Is called Aipoly and it is an app that allows blind or visually impaired people to "see" what is around them. Aipoly is an artificial intelligence app that allows you to explore the world in a different way, through a technology that communicates what is being framed with a guiding voice, obviously thanks to the use of the smartphone camera. The app currently allows you to identify around 1.000 different objects and 900 colors in real time.
Aipoly was presented for the first time in Italy at the Irccs Fondazione GB Bietti per lo Study and Research in Ophthalmology Onlus; it was created by the very young Albert Rizzoli (22 years old), by Marita Cheng (26 years old) and Simon Edwardsson (27 years old), at Singularity University, at the research park of NASA in California.
It works like this: the blind or partially sighted person takes the cell phone in hand and with the camera focuses on what is in front of it. The cell phone will say in speakerphone everything he recognized. Much better than a guide dog! Aipoly was born thanks to a 30 thousand scholarship dollars given by Google to attend Singularity University.
The app has been learning for a few months the Italian and 5 other languages, and just 4 weeks after release it was already been used by approximately 40.000 people; soon we will reach the milestone of 5000 recognized objects. «Despite therapeutic progress – explains Mario Stirpe, president of Ircss – unfortunately the risk of blindness has not been overcome, which affects a number of people that varies depending on the country. Innovation described by the group of researchers opens a new path for concrete help."
