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Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, March 22, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.
Seeing AI is a free Microsoft app for people who are blind or have low vision. It uses the phone's camera and AI to narrate the world around the user — reading text out loud, identifying products by barcode, describing scenes, and recognizing faces. It launched on iOS in 2017 and became available on Android in December 2023, supporting 18 languages.
Details
Seeing AI originated from a 2015 Microsoft Hackathon project led by Saqib Shaikh, a software engineer who is blind. The app uses Azure Cognitive Services (Microsoft's cloud AI platform for vision, speech, and language tasks) to power its features: reading printed and handwritten text, scanning documents, identifying products via barcode, recognizing faces and emotions, describing scenes, identifying currency, and detecting colors. By the time of its Android launch, the app had helped users with over 10 million tasks. The app is part of Microsoft's broader AI for Accessibility grant program, which provides funding and technology to organizations building AI tools for people with disabilities. Seeing AI has received broad praise as a practical, beneficial use of AI with no significant controversies reported.
Products affected
Seeing AI (iOSAndroid)Azure Cognitive ServicesMicrosoft AI for Accessibility program
Sources & Evidence
Company Disclosure
Other practices by Microsoft
OtherProject InnerEye is a Microsoft Research initiative that uses AI to analyze 3D medical scans — primarily CT scans used for cancer radiotherapy planning — and automatically highlight the areas that need treatment. Peer-reviewed research found it can complete this task up to 13 times faster than a clinician doing it manually, while staying within the range of human expert accuracy.OtherWindows Recall is an AI feature for Windows 11 that continuously takes screenshots of everything on a user's screen and stores them locally, so the user can later search their own history by typing questions like "find that recipe I was looking at last week." Announced in May 2024, it faced immediate criticism from security and privacy experts and was delayed multiple times before a limited release.OtherMicrosoft offers Security Copilot, a generative AI assistant for security and IT professionals, generally available worldwide since April 2024. It processes natural language questions from analysts and returns findings drawn from Microsoft's global threat intelligence to help teams detect, investigate, and respond to security incidents. In March 2025, Microsoft announced six autonomous AI agents for Security Copilot, available for preview in April 2025, designed to handle high-volume tasks such as phishing triage, access policy optimization, and vulnerability remediation without requiring step-by-step human input.
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