*Augmenting those with deficiencies, not a huge market, but a good idea.
*Also it's an augmentation with "deep learning," which sounds rather novel in augmentation-land.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601098/app-spots-objects-for-the-visually-impaired/
"As I walked 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. Aipoly runs directly on your phone, so it doesn’t need Internet access to work, and it can identify one object after another as you move the phone around, without requiring you to snap a photo of each thing.
"The creators of Aipoly hope the app can be helpful for people with severe vision impairments—and perhaps for those trying to learn a new language. They also hope it will be faster than other image-recognition-related apps that rely on the aid of other humans, like Be My Eyes, or that require the Internet, such as TapTapSee.
"The app was rolled out for the iPhone early this year by a Melbourne-based startup of the same name. Aipoly cofounder Simon Edwardsson says it recognizes images by using deep learning, which is a machine-learning technique inspired by studies of the brain. It’s the same technology used by Facebook for recognizing faces and Google for searching images.
"The app figures out what something is by breaking an image down into different characteristics, like curves, lines, and patterns (such as stripes), then uses those features to determine the likelihood that the image is a specific object…."
