Be My Eyes: the app powering a global volunteer movement for accessibility | Hans Jørgen Wiberg

HJW 0:00

We got a call from OpenAI. They said we also have a model that can describe images, and we believe that is something that the blind people could really benefit from. Would you like to partner with us?

TS 0:17

Welcome to Made For Us, the show where we explore how intentional design can help build a world that works better for everyone. I'm your host Tosin Sulaiman.

I wonder if you made any smartphone resolutions at the start of this year. Maybe it was to get a better one, to spend less time scrolling on social media, or to delete a few hundred photos. Well, one company in Denmark has a novel idea for how you could be making the most of your smartphone. The company is called Be My Eyes. And the idea is micro volunteering. It works like this, if you're a sighted person, you can volunteer to be the eyes of someone who's blind or visually impaired, all in one short phone call. The app now has nearly eight hundred thousand users and 8.5 million volunteers around the world, and it's on track to hit one million blind users by the end of the year. I spoke to Hans Jorgen Wiberg, the founder of Be My Eyes, and he told me how he came up with the idea for the app, and the many ways in which people are using it. We also talked about how AI has the potential to transform how Be My Eyes users interact with the world, but why he believes human connection will remain the app superpower. Here's our conversation.

HJW: 01:29

My name is Hans Jorgen Wiberg. I'm from Denmark, and I'm blind myself, and I founded Be My Eyes back in 2012. I was working for the Danish Blind Federation as a consultant, and my job was to visit blind people in their home and tell them about audio books and all kinds of stuff. And in that period, I met a lot of people who were blind or low vision, and also some of the more tech savvy ones, and one of them told me about that when he needed assistance, he would make a FaceTime call. And then he said, but I always have to call someone. And I knew this from myself that you have to think about, oh, did I call my sister yesterday? Or who should I call today? And so on.

And then I was thinking, Oh, maybe we can make a group you can call but I'm not a tech person myself. I have no clue how to make an app, but I managed to find some people who knew about this, and we also managed to raise some money to actually pay developers to do this. So that was kind of how it started.

TS: 02:39

So if you could explain for people who aren't familiar with Be My Eyes, how it actually works. You're connecting users who are blind with volunteers. So just tell us a little bit about that idea.

HJW: 02:51

Well, the idea is pretty simple, because when I am here in my kitchen, in my home and I need to see something and my wife is not around, then I'll pull out my phone and launch the Be My Eyes app and press the button called call a volunteer, and then the Be My Eyes system will know that, hey, Hans is speaking Danish, and he is in Denmark. Let's try find someone who also speaks Danish, and then we will notify twenty of the volunteers here in Denmark, and then the first one of those volunteer to say yes will be connected with me. And there's another thing you can do in the Be My Eyes app, but we have added something called Be My AI, so if I don't feel like talking to a real human being, maybe it's too early Monday morning or something, then I can just take a photo with the Be My Eyes app, and then we will upload that photo to open AI, and you will get a very detailed description back from open AI about what the photo is about. And you can even ask follow up questions. So that is the two main way people are using be my AI.

TS: 04:10

So can you talk about what are the things that are best done with a volunteer versus Be My AI?

HJW: 04:20

Well, a very concrete example is when I'm turning on my washing machine, I need to make sure I have it on the right temperature and the right program and all that. And that's way easier to do with a live person who can say, Okay, you need to turn it a little more down, and now it's on 60 degrees or whatever. But if I have an image in a textbook, or if I get a letter or something, then it's easier to just take a photo and then get a description back. And also it feels more private when you're not having a human being involved. And this is just a computer doing something.

TS: 04:57

So apart from using it to operate your machine, I'm curious, how else you use Be My Eyes?

HJW: 05:03

Well, quite a few times I have been using it in my garden because we have one of these self driving lawn mowers. And sometimes it stops somewhere in the garden and I cannot find it. And then I have been using be my eye to locate this more or less run away lawnmower and get it back into the charging station and so on. And that's always kind of a funny call, because it kind of sparks interest into my garden.

And then I live in a very small town. We have one shop, and sometimes I use be my eyes to make sure I get to the right place when I'm walking down to the shop, if there's something on the street that I need to pass, or something, then I use be my eyes to make sure I get around whatever it is. And so also for navigating.

TS: 05:52

And in terms of how your broader user base is using it, what are the main categories of requests that people are using it for?

HJW: 06:01

The majority of all calls are from within your house, and most likely, within the kitchen. Cooking is a big thing like everybody else, we like to know what we're eating, and so making sure you have the right ingredients and they are not expired, and how I set my oven to this temperature and so on. And also, are these two suck the same color, and is the shirt clean? And all kind of daily tasks where you just need to be sure you're kind of here, but you just want to make absolutely sure that you are doing the right thing and know that you have actually checked how you look before you leave the house.

HJW: 06:40

I was surprised to see somewhere in the southern part of the US, we have a farmer who is using the my eyes to run his chicken farm and to make sure he is taking the food out of the right bag and feeding to the chickens. And we even have another farmer who is using to check on his cows and so on. I'm born on a farm myself, well, this is kind of a mind blowing to me, that you can actually do this.

TS: 07:09

And you've called this concept micro volunteering. It's something that you spoke about in your TED talk. Can you expand on that a bit more?

HJW: 07:18

Well, it's micro because we have many calls that are like, fifteen, twenty seconds. Have I set my oven to 200 degrees. Yes, you have, well, thank you so much, and that's it, and that's exactly the information you needed, but you would never kind of walk across and ask your neighbor to come over and see how I set my order to 200 weeks. But you kind of need to be sure about this, and I think that 90% of our calls are less than three minutes, and you can do a lot in three minutes. So that is why I like to call it micro volunteering. Of course, sometimes we have very long calls, half an hour or more. Sometimes, if you are updating your computer, you need to restart or something like that, or you are trying to locate something and it's completely lost and you have to search through the whole house. It might take quite a while, but most calls are super easy and short, right?

TS: 08:20

And the idea is that, you know, instead of someone playing a casual game on their phone or scrolling on social media, they can spend a few minutes helping someone out.

HJW: 08:29

Exactly. It makes a very big impression on people that they suddenly are one to one with a real blind person solving a real issue. And this is not a game or something. This is a real person who needs this information right now, and you are there with the person. And that just impactful to experience that sometimes we even have people who are in wheelchairs and things. It's kind of beautiful that one group of people who has some kind of impairment can help other people in the same situation, but with another impairment.

TS: 09:11

On the Be My Eyes website, there's a community page where users and volunteers share their experiences of using the app. Let's hear from a couple of them.

Sally: 09:25

My name is Sally, and I live near the sea, very near the sea in Essex, which is in the south half of England in the UK. I've got something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which mean that I'm in constant pain and I have difficulty walking. Sometimes mobility is an issue for me. I spend some of my time in a wheelchair, and if I'm not in the wheelchair, I'm using clutches. So it does mean that I don't get out and about very much. I found this app when I was sitting with a friend of mine, and she happened to take a call. She sort of shushed me, and just got on with this person on the phone. And I was absolutely fascinated. I'd not come across any thought of this app even, and I just watched her.

Sally: 10:18

She was only on the call for probably three or four minutes, and she had to help this person find a tablet, which he dropped all his tablets on the floor, but he'd found a few, and there was just one more to find, and she helped him find it pretty quickly. I have an iPhone. I've never used it to its potential, really, and yet that seemed to be a fantastic idea, that I could be handy for somebody else, and I can feel useful to somebody else all of a sudden. And the fact that it's worldwide is just fascinating. So I could talk to anybody in the world, and they could use the one bit of my body that's still working, which it makes me feel really valued, and I really look forward to my first call and all subsequent calls, because life is hard when you're on your own, and it's hard when you're in pain, and You do feel useless, and I do feel really, really separate from society, and if I can do something by using the app to feel more inclusive into a wider society it's brilliant.

Amir: 11:35

Hello. I'm Amir. I live in Tehran, Iran. I'm a radio journalist and a translator. I use Be My Eyes quite often, actually, on a daily basis, I use it for a variety of tasks. For example, sometimes I use it to just have the color of my clothes identified for me. Or sometimes I use it at work just to see what is going on in front of me, how many people are there, and just to have a description of the surroundings, I've been using iPhone from the day voiceover came out, but no application like Be My Eyes has altered my life as drastically as I can put it, it just comforts me to know that there is an option whenever I need assistance.

For example, a couple of days ago, I just wanted to record a piece, a piece of music using my digital piano, and I couldn't just remember the placement of the record button. I just used Be My Eyes, and in just thirty seconds or so, a volunteer came, and she reads the name and the order of all buttons. And these are little buttons, you know, smaller than a fingertip to me, and I was surprised that, you know, a task which could have required thirty minutes on my side. I mean finding a sighted peer around or a family member who doesn't know English quite well, just took two minutes to be complete. So that has been quite revolutionary.

TS: 13:14

Once you had the idea, how did you go about developing the product? Building a team? Because you said yourself that you weren't a very techie person, you had no idea how to build an app. So how did it all happen?

HJW: 13:25

Well, when I presented the idea, I was lucky to find, I think, eight people altogether who kind of made the team in the beginning, and we raised the money, and we hired developers who could actually build an app and also make it accessible. And then we launched in 2015 and very soon we realized that we also had to make it into a business, because Be My Eyes is a totally free app to use. And the reason is that most of the blind people in this world, they live in low income countries in the Global South, as we call it, and a lot of them has a smartphone, but not that many people can pay $10 a month if you are blind and live in low income areas. So we decided that it needed to be free, but we also needed to have some kind of income.

So one of my colleagues came up with this idea about service directory, as we call it now, where we help companies serve their blind customers. I would like to use Microsoft as the example, because in the Be My Eyes app, you can open service directory, and then you can find technical and then you can find Microsoft, and then you can call Microsoft directly from the Be My Eyes app. And when we do that, they know it's a blind person calling so they can make sure that it is the right agents who know about the issues that blind people has with Microsoft products.

And on top of that, we have added AI. So if you want to use AI to solve your problem, you can do that. And that's really popular also, because you get a step by step guide to how to solve your problem. Because sometimes we talk to someone and then they say, first you do this, and then you do that, and then you do this, and then you hang up, and then you have forgot what number three was, but with the AI, you can always go back and look at the list that you have gotten in text. And those companies, they pay Be My Eyes a monthly subscription to be on our platform. So that is how we can keep Be My Eyes as a free service for every blind person in the whole world.

TS: 15:46

How many companies are you partnering with besides Microsoft?

HJW: 15:50

We have Spotify, we have LinkedIn, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Lego and a number of other huge brands who has a large customer base and who care about accessibility and being a good company and so on.

TS: 16:06

And you said the rationale for them to partner with Be My Eyes, is really understanding the needs of blind and low vision users, but I guess it also has an impact on innovation and helps them to make their products more accessible.

HJW: 16:19

That's kind of the secret about this, because when you are answering calls from your customers, you will learn about your product. I assume, when the agent has answered the same question a number of times, they will give feedback to the company, say, Should we do something about this? And that's what I really love about this way of engaging with the company that the companies will be better at doing what they do for their blind partners when they repeatedly get reminded about and very often, the blind people will have ideas about how they can improve and so on.

TS: 17:00

What role do you think AI will play in this next phase of your growth?

HJW: 17:05

Well, now everybody talks about AI, but in a few years, AI will really be everywhere. It will be in our washing machine, and it will be everywhere, and it will be free or close to free. So I believe that the luxury of having a real person to call will be quite significant, also for the group of people I mentioned before, it will make it a lot easier to access technology, simply because you can talk to your computer, and it will actually do what earlier you say to it. So I think AI will have a amazing influence in how we interact with technology in the future.

And, yeah, I'm just very happy that we have the resource of real human beings, because a lot of people will prefer even though they could do the same thing, but AI, they would like to talk to a human being. I know that a lot of our calls could have been done in half the time, but the other half is just as important, because that's where you talk about, okay, how is the weather in Copenhagen, and how is the weather in London or New York or whatever? But it is a very important thing that now that you are talking to another person, that you kind of show a little interest in what they are doing, and that's very often sparks, sometimes a long conversation, and that's perfectly fine.

TS: 18:41

So it sounds like you're optimistic about the potential of AI.

HJW: 18:46

I am. I mean, there has been all kind of rumors and maybe also example of how AI can be used in harmful way. It is kind of scary to think about how evil people can manipulate a lot of people with personalized emails and deep fakes. So it's also really scary. But as a blind person, and if I focus on how can that help the blind group, I am very excited, absolutely, but it is something that we as a society need to really be careful about what we are letting loose here.

TS: 19:32

I was curious about how be my AI got started. Was this something that was initiated by you or by OpenAI? Could you tell the story of how that happened.

HJW: 19:43

Be my AI was kind of an amazing story. Because, like everybody else in November, December 2022, we were looking at open AI, and everybody was talking about open AI and chat GPT, and we were looking at, how can we use this. And then we got a call from open AI. They said we also have a model that can describe images, and we believe that is something that the blind people could really benefit from. Would you like to partner with us? And to be honest, I was a little skeptical in the beginning, because what we have seen so far was not really good. Well, then we got to use the model, and we were completely blown away about how precise and how well it described and how detailed it was. So we were, oh, we can really use this.

HJW: 20:36

And then, as the only company in the whole world, we got access to that model. So it was a totally amazing thing to be part of. And I'm today, I'm very, very proud that be my eyes was the company who facilitated that. Suddenly, blind people were in the forefront of what everybody was talking about. And I also believe that we actually helped open AI improve their models, because we, of course, gave a lot of feedback about when it was hallucinating and all that. And also, on day one, working with open AI, we have to tell them that Be My Eyes, is a free service, and we will not charge our users anything. Are you okay with that? And they were until this day, we are not charging anything to look a little bit ahead. We are looking into the news model, where you can point your phone at something and have a live description from AI, and we haven't gotten access to it yet, but we believe it's pretty soon, and we are very a little scared about how the pricing of this will be, because it is Really what we as blind people, has been dreaming on for many years that you can just pull your phone out and then get a description of whatever you probably that, and that is from a technical side possible. We have seen it, we have tried it, but we don't know if we can do that as a totally free service for everyone. So it's really, really exciting the next six months, or maybe more before we really know how we can structure the new adventure with OpenAI.

TS: 22:35

And so for OpenAI, what do you think is the motivation for partnering with Be My Eyes.

HJW: 22:40

Well, I don't know what they are thinking, but I believe they are also good people. I basically think that they saw this tool and say, Oh, this is perfect for blind people. Let's call some blind companies. I don't think they have developed this specifically for us, but I think they saw they could do it. And then, of course, making it available for free for us is absolutely their credit, and I am forever thankful that that they have, I mean, they could have charged not be my eyes. But then another company is to kind of do this, but they decided that, yeah, okay, this is kind of our little contribution to the blind community and so on. So I'm very happy about that, but it's very important to say that we do not train on the image that the blind people are taking. It is AI who is giving the description of the image. In order to train on something, you need a person to describe what is on the image, and that's not what we're doing. So the image we are taking, or our users are taking are not used for any kind of training. So just to be fair about that, but we have provided a lot of feedback, and sometimes we could even say, Okay, please take this picture and see that description. What went wrong here and so on, and that was part of the feature test. And before Be My Eyes, how would you describe the level of innovation for people who are blind or visually impaired? I'm 60 years old, so I've been around for quite a while, and I remember the old Nokia phone. They were really hard to use as a blind person, and you had to pay a lot of money to make them accessible and talk in any way. And then iPhone came along, and suddenly you could buy the same for iPhone as everybody else and use it because voice over was invented, and I believe that has sparked a whole innovation and also pressure on Android to make their phones accessible to blind people. And so there has been a tremendous amount of innovation, and I think AI is just tripling the speed of innovation in this area. So totally amazing to be part of. Yeah.

TS: 25:00

So if a company were to approach you for advice on developing inclusive products, what would you say to them?

HJW: 25:08

I mean, number one is find some of the people that you are trying to develop something for and work together with those people. The saying nothing about us without us is very much true. And I think the most important thing was for us in the beginning, was that we rented a office at one of the biggest institutions for blind people here in Denmark. So we were developing in the middle of a lot of blind people. So every time we needed a new person to try something out, we could just open the door and grab the first person going by. So work closely together with your target group is, I think, the most important thing, and then they will guide you to do the right thing.

TS: 25:59

I want to talk about the ratio of volunteers to users, because, as you said, it's way more volunteers. Was that by design, or was that something that you didn't anticipate?

HJW: 26:09

Well, it's kind of funny because we had no idea, because we could not find another service like Be My Eyes, when we looked at this, we actually made a gamification element in the beginning, where you could earn some point if you were helping. Because we were thinking, maybe it's difficult to find volunteers. We had no clue. And then when we launched in 2015 on the first day, we got a thousand blind people signed up, and we had ten thousand volunteers who signed up within the first twenty four hours, and we were completely blown away. It spread like wildfire. I don't speak Russian, but suddenly we had a whole group of blind people in Russia using Be My Eyes. And I had no clue how they have even heard about Be My Eyes, but that was the power of social media and all the interviews we gave at the time, but we have not done anything to keep up a specific ratio. I mean, we have one hundred and eighty-five different languages, and in Hindi, for instance, we have a quite low ratio. I think it's like one to five or something in other language, it may be more like one to a hundred or something. So it's quite different from language to language.

TS: 27:31

What do you think is that the motivation for people who volunteer? I know there's, you know, the fact that they can do it in a short space of time, but what else do you think is driving this?

HJW: 27:41

People in general do want to help. And Be My Eyes is an easy way to do that, and it's kind of also a techie to do it. The power of Be My Eyes is generosity. People being generous with their time, but also trust. I mean, you have to trust another person in order to kind of use this service. And maybe it's not a coincidence that it was a guy from Denmark who came up with this crazy idea, because we are said to have a very high degree of trust in other people. But I can see that it's pretty much the global phenomenon, because people do sign up in all countries, and it's just very humbling that so many people are willing to go in and download the app and sign up and say, Yeah, I'm ready to step up and do what it takes to help a blind person. We have not had any serious incidents of people trying to scam or anything like that, so you can actually trust the people you don't know. But of course, you always need to be Be careful and not share private information. But all the general easy day to day, things you can safely use be my hands for.

TS: 29:00

Do you have goals for the number of users you'd like to reach? Because when you look at the total addressable market globally, it is quite significant, isn't it?

HJW: 29:08

Yes. And no matter how much we brag about our numbers, we can also see that I believe there is almost two hundred and fifty million people who are blind or low vision. But then again, a lot of them don't have smartphones. A lot of them are plus eighty years old. It's a slow process, because you cannot just do Google ads and reach blind people in low income countries and so on. So it will take quite a while, and we need to work more closely together with blindness organizations and mobility instructors in different countries.

TS: 29:48

So it sounds like that next phase of growth is going to be the most challenging you've managed to reach. I guess the people who are the most tech savvy, maybe a little bit younger.

HJW: 30:00

Absolutely, we have to look at if we can make it even more easy to use, because a lot of people, they are maybe in their 60s and 70s, and when they need to use Be My Eyes for the first time, and maybe they have not been that technical. So keeping it very easy to use is, I think, the key thing we need to look more into and always have in mind that the people you see in the media and so on, the blind people, they are the most tech savvy, but the big group, they are not that visible. And we absolutely need to be there for those people who are new to being blind or low vision, that is the big challenge, I think.

TS: 30:53

Thank you to Hans Jorgen Wiberg for joining me on the show and thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave us a five-star review—it makes our day and helps others discover the show. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter or follow us on social media. You’ll find us on LinkedIn and Instagram at madeforuspodcast. I’ve also included the links in the show notes. We appreciate your support, and we’ll see you next week.

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