could join the list of creative companies," said Alireza Qassemi, the executive director of the knowledge-based ‘Poli Be Sooye Farda’ company.
He added that the product automatically detects and identifies the main text of a webpage and removes its unnecessary texts, including the advertisement.
“The product makes it possible to switch between different pages of a website and access the main text of that page with the help of speech recognition and text to speech services and the up and down buttons of smart phones,” Qassemi said.
The most common way for users who are blind to surf the web is with a browser and screen reader (also known as text-to-speech software).
Understanding how text-to-speech software helps the visually impaired “read” websites is essential for anyone designing for such users.
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