The idea here is to provide users with a way to practice the Chinese language in the absence of real-life communicative partners. "You think you know Chinese, but if you meet a Chinese person and you want to speak Chinese, there is no way you can do it if you have not practiced," said Microsoft's Yan Xia in a blog post. There's no word on plans to expand to other languages, but it's not hard to see such an app helping you learn to converse in different tongues, too. The app uses various AI tools like deep neural networks that are able to figure out what you're trying to say and then evaluate your pronunciation. The AI has been trained on data from native Chinese speakers as well as Microsoft's text-to-speech technology.

Language-learning apps are nothing new, with offerings from MIT and Duolingo ready to teach you a new way to communicate right on your phone. Now Microsoft is looking to teach you Chinese with a free new AI-powered iOS app. The idea here is to provide users with a way to practice the Chinese language in the absence of real-life communicative partners. "You think you know Chinese, but if you meet a Chinese person and you want to speak Chinese, there is no way you can do it if you have not practiced," said Microsoft's Yan Xia in a blog post. There's no word on plans to expand to other languages, but it's not hard to see such an app helping you learn to converse in different tongues, too.

Microsoft hast just launched Seeing AI, an iOS app that it appropriately describes as a'talking camera for the blind'; I've been giving it a whirl this morning and it's actually pretty impressive. Fire up the free app and point your iPhone at anything, whether it's a document, a menu card, a room or even a friend, and Seeing AI will tell you what it is with its voice. I tried it on a bunch of objects and spaces, and the app was astonishingly quick and accurate for the most part. It managed to recognize a guitar, identified me by my face and told me just how far away I was, and even described my living room and shower with some basic details. It was also able to read out the blurb of a book and the ingredients on a ramen packet, and even identified the contents of a photo I sent to the app from the share sheet in Twitter.