Late last month, Be My Eyes announced it had entered into a partnership with Meta that sees the former’s accessibility software for the Blind and low vision community integrated into the latter’s popular Ray-Ban smart glasses. According to the San Francisco-based Be My Eyes, the collaboration brings the “Call A Volunteer” functionality to the Ray-Bans, boasting in its press release that the integration is result of a “groundbreaking partnership” as well as a “market first” innovation.
“Call A Volunteer” in Ray-Bans will initially be available in the United States, as well as Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.
Be My Eyes describes the new software as an experience initiated “entirely by voice command.” The company noted saying “Hey Meta, Call a Volunteer on Be My Eyes” will prompt a connection to a sighted Be My Eyes volunteer, who speaks the user’s native tongue, through a one-way video, two-way audio call. This setup enables the sighted volunteer to see through the lens of the Ray-Bans in an effort to offer a real-time description to the user via the glasses’ open-ear speakers. Be My Eyes purports the functionality is useful for everyday tasks like setting the desired temperature on a thermostat, finding the right aisle at the supermarket, and much more—all while keeping the user’s hands free.
Be My Eyes has a worldwide network of 7.7 million sighted volunteers.
“We believe, and many very thoughtful people in the accessibility space believe, the future [of accessibility] is in wearables,” said Be My Eyes CEO Mike Buckley earlier today in a brief telephone interview with me. “Particularly when you think about the Blind and low vision community, the idea you could have AI give you greater independence while having a hands-free experience is an extremely big deal. It’s deeply profound.”
Buckley doubled down on the profundity narrative, telling me his company’s work alongside Meta has the potential to beget “transformative” advances in equal access to the world. Although Be My Eyes is pitching this technology as beneficial for admittedly ho-hum, mundane everyday tasks, Buckley keenly emphasized there are far grander applications. One such area is employment—after all, October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month—with Buckley saying utilizing Be My Eyes on the Meta Ray-Bans potentially could afford “greater independence” in the disability community such that there would be a commensurate uptick in job opportunities for them. In fact, it was this more grandiose realization that spurred Buckley and team to pursue the Meta partnership with more aggression, as it aligned with the aforementioned notion that wearable technology will continue to be key vehicles towards achieving greater empowerment in people’s lives.
But Buckley and crew stands not alone. Indeed, as it takes two to tango, he explained Meta was equally enthused about getting together to do something. The two companies have committed to what Buckley characterized as a “deep development partnership” for which Buckley has “many aspirations.” According to Buckley, Meta’s chief technology officer in Andrew Bosworth, affectionately known as Boz, played an instrumental role in shepherding the duo’s partnership from conception to fruition. Bosworth, Buckley told me, saw the life-altering potential of the work and, shrewdly, recognized Meta’s need for more pointed feedback on its side of the fence. Buckley added that, internally to Meta in Menlo Park, there are opportunities for workers to volunteer to work on certain projects they find fulfilling and interesting. The Be My Eyes project has purportedly been “one of the most popular projects Meta has ever seen in terms of the number of engineers who wanted to volunteer and work on this thing,” he said. Moreover, the engineering groups at both companies have spent “over a thousand hours together” shoulder-to-shoulder on this initiative, in places from California to New York and even transcontinentally to Denmark. That engineers on both sides of the aisle were so gung-ho about working together on the project is a true testament to “the levels of excitement on both sides,” Buckley said.
“There’s a wide palette of things we can do together,” he said.
When asked about feedback, Buckley told me he hasn’t witnessed this much anticipation since OpenAI’s release of the ChatGPT-4 model in the spring of 2023. Buckley noted a few weeks ago, a Facebook group called Blind Users of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses appeared online. The private group, he said, began modestly enough with but two people; as of this writing, what was 2 has ballooned to over 1,300 members. Elsewhere, Buckley said customer support tickets at Be My Eyes—he tries to take on 20–30 tickets per month as a means of “[staying] close to our customers and the people using our product”—has revealed “very high levels” of excitement amongst those in the Be My Eyes community.
As to the future, Buckley expressed confidence at all the good Be My Eyes and Meta will eventually do together. On the AI front, he’s excited about the possibilities that Meta’s Llama model could enable for accessibility. In addition, Buckley said there are enticing possibilities in the enterprise, as well as in distribution. It’s intriguing, he told me, to ponder how perhaps healthcare companies could subsidize the cost of the Ray-Bans such that more people could have them without financial constraints being a barrier to inclusion. Likewise, the same could said for governments and other entities. Nonetheless, Buckley was quick to curb his enthusiasm by emphasizing he wishes not to “over promise anything” because, as Apple CEO Tim Cook is wont to say of ascendant technology, the game is very much in the early innings. In other words, Be My Eyes and Meta have taken their first steps on what’s assuredly a long journey.
“I think there’s a shared commitment amongst Meta and Be My Eyes to dramatically expand the use cases and distribution of this [technology] to beneficially impact humanity,” Buckley said of the future. “I know that’s a very grandiose claim, but it’s how I think about it for us.”