BENGALURU: With an aim to help the visually impaired lead a normal day-to-day life, 33-year-old Gaurav Mittal decided to develop an app that could serve the purpose, which was how Eye-D was born. This assistive technology app, developed by startup GingerMind Technologies, was launched in 2016 and uses AI to help the visually challenged. “I wanted to create an app that could act as a ‘Swiss Army knife’ for the visually-challenged,”says Mittal, the co-founder of Eye-D, which was set up in 2016.
The Bengaluru-based company which has eight employees and four advisors has developed this app, the features of which include ‘Where Am I’ option, which helps a user determine their exact location and also informs them about important landmarks. Once the phone is in the ‘talk back’ mode, the user chooses a landmark they’d like to visit, the app helps them with directions. The ‘Around Me’ feature on the app helps the user find ATMs, banks, bus stops, cinemas, restaurants, hospitals, stores and even the religious places nearby. To ensure that the user doesn’t miss out on any place, the app comes with a ‘search radius controller’ which helps the user to adjust the search radius in the range of 500m to 5,500m in case they are unable to find a particular place. “We designed this feature so that the next time you visit a restaurant or want to get a book for your friend, you won’t have to ask anyone for help. ‘Open read text mode’, ‘click a picture’ and the app will read the text in front of you. You can swipe right to hear the text again in case you missed it the first time,” says Mittal.
According to him, the app relies heavily on AI technology, through which the user can travel, explore, identify objects for the visually-challenged. With the help of the ‘Talk back’ feature in smartphones, the idea is to assist the visually-challenged in executing day-to-day tasks independently,” Mittal says, adding that an amount of “several lakhs” has been invested into the startup. So far, the startup received external funding from Microsoft, Citrix and Intel. The app is free for download from PlayStore. There have been more than 1 lakh downloads since it was launched.
Their future plans include making universities and workplaces accessible for the visually impaired.
Other Features
‘See Object’, another feature on the app enables users to evaluate their surroundings. Once the user clicks on this mode, they can take a picture and the app tells the user what’s in front of them. So, one could be walking through a lesser known path or standing beside a window, and one can use this feature to understand what lay ahead of them. In case they miss the description the first time, the user can simply swipe right to hear again.