LookTel Features
Gain independence through LookTel by performing
daily visual tasks such as:
Identifying objects
Recognize packaged goods such as items in your kitchen or grocery
store, organize money, quickly identify a medication
bottle, easily find a CD in your music collection, and more!
For objects that cannot be recognized using their packaging images,
LookTel provides a set of printed and pre-trained image tags that
can be applied to virtually any object in your home such as
clothing, plastic frozen food containers or a glass jar. Simply peel
and attach the tag to an object, point your mobile phone at it, and
record an audible description of the item.
Identifying landmarks
Increase your personal
mobility and have confidence in your orientation by training the
system to recognize destinations such as a home or building
entrance. Simply take a photo and label it by speaking into the
phone’s microphone. Later, you can use LookTel to confirm that you
have reached your own home, friend's apartment, or as many other
destinations as you desire.
Personalized image databases
Customize LookTel by teaching it to recognize other
items of importance to you. Capture photos of the items and label
them with your own speech tags. Then, when LookTel "sees" them
again, you will hear your own message about the items you taught it
to recognize.
This can become a family activity, as with each tag you expand your awareness and control of the visual world around you.
Remote sighted assistance
LookTel provides additional state-of-the-art tools for remotely
connecting to another person that can provide a wide range of
assistive services to make day-to-day activities easier. Through a
combination of live video, hi-resolution photos and GPS tracking
data sent from your cell phone, remote assistants can help read signs on street corners and
buildings, provide turn-by-turn directions, and use integrated
resources such as Google Maps to identify nearby points of interest
and help you learn a new neighborhood. With LookTel, the help of a sighted assistant is within your reach any time, any place.
Text Reader
Use your mobile phone to take a photo of any printed text and LookTel will read it back to you. The system sends these images to a connected PC running a full featured optical character recognition engine. This solution offers a more robust mobile text reader that can handle complex pages of text and skewed or rotated images.
Smartphone Accessibility
LookTel is also working towards making your cell phone into a device that's easy for a person with a visual impairment to use. Sliding a finger over the screen causes the phone to speak the names of menu items in a clear voice. Double tapping on the screen selects an item or menu. You can also customize the phone's physical buttons to perform different tasks, such as launching the software. Navigation is made easy with the step-by-step selections that tell LookTel what you wish to do. LookTel will assist a consumer that simply needs basic phone accessibility or a professional that requires more advanced capabilities such as Outlook contact integration. Some of the smart phones that support LookTel also have Microsoft’s Voice Command which provides speech recognition features allowing you to initiate calls, ask for time, and more. In the near future LookTel will allow such interfaces for E-mail, or SMS
How does it work?
Users running the LookTel Mobile software, which runs on
compatible Windows Mobile Smartphones, use the cell phone’s
touch-screen interface to navigate and the cell phone's camera to
recognize objects. The LookTel Mobile software transmits the live
images from the cell phone to a PC running LookTel BaseStation,
our sophisticated recognition software. When the PC receives a request to look
up an image, it sorts through the image library to find the matching image
stored in the database. It then sends back the information that
permits the Smartphone to speak the description of the item to you.
LookTel "learns" to recognize new items by storing an image of
the item, captured by the Smartphone, and matching it with a tag.
The tag can be your own voice or a text tag that is read by the
text-to-speech engine, similar to what your home PC can do.
The LookTel solution also provides remote sighted assistance
through the use of the cell phone’s camera and communication to a
remote human assistant who can look at live images and video to
describe your present surroundings. As you aim the camera, the
person assisting you receives live images of your surroundings,
allowing them to describe the location of landmarks,
pathways to destinations, or assist you in locating and recognizing
objects or street signs.
