You could argue that we’re still in the heady early days of an inevitable proliferation of ChatGPT apps, plug-ins and tools to automate pesky daily tasks.
Ednews informs citing Euronews that, some bright minds are already finding interesting uses for OpenAI’s revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, aside from plagiarising essays, sending flowery emails and asking if God exists.
Take, for example, an app for visually impaired and blind people called Be My Eyes.
Founder Hans Jørgen Wiberg, who is visually impaired himself, developed the idea in 2012 as a way to get visual assistance when he was on his own, and is now drawing on the tech behind ChatGPT.
How does it work?
Launched in 2015, the app works by pairing visually impaired or blind people with sighted volunteers who act as their “eyes” via video call.
Now boasting half a million blind and low-vision users in addition to 6.4 million sighted volunteers, the app is now trialling a “Virtual Volunteer” powered by ChatGPT.
This means that users can take a picture using their phone, send it via the app and instantly have the photos described to them in impressive detail.
The virtual aid can even suggest recipes to prepare based on images of the contents of a user’s fridge.
"I use it on a fairly regular basis, maybe once or twice a week,” Jesper Holten, a Be My Eyes user who is completely blind, said.
“It tends to be in daily situations like when I'm cooking food and want to have a look at tins, especially, tins and cans with food stuff can be very hard to ascertain what's in it”.
