App Spots Objects for the Visually Impaired

Walking around my office on a recent morning, a female voice on my iPhone narrated the objects I passed. "Brick," "wall," "telephone," she said matter-of-factly. The voice paused when I came upon a bike hung on a wall-mounted rack, then intoned, "bicycle." The voice is part of a free image-recognition app called Aipoly that's trying to make it easier for those with vision impairments to recognize their surroundings. To use it, you point the phone's rear camera at whatever you want it to identify, and Aipoly will speak what it sees (or, at least, what it thinks it sees) and show the object's name on the phone's display.