From Seeing AI to Guided Vision: The Rise of AI Visual Assistants

This timeline would trace how machine vision moved from research labs and dedicated accessibility apps into everyday smartphone assistants. It spans early mobile visual-recognition tools such as Microsoft's Seeing AI and Google Lookout, the emergence of human-assisted services like Be My Eyes, the arrival of multimodal AI models, and the integration of real-time camera descriptions into Gemini Live. The through-line is the gradual shift from specialized assistive technology to mainstream AI features that describe, read, and interpret the physical world through a phone camera. This timeline was generated automatically by TimeStrands AI from Wikipedia research. Facts are sourced; framing may be imperfect.