Google's new AI-powered glasses will help blind people see once again

Google and a Dutch startup company called Envision have teamed up together to create a new pair of smart glasses that have the potential of making many people's lives a lot easier.

These new glasses are called the Envision glasses, and they are powered by artificial intelligence that has the capabilities of reading out loud what the user is looking at in the environment. The glasses are aimed at making blind people, and the lives of visually-impaired much easier, and they can do this by extracting large quantities of visual information and describing it back to the user. Examples of this include reading a recipe from a cookbook, analyzing friends, and describing immediate surroundings such as hazards.

Envision claims that the glasses have the fastest and most accurate optical character recognition technology available at the moment, and that the glasses are capable of reading any text from more than 60 different languages from any surface. In a way, if blind people or the visually-impaired are having the world described to them in real-time, then they are 'seeing', but just not with their eyes. Instead, they are using pieces of information to accurately organize their imagination together of what the world would look like if they could see. While it might not be the same as seeing with eyeballs, it is certainly a start.