The vOICe for Android

Peter Meijer

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About this app

See with your ears! The vOICe for Android maps live camera views to soundscapes, offering augmented reality and unprecedented visual detail for the totally blind through sensory substitution and computer vision. Also includes live talking OCR, a talking color identifier, talking compass, talking face detector and a talking GPS locator, while Microsoft Seeing AI and Google Lookout object recognition can be launched from The vOICe for Android by tapping the left or right screen edge.

Is it an augmented reality game or a serious tool? It can be both, depending on what you want it to be! The ultimate goal is to provide a form of synthetic vision to the blind, but sighted users can simply have fun playing the game of sight-without-eyesight. Visually impaired users with severe tunnel vision can try if the auditory feedback helps them notice changes in the visual periphery. The vOICe for Android runs on smartphones and tablets, but is also compatible with most smart glasses, using the tiny camera in these glasses and a special user interface to generate a live sonic augmented reality overlay, hands-free! You may want to use an external battery connected via USB cable to keep the smart glasses battery from draining too quickly. You can help us by blogging and tweeting about your experiences, your use cases, and about how *you* learn to see with sound.

How does it work? The vOICe uses pitch for height and loudness for brightness in one-second left to right scans of any view: a rising bright line sounds as a rising tone, a bright spot as a beep, a bright filled rectangle as a noise burst, a vertical grid as a rhythm. Best used with stereo headphones for the most immersive experience and most detailed auditory resolution.

Just experiment with simple visual patterns first, because real-life imagery is extremely complex. Randomly drop a bright item such as a DUPLO brick on a dark table top, and learn to reach for it through sound alone (close your eyes if you have eyesight). Next try and explore your own safe home environment, and learn to associate the complex sound patterns with what you already know is there. Sighted users can also use the app with Google Cardboard compatible devices through a swipe-down on the main screen to toggle the binocular view.

For serious users: learning to see with sound is like learning a foreign language or learning to play a musical instrument, really challenging your perseverance and brain plasticity. It may well be the ultimate brain training system, bridging the senses through artificial synesthesia. A general training manual for The vOICe (not specific to the Android version) is available online at

https://www.seeingwithsound.com/manual/The_vOICe_Training_Manual.htm

and usage notes for running The vOICe for Android hands-free on smart glasses are at

https://www.seeingwithsound.com/android-glasses.htm

Do not worry about the many options of The vOICe for Android: human eyes have no buttons or options, and The vOICe is similarly designed to perform its main function out-of-the-box, so you do not have to use any options to get going. Some of the most common options appear as you slowly slide your finger across the main screen.

Why is The vOICe free? Because our foremost goal is to make a real change by lowering barriers to use as much as we can. You will find that competing technologies cost upwards of $10,000 and yet have lower specs. The perceptual resolution offered by The vOICe is unmatched even by $150,000 "bionic eye" retinal implants (PLoS ONE 7(3): e33136).

The vOICe for Android supports English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Arabic (menu Options | Language).

Please report bugs to [e-mail], and visit the web page http://www.seeingwithsound.com/android.htm for detailed description and disclaimers. We are on Twitter at @seeingwithsound.

Thank you!

Ratings and reviews

It's good but I feel there is scope for improvement. Can the image to sound conversion be made more accurate. The sample rate could be slowed down. As accuracy is more important than speed.can more tones and pitch variations be produced so that a blind person create a more detailed picture of the visual information. I really like this idea it is awesome, But I hope that you could make a better more accurate version of this. It can be real blessing and game changer for the blind.

First used app on Android 2 years ago and was very basic+ hard to use.Wow how it has improved,its not too difficult to learn and interpret basic changes of environment from sounds.If you had to rely on this 24/7 as sight impaired person im sure it would be big help once you begin to learn what the sounds and clicks represent.The spoken location, navigation color functions are good.Best this app used on 3D with headphones. maybe used on remote spec mounted camera would enhance this app greatly

This app allows visually impaired users to explore the world in a very different way from what you would expect. While it may seem daunting for novices, the app challenges some of the basic assumptions about the perceptive abilities of people who are blind or have low vision. Additionally, vOICe offers other interesting tools that may serve as helpful navigation aids for blind users. Last but not least, vOICe is a great research project that has a very committed team behind it and this in itself deserves 5 stars!

What's new

v2.74: Added support for Android 15, fix for broken preview image saving on Android 10+, and minor bug fixes.

v2.73: Bug fix for a few wrongly positioned graphical buttons on the main screen of the app.

v2.72: Stability improvements and minor bug fixes. Fix for EXIF data not saved in snapshots in Android 11+. Tweaks for TCL RayNeo X2 and Vuzix Shield smart glasses.