Meet Gaurav Mittal, the techie who builds virtual assistants for the blind

The IIT-Varanasi alumnus launched his startup Gingerlind.ai in 2016 and created an app that helps the visually impaired read, identify objects, travel and go about their daily chores

Assistant Commandant Sandeep Mishra lost his eyesight in an ambush by Ulfa militants in Assam in 2000. Today, he provides computer training at the BSF Academy in Tekanpu, Madhya Pradesh, and loves reading newspapers. He is an avid user of Eye-D (Eye Devices) which acts as a personal assistant to help him navigate through the day.

Eye-D, an assistive technology product of a Bengaluru-based startup called GingerMind, is like Siri for the visually challenged which helps them live an independent life.

Back in 2012, Gaurav Mittal, then a young software engineer with Citrix, attended a CSR event where he was made to do several simple things such as walking and touching the entrance gate, blindfolded. He realised that there were several challenges a visually challenged person faces daily. Mittal, an alumnus of IIT, Varanasi took this as a challenge. In 2016, he launched his startup Gingerlind.ai and the app came into being the same year with the help of grants from Microsoft, Citrix and Intel.

The app has salient features such as ‘Where Am I’, ‘PDF Reader’, ‘Travel Mode’ and ‘Around Me’ to help visually impaired persons move about with their lives. The app can be downloaded both on Android and iOS smartphones. Once the visually impaired person opens the app, it talks back taking them through various options to help them with their daily chores.

If a user wants to read the newspaper, he can just scan it through the phone and app will read the text to him. It supports all major Indian languages. The user can click photos of the objects in front of him and the artificial intelligence engine embedded in the app tells him what lies ahead of him. If the user is travelling, the app helps the person in being location-aware and be sure to get down at the correct location. The basic app is free of cost while the Pro version with added features such as travel mode is available at a one-time fee of Rs 450.

A Visually impaired person using the virtual assistant created by Gaurav Mittal's Gingerlind.ai

Three years since its launch, the app has around 20,000 active users and is available across 160 countries. “One of the things that we want to change is the skepticism around disability. We are confident of reaching 100,000 users in a year or so,” says Mittal.

However, he feels in India most of the investors don’t see disability as a lucrative sector. So, Mittal has partnered with a non-profit Samarthanam’s Assistive Technology Accelerator (ATA), which provides an ecosystem to collaborate and help the 21 million disabled population in India. Founded by Prateek Madhav, ATA claims to be India’s first accelerator to help nurture the start-ups working in the field of assistive technology.

With over a billion people living with some kind of disability around the globe, bigwigs such as Microsoft and Google are too designing assistive technologies. Microsoft’s ‘Seeing AI’ banks on the power of AI to help the blind identify people, identify currency and read text. Early this year, Google too launched the ‘Lookout app’ which is capable of describing objects to the visually impaired people.