Google’s Lookout app for vision-impaired now scans food labels and long documents – ProWellTech
Google has updated its Lookout app, an AI toolkit for people with visual impairment, with two helpful new features: scanning long documents and reading food labels. Paper molds and similarly shaped products in store are challenging for the blind, and this should make things easier.
Food labels, if you think about it, are actually a pretty tough problem for a computer vision system. They should be eye-catching and distinctive, but not necessarily easy to read or informative. If a sighted person can accidentally purchase the wrong type of peanut butter, what chance does someone have who cannot read the label themselves?
Credit: Google
The new food label mode is less about reading text and more about knowing exactly what product it is. When the user needs to rotate the can or bottle to give the camera a good look, the app will let you know. It compares what it sees with a database of product images and, if they match, reads off the relevant information: brand, product, taste, other relevant information. If there is a problem, the app can also scan the barcode at any time.
Scanning documents isn’t exactly exciting, but it’s good to easily integrate the option into a universal artificial vision app. It works as expected: point your phone at the document (the app will help you keep track of everything) and scan it so your screen reader can read it out.
The “Quick Read” mode, which the app debuted last year and which searches for text in camera view and reads it out loud, has seen some speed improvements.
The update brings a few more benefits to the app that should run on any Android phone with 2GB of RAM and version 6.0 or higher. It is now also available in Spanish, German, French and Italian.
