[brightbeige]

A while ago I signed up as a sighted person on Be My Eyes. I didn't get as many calls as I had hoped, but I was glad to help out on the few that I could. One call was to read envelopes of incoming mail, another was to read pill bottles, and then there was the two funny guys on big cozy chairs with shopping bags of cereal boxes and wanted to know what was what. I remember one guy really didn't like one type. The app had a unique feature for the sighted person to turn on the camera of the vision impaired person.

https://www.bemyeyes.com

[3s]

I still have the Be My Eyes app installed but haven’t had a call in over a year - I think it’s a testament to how powerful AI vision models have become. I find it cool that AI works well enough for vision impaired people to solve all their problems.

However there was something very human and nice about helping out a stranger with a small random task from time to time. I fondly remember one older lady who spilled a box of blueberries on the kitchen floor and I helped her hunt them all down by guiding her around. It was 10 minutes of connection with a random person doing something fun and which is till remember fondly 4 years later

[jareds]

Ever since Be My Eyes introduced there AI features it's my understanding that there's been a lot less need for volunteers. I'm totally blind, and started using the app once they added in AI. It works great for for things like reading food labels after my kids have movved things around, determining if the tv has been left on, etc. I think I would use the volunteer feature if I still lived alone, but I don't.

[Angostura]

I haven’t had a single alert from it since the AI stuff rolled out

[latexr]

> I didn't get as many calls as I had hoped

They always had significantly more people willing to help than in need of help. Which is good, not going to knock that. I signed up for it many years ago but didn’t get a single call, so eventually I just uninstalled it.

[rigrassm]

Sadly, judging by the info I read on the website now, it seems to be focused on using AI assistance.

Not going to lie, it deeply worries me how quickly society is just accepting offloading what used to be meaningful human interactions to AI. I hate to imagine what a society looks like once the people in it solely rely on AI for navigating life.

Sorry for the bleak reply. I was genuinely excited to read about the service as you described it and would love to hear that the human assistance side of it still works even if the website only showcases the AI.

[kdheiwns]

I see it less bleakly and in a more hopeful manner. For people who signed up to help, I guess it might've felt like a social thing. But I imagine most of the people who relied on the services were looking less for the social aspect and wanted more independence in life. There are probably loads of blind people who are very thankful that they're increasingly able to go outside and live fully functional lives thanks to having a phone and some AI stuff to let them do whatever they want without feeling like they're depending on someone for assistance.

I'm someone who absolutely hates generative AI, but AI that assists people in living happy lives outside is something I'm completely in favor of.

[tskj]

Reminds me of the quote (paraphrased):

> We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don't know.

[nonethewiser]

Who called you? Blind people?

[arijun]

That’s the app. Or vision-impaired, at least.

[nonethewiser]

But in practice it could just be anyone whose outsourcing vision right? It's basically a free manual vision service.

[arijun]

There would have to be a person pretending to be blind on the other side of the phone call, recording your answers. At that point is it not just easier to have that person do the labeling themselves?

[Faaak]

In practice, it's also to help vision impaired people

[agmater]

> Thank you for joining the Be My Eyes community! Be My Eyes connects blind and low-vision users with volunteers who can provide visual interpretation of smartphone images, to companies that provide them with services or employ them, and to artificial intelligence (“AI”) tools that analyze and describe images submitted by our users.

I thought you were being cynical, but yeah the ToS basically says that as well.

[foobiekr]

Are you implying that it might be exploited by unethical tech bros looking to build data sets?

[Tagbert]

It is a very manual process and would probably be an inefficient way to collect that data.