bengaluru when pavan kumar chitta 17 visited a restaurant in the city dialogue in the dark he was in for more than a highquality dining experience the boy was astounded to see the unlit eatery being run by visually impaired people watching them walk around confidently and offer impeccable service to customers opened pavans eyes to the fact that even the visually impaired can live an independent life as he walked out his appetite satiated and brain stimulated pavan thought of making a difference to their lives the class 12 student of greenwood international school knew what he could do develop an app using the watson cognitive application programming interface api offered by companies like ibm his efforts resulted in the creation of bee my guide a mobile application for the visually impaired after having a conversation with the volunteers and their manager faizal ka who is incharge of recruiting them and is visually impaired himself i was able to understand their everyday problems one of them being dependence on others when they were outside the restaurant using cognitive services offered by firms like ibm i figured i could create an app to solve some problems faced by the visually impaired pavan said the most obvious question thrown at him was how can a visually impaired person use a mobile app pavan explained many phones provide accessibility options such as the voiceover which lets the user know whats happening on the screen and which button heshe is pressing only the phone needs to be affixed to the stick used by the person pavan made use of tools like visual recognition speech to text and text to speech as well as geolocation and weather apis the objective of the app is to enable the visually impaired to know exactly what they are surrounded by he said the app combines six features that pavan created using feedback from visually impaired people the my vision feature allows the user to capture a photo which is processed and explained to them if the app detects a person the voice will tell the user about the persons gender age description glasses headgear and emotion and also identify if he or she is a celebrity pavan added the app went live on all ios platforms a week ago the android version is awaited makes our lives simpler faizal who is visually impaired since birth runs the restaurant and is primarily incharge of recruiting the volunteers one of the first users and reviewers of pavans mobile app faizal said the app is so accessible and easy to use that in half an hour i was able to get the hang of it boasting of many features the app makes our everyday lives much simpler be it shopping or anything else we dont need to depend on others smart cane next on agenda pavan feels theres more to be done my goal will be fully achieved when i develop a smart cane with a