Be My Eyes

Be My Eyes is a free app that gives blind and low-vision people two ways to get visual help: a live video call with a sighted volunteer from a global pool of millions, or an instant response from Be My AI, a built-in vision assistant that describes images and answers questions about what a camera sees. Users open the app, point their phone at whatever they need help with (a label, a menu, a piece of mail, a room), and either get connected to a volunteer in under a minute or ask Be My AI directly for an immediate text or spoken description.

The volunteer network is the original core of the product and still handles tasks that benefit from a real person's judgment or conversation, like walking someone through a store aisle or checking an outfit. Be My AI, built on GPT-4V/GPT-4o vision models, has become the more heavily used feature for many people because it doesn't require waiting on another human and can answer follow-up questions about the same image. Be My Eyes also licenses its AI and accessibility tools to companies (Microsoft, Google, and others have partnered with it) so that customer service and product interfaces can be made more usable for blind users, extending its role beyond the consumer app into a broader accessibility layer.

What sets it apart is the combination: it was one of the first apps to make crowdsourced sighted assistance practical at scale, and it was among the earliest mainstream deployments of multimodal AI for accessibility, giving it a large existing user base and volunteer network that newer AI-only vision apps don't have.