People who have used this app, which kind of situations have you helped with? I want to help but am a bit nervous
* find their friend in park when they got separated (mentioned elsewhere)
* differentiate canned food when their system got messed up (e.g. canned corn vs canned beans, same size cans)
* figure out which of two sweaters was the red one
* reorganize paper money that had fallen out of pocket/wallet
text recognition is only solved in pretty well controlled situations also.
Contextual adjustment in situations like this is something humans are really good at. You can easily imagine an automated system that works for some of these things, but is much slower and harder to use.
For the cans, you might be able to have it identify corn vs green beans, maybe. But can you get it to tell you "hey rotate the one in the middle a bit, I can't see the label"?
The finding a friend in the park seems real hard, depending on parameters.
My point isn't that these are impossible problems. It's just that a human can currently do them better than a machine, even if the basic capabilities are doable in AI. At the very least it'd probably take a ton of engineering to expose all of that in any useful way.
It already is to some degree. E.g. I have an application on my iPhone which reads the value of bills (in various currencies) with no noticeable delay, and another that can act as a colour detector although that is less reliable; maybe more useful if you want to know which is the light vs dark thing.
1. Woman asking what color a sweater was, to confirm its color. Was maybe a 30 second call.
2. Teenager with a box of paint supplies wondering if the box has an expiration date, since the paint felt weirdly thick. 2 minute call, then we chatted a few minutes.
Other situations I got calls for:
- Help with navigating the installation wizard of some software.
- A person trying to locate his right-foot's slipper while he had the other one on. This was a really wild one where I had to ask him to walk around the room, show underneath the bed, around some other objects etc. But to no avail. Finally, he thanked and disconnected saying he was tired :(.
- Help with reading railway tickets, magazine articles, textbook chapters.- read recipients for 30+ pieces of mail
- read prescription med bottle refill instructions
(As the reader, the app has the feature to turn on the flashlight of the remote smartphone. It’s often quite dark in the room!)