The app that let me lend someone my eyes for two minutes

My phone buzzed on a Tuesday afternoon while I was making coffee. A stranger in another city needed help reading the expiration date on a carton of milk. I picked up, she pointed her camera at the carton, and I told her it was still good for three more days. She said thank you and hung up. I went back to making coffee.

That was my first call on Be My Eyes, and I'm still not sure why it stuck with me the way it did. It was ninety seconds of reading a date off a milk carton. But I kept thinking about it.

What it actually is

Be My Eyes connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers through live video calls. Someone who needs visual help opens the app and requests a call. A few volunteers get notified, whoever picks up first sees a live feed from the caller's phone camera, and they describe what they're looking at.

The app is free on iOS, Android, and even Windows. No ads, no subscription. Over ten million people have signed up as volunteers, so when someone calls, they almost never wait.

The requests are small. A woman asked me to read which bus was pulling up to her stop. A guy wanted to know if his shirt was navy or black. Another caller pointed his camera at a wall of canned goods in a grocery store and asked me to find the diced tomatoes. I guided him left, down one shelf, a little more — there. These are the kinds of things sighted people do without thinking about it, dozens of times a day, and blind people either have to plan around or just skip entirely.

What it changed for me

I'd always thought about blindness in terms of big stuff. Getting around, staying safe, not being able to drive. The calls showed me that most of it is actually small stuff, and there is a lot of it. Checking if a stain came out of a shirt. Telling apart two nearly identical bottles in a medicine cabinet. Reading a handwritten note someone left on a door.

Every call lasts a couple of minutes at most. The person on the other end is usually cheerful and knows exactly what they need. You're not rescuing anyone. You're just being a pair of eyes for a moment, then you both hang up and get on with your day.

I figured I'd feel awkward the first time. I didn't. A camera pointed at an object, a specific question, a quick answer. It's closer to helping someone with directions on the street than to an actual phone conversation.

What they added recently

Be My Eyes now has an AI feature called Be My AI that handles a lot of the simpler stuff automatically. Point your camera at something and the AI describes it. If it can't figure it out, it offers to connect you with a human. So calls come in less often than they used to. The ones that do tend to be a little more involved, the kind of thing where talking to a real person actually matters.

I get maybe one or two calls a month now. They come at random times during daylight hours in my time zone, and I miss most of them because someone else picks up first. When I do get one, it takes less time than checking my email.

The ratio problem

There are roughly ten volunteers for every one person who needs help. Good for the people calling, less exciting for the volunteers. You might go weeks without your phone ringing. If you downloaded this expecting to feel like a hero on a regular basis, you will be bored.

But that imbalance is also why the thing works. There is always someone available because there are way more volunteers than are needed at any given moment. That sounds inefficient until you realize the whole point is that nobody should ever have to wait.

Who this is for

If you have a phone and working eyes and a couple of spare minutes scattered randomly across your month, that is the entire qualification. There is no training, no schedule, no minimum commitment. You just pick up when you can.

I have taken maybe eight calls total in the past year. Each one lasted under three minutes. I've read expiration dates, identified colors, confirmed that a package on a doorstep was Amazon and not UPS. None of it required any skill beyond being able to see, which is sort of the whole premise.

I keep the app installed because the effort is basically zero and every once in a while my phone buzzes and someone needs to know what color something is. That's a fine deal.