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Googles Lookout app for vision-impaired now scans food labels and long documents

Paper forms and similarly-shaped products at the store present a challenge for blind folks and this ought to make things easier.

If a sighted person can accidentally buy the wrong kind of peanut butter, what chance does someone who cant read the label themselves have?

The new food label mode, then, is less about reading text and more about recognizing exactly what product its looking at. It compares what it sees to a database of product images, and when it gets a match it reads off the relevant information: brand, product, flavor, other relevant information.

Document scanning isnt exactly exciting, but its good to have the option built in a straightforward way into a general-purpose artificial vision app.

It works as youd expect: Point your phone at the document and it scans it for your screen reader to read out.

The quick read mode that the app debuted with last year, which watches for text in the camera view and reads it out loud, has gotten some speed improvements.

The update brings a few other conveniences to the app, which should run on any Android phone with 2 gigs of RAM and running version 6.0 or higher.

Original article
Author: Devin Coldewey

TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

Devin Coldewey has recently written 6 articles on similar topics including :
  1. "Google has updated its Lookout app, an AI toolkit for people with impaired vision, with two helpful new capabilities: scanning long documents and reading out food labels. Paper forms and similarly shaped products at the store present a challenge for blind folks and this ought to make things easier". (August 11, 2020)
  2. "Understanding what makes something offensive or hurtful is difficult enough that many people can't figure it out, let alone AI systems. And people of color are frequently left out of AI training sets". (August 15, 2019)
  3. "Google has taken the wraps off Chimera Painter, a web-based tool that lets anyone generate terrifying cryptozoological entities in an interface that looks like MS Paint by way of Diablo. Why, you ask? Well, isnt it obvious? No no, I suppose it isnt". (November 18, 2020)
  4. "Apple has issued a tart response to an extensive report by Google of a serious security flaw in iOS. The flaw, which let an attacker gain root access to a device visiting a malicious website, was reported last week". (September 6, 2019)
  5. "If you've ever seen a lamp or chair that you liked and wished you could just take a picture and find it online, well, GrokStyle let you do that — and now the company has been snatched up by Facebook to augment its own growing computer vision department". (February 9, 2019)
  6. "Googles data centers run 24/7 and suck up a ton of energy so its in both the companys and the planets interest to make them do so as efficiently as possible". (April 22, 2020)
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