FYE | AppleVis

Submitted by Enes Deniz, 20 November, 2023

Last updated on 20 November, 2023

Description of App

From Your Eyes is an assistant technology that brings together human and artificial intelligence and offers both fast and qualified visual explanation service to visually impaired and visually impaired users. There are three hundred and thirty million visually impaired people worldwide. One million of them are in Turkey, and ten million are in the United States. FYE consists of three parts: visually impaired users, trainable artificial intelligence services and descriptors. Visually impaired users can take any photo or select an image from their existing library and upload it to the application. Artificial intelligence delivers a draft description to the user immediately after the visual is loaded into the application. If the visually impaired user thinks that this draft description should be improved, he can also enter the description section in which aspect he wants it to be detailed and send it to the descriptors with a single click.
This request reaches the descriptors as a notification. When a descriptor enters the application, it selects an image from the request pool and makes written improvements to the text by comparing the image and the draft description. The process ends when the advanced draft is sent back to the user. The underlying AI services learn about these improvements with machine learning.

Version

1.0.3

Free or Paid

Free

Apple Watch Support

Device(s) App Was Tested On

iPhone

iOS Version

17.1.1

Accessibility Comments

With various bugs fixed in the latest updates, more fixes and improvements on the way, the app promises full accessibility already as its very own purpose. It's being developed and maintained by a team with Zülal Tannur, who is visually-impaired herself, as the CEO of the company. She says she welcomes feedback and suggestions from users, and evaluates them as a user herself, which are true most of the time. I have just suggested that an NVDA add-on be developed to make it more convenient to use the service on computers without having to go to the website.

VoiceOver Performance

VoiceOver reads all page elements.

Button Labeling

All buttons are clearly labeled.

Usability

The app is fully accessible with VoiceOver and is easy to navigate and use.

Other Comments

Don't know why the old app (From Your Eyes) will be removed from the App Store and replaced with this one instead of being updated even if rebuilt from scratch, as I already suggested otherwise, but here's a new app with a new design. It has several features that make it more preferable compared to other alternatives. Not only images but also videos can its AI describe, with instant descriptions among planned features to be implemented in the future. You can also instruct the AI to tailor the descriptions to your own needs and priorities, like having it omit confusing details or give a more elaborate description, or emphasize a particular aspect of the described image/video. Not only that, you can make your AI characters to switch between, each having their own styles to offer descriptions. The app also supports OCR functionality, and can scan images or PDF's for text. There's no limit to the maximum number of characters the AI responses can reach, so you don't have to request it to continue every time a message is cut off in the middle of a word as in Be My Eyes. The AI is now better than ever with 15 million visuals used to train it, a thousand times the previous 15 thousand, but you can always submit anything to human volunteers if you're not satisfied with the AI results.
With ranks and leaderboards, this app should make it more fun and convenient for visually-impaired users to get descriptions of objects and environments, documents and videos.

App Store Link

https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/fye/id6470201476

Developer's Website

https://fromyoureyes.app/en/index.html

Developer's Twitter Username

@ZTannur

Recommendations

3 people have recommended this app

Most recently recommended by Enes Deniz 1 week 2 days ago

Options

Comments

Try to get it to describe a video

I tried to get it to describe a video, and waited, and waited, and waited, and then it was uploaded, but then it didn’t give any description at all. It just said one photo and then give me a bunch of choices like how to help it improve, things like that. But as far as giving me any sort of a description, it failed miserably. Maybe it wanted to give me a hope of a description?

Can you list those choices?

What is this bunch of choices that you were given?

LLM

Couldn't find this info in the description, what LLM is used to generate the responses? They all have their strengths and weaknesses and it would be interesting to know what to expect.

OpenAI/GPT

It utilizes OpenAI's language model, but has its own independent AI for processing submitted files. The CEO informed us they had been looking for other alternatives after the DDoS attacks OpenAI had faced earlier this month.

Thank you

Thank you for the fast reply. Do you know which of OpenAI's models is used, GPT-3.5 or GPT-4?

It said

After it displayed the fact that a video was uploaded, then it said, teach your artificial intelligence, send this to a volunteer to be described, your descriptions, etc.

GPT 4 is now free for everyone, right?

Well, they should switch to GPT 4 soon, but I don't know what they're up to. All I know is that they were looking for some other alternative back when GPT was down.
As for video descriptions, I don't know what the exact cause is, but would already recommend waiting for the new AI trained with 15 million visuals. By the way, have you tried choosing the option to teach the AI on that screen? Or have you tried having FYE describe a photo instead, and compared the screens that you would get?

An Update

Based on the explanation from the company's founder during a conversation with her, you may change the app's interface language as well as that of descriptions by going to the My Profile option on the home/main screen and then selecting the My Preferences option. I also suggested that they make it possible to change the language from the device settings.