Announcing Accessible QR codes in the Be Me Eyes app

We’ve been fortunate enough at Zappar to work with the class-leading apps and businesses at the forefront of servicing the blind and partially sighted communities across the globe. With Zapvision we have integrations with Microsoft Seeing AI, Envision and now, we are thrilled to announce our collaboration with Be My Eyes.

Each app offers an array of services to help the blind and partially sighted community go about their daily lives. From wayfinding to translation services, object recognition, code scanning etc. They are each pushing the boundaries in terms of innovation and the use of new technologies from Machine Learning to integration into wearables. 

Be My Eyes is particularly significant, with the incredible ecosystem that they’ve created between an awesome community of millions volunteers on call to help their audience of active users in over 160 countries around the world which continues to grow. Their real-time assisted services are beautifully simple and effective. 

It’s tech for good at its absolute best.

Be My Eyes are now going a stage further with their partnership and work with Open AI and Chat GPT 4 to create a new Be My AI virtual assistant agent for the next generation of services with visual search and conversational AI alongside their live volunteer and support services. It’s been in beta with the community and the feedback can best be described as rapturous and life-changing for many.

Transforming products into experience-led services using AI and accessible QR codes

So where do Zapvision and Accessible QR fit into this story? Well, with AQR for product packaging, we’re able to deliver a level of end-to-end experience both for the community and brands that can ensure that the information delivered from product packaging is unambiguous, accurate and trusted. This is not about inferring information from the web about a product. 

Here’s a short video of Be Me Eyes user Andy Lane, using the app with Accessible QR codes.

But ingesting the right and accurate structured information at an SKU level from the Zapvision CMS into the assisted experience and AI engine for the benefit of all. It means a better customer experience and mitigates risk for brands. This is being brought to market for the first time in collaboration with Unilever for Colman’s. With the help of the RNIB and the Be My Eyes beta testing community together we’ve been testing the service and the response has been humbling in its positivity. 

Bringing together Zapvision's cutting-edge computer vision tech with Be My Eyes' latest OpenAI, ChatGPT4 Vision feature, we're gearing up to offer Be My Eyes users a more engaging, supportive experience filled with clear, well-organized, and reliable data. 

This partnership kicks off a new era of what we’re calling, 'product as a service,' further levelling the playing field for people with blind or low vision visually users’ access to information, but also surfacing it in a way that’s more enjoyable and valuable to the end user. 

The continued mission for AQR and Zapvision

Our mission with Zapvision remains to make access to product information a basic human right. Full stop. We have the technology. We just need the willpower within the consumer packaged goods community to deliver this at scale. With Accessible QR, alongside the integration and innovation of Seeing AI, Envision and now Be My Eyes with this groundbreaking new service, we have the framework to make this a reality in the years ahead. And with thought-leading brands like Unilever and Bayer guiding the way we’re proving that this can be done by some of the world’s biggest packaged goods companies at scale, globally. 

There’s a lot of work still to do to make AQR a standard but when you look at the progress made over the last two years we feel ever more hopeful that we can make the everyday challenge of accessing information on packaging for 100s of millions of people a thing of the past in the coming years.

How to get started

If you’re already a Be Me Eyes customer, you can start using accessible QR codes within the Be Me Eyes app, simply…

1. Tap on ‘Browser Specialized Help’ from the home screen
2. Tap ‘Scan accessible QR code’ to begin