A while ago I signed up as a sighted person on Be My Eyes. I didn't get as many calls as I had hoped, but I was glad to help out on the few that I could. One call was to read envelopes of incoming mail, another was to read pill bottles, and then there was the two funny guys on big cozy chairs with shopping bags of cereal boxes and wanted to know what was what. I remember one guy really didn't like one type. The app had a unique feature for the sighted person to turn on the camera of the vision impaired person.

https://www.bemyeyes.com

I still have the Be My Eyes app installed but haven’t had a call in over a year - I think it’s a testament to how powerful AI vision models have become. I find it cool that AI works well enough for vision impaired people to solve all their problems.

However there was something very human and nice about helping out a stranger with a small random task from time to time. I fondly remember one older lady who spilled a box of blueberries on the kitchen floor and I helped her hunt them all down by guiding her around. It was 10 minutes of connection with a random person doing something fun and which is till remember fondly 4 years later

Ever since Be My Eyes introduced there AI features it's my understanding that there's been a lot less need for volunteers. I'm totally blind, and started using the app once they added in AI. It works great for for things like reading food labels after my kids have movved things around, determining if the tv has been left on, etc. I think I would use the volunteer feature if I still lived alone, but I don't.

> I didn't get as many calls as I had hoped

They always had significantly more people willing to help than in need of help. Which is good, not going to knock that. I signed up for it many years ago but didn’t get a single call, so eventually I just uninstalled it.

Who called you? Blind people?