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San Francisco, 5 February, 2025 - Be My Eyes (bemyeyes.com), the company that breaks down barriers to accessibility for people who are blind or have low vision, announced today a major update to its award-winning app. The Winter ‘25 release is focused on enhanced usability and performance as well as improving data controls and choices for its users.
Although Be My Eyes makes continuous improvements to its app with incremental updates throughout the year, the Winter ‘25 release - which coincides with the recent 10th anniversary of the original launch of the Be My Eyes app - holds significant new capabilities for its users. It also introduces important new data management capabilities including the formalization of a data retention policy promised in the announcement in July 2024 about AI training data.
The new capabilities are focused around two main areas:
The Winter ‘25 release adds some new and exciting user experience and performance features.
Higher Resolution Video
Call-a-Volunteer video calls are now made in full 1080p HD resolution as a default. This higher resolution provides volunteers and Service Connect agents (when calling a business) with clearer images and finer details when zooming-in before providing any description or answers to the user.
Auto Read Aloud
Be My AI, the AI-powered visual interpretation agent, has also undergone some enhancements. For example, at the request of many low vision users, descriptive texts can now be read aloud automatically even if a screen reader is not active on the device, making for a more elegant and easy way to access descriptions without the need for additional software or settings.
Image Saving and Sharing
Images taken with the app, along with the AI-generated descriptive text, can now be permanently saved directly to the smartphone’s camera roll, or shared with friends or family. Any saved photos will be excluded from a new 30-day auto-deletion data protection policy. Previously saved photos can also be unsaved and will then be archived according to the 30-day limit. When a photo is shared it will also be saved indefinitely past the 30-day limit, until such time as the user chooses to unshare and remove the link.
Custom iOS Shortcuts
And for Apple iOS users, the release provides new shortcuts to quickly and easily access Be My Eyes functionality. Users can use built-in phrases or build their own in the Shortcuts app in iOS. For example “Hey SIri” will now be able to read text aloud from a document with “Read with Be My Eyes” or provide a summary description of an image with “Describe quickly with Be My Eyes”, and many more.
Since launching its ground-breaking Be My AI service, which interprets images taken by the user and describes them in detail using advanced artificial intelligence, Be My Eyes has been storing images and the corresponding AI descriptions under strict compliance with its data policy terms. It has done so primarily for testing and product enhancement purposes. However, with Be My AI now officially out of Beta testing, and to fulfill the promise made to formalize a new data retention policy and implement it in early 2025, all images and their AI descriptions will now be saved for just 30 days, before being deleted. Users will have the ability to save specific images if they choose, but by default any images not saved will be deleted after the 30 day period.
Be My Eyes users have always been able to control, opt out or delete their data, but now, they have more seamless control via new Settings options, accessible from an updated and simplified Settings Menu. For example, some users may choose to opt-out of the much lauded Be My Eyes AI training initiative, whereby video data (with metadata stripped of Personally Identifiable Information) is shared with AI vendors to train their models in being more inclusive, accessible, and without disability bias. If they choose to opt-out they can now do so with a simple switch in the app.
“We first launched the Be My Eyes app 10 years ago. A lot has happened in the years since, both within our app as well as the broader market place in which we provide it. One of the biggest is obviously generative AI, our early and innovative adoption of it, and the market’s thinking around how it will develop and how to protect individuals from misuse” said Jesper Henriksen, CTO of Be My Eyes. “We take that maturity of thinking very seriously, and is why we embrace AI so fully as part of our product development plans and why we put so much thought and effort into our data management policies and control of them into our users’ hands.”
“We are very proud of just how far our Be My Eyes platform has come in the 10 years since we launched” continued Henriksen. “With over seven hundred and fifty thousand blind and low-vision users, eight and a half million sighted volunteers, ground-breaking use of AI, millions of user requests every month, and some of the world’s most iconic brands as paying customers, I think it is fair to say that Be My Eyes really is doing its bit to make the world more accessible and continues to be a world leader in providing innovative, free accessibility solutions for the world’s 340 million people who are blind or have low vision.”
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About Be My Eyes
Launched in 2015, Be My Eyes is a globally recognized and award-winning access technology provider for people who are blind or have low vision. With a global community of 750,000 users, and over 8 million volunteers, Be My Eyes connects blind and low-vision users with sighted volunteers and companies, through live video and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tackle inaccessible parts of everyday life, whether at home or at work; all for free to the end user.Be My Eyes is available in more than 150 countries worldwide and its volunteers speak more than 180 languages. To learn more, please visit bemyeyes.com or join us on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and TikTok.
