What it is and how to use it – Heaven32

Doing our daily tasks like sorting mail, putting away groceries, reading whatever we want to do, and more is very easy to do. But have you ever thought about how difficult these “simple tasks” are for the visually impaired or blind? Well, Google has an app to make things a little easier for these people. Search the Google.

What is the Google Lookout app?

The Lookout app is an initiative by Google, which uses computer vision to help people who are visually impaired or blind to do things faster and easier using the device’s camera. Google says its mission is “Make global information accessible to all”.

Initially, the app was only available for Pixel devices, which are also only in the US, but it now supports all Android devices running Android 6.0 and above with at least 2GB of RAM. The languages ​​supported are English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

How to use the Lookout app?

The Lookout app has 5 different modes for different use cases (which can be found at the bottom of the app):

• Quick read – This mode quickly identifies text and reads it aloud. You can also identify handwritten text, if given a little time and when it’s written well (as opposed to my bad handwriting hahaha)
• Scan the document – This mode takes a snapshot of a document, scans it, and reads it aloud on your phone. The app also helps with alignment guidelines to scan it properly.
  
• Food label (beta) – This mode quickly identifies packaged foods by their label, there is also an additional option to scan barcodes. This mode does not work with any other type of text and is not available in all countries at the moment.
• Explore mode (beta) – This mode identifies objects (such as tables, plants, humans, furniture, bags, etc.) in our surroundings, to help visually impaired people move around easily.
• Piece of money – This mode is used to identify banknotes, although it does not work with coins (at the moment it only supports US dollars).

In addition to all of these modes, we have two switches just above the modes, to turn the camera on / off, and the other switch is to see recent history of our scans. You can go to the application settings, by clicking on the profile icon at the top right, here you can adjust the “Speech rate” and “Tone” of the voice, as well as some additional parameters.

Have you ever used this handy Google app? If so, let us know what you think in the comments below.