Be My Eyes is an accessibility company and app founded by Hans Jorgen Wiberg, a Danish furniture craftsman who was himself losing his sight, and launched in 2015. The original idea was simple human-to-human: a blind or low-vision user opens the app and is connected by live video to a sighted volunteer somewhere in the world who looks through the phone’s camera and helps with everyday tasks - reading a label, checking an expiry date, matching clothes, finding a dropped item. It grew into one of the largest micro-volunteering communities anywhere, with millions of volunteers across many languages.
In 2023 Be My Eyes became one of the first consumer products to put a large multimodal model in front of real users, launching Be My AI (initially called Virtual Volunteer), powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4. Instead of waiting for a human, a user can take a photo and get a detailed spoken description, then ask follow-up questions in conversation. The company kept the human volunteer network as a complement, so a user can escalate from AI to a person when the situation needs it. Both the volunteer service and Be My AI are free for blind and low-vision users.
Be My Eyes occupies an interesting spot in the AI story: a mission-driven organization that already had the user base and the trust, then bolted on frontier AI to make the same help faster and available around the clock. It is also a recurring reference point for what assistive multimodal AI can do well in practice.
Why business readers should care: Be My Eyes shows how an existing community and clear use case can absorb a new model fast, and how keeping a human fallback alongside the AI is a feature rather than an admission of weakness.