In this edition of the AppleVis Extra, David Nason speaks to Saqib Shaikh, a key member of the team behind Microsoft's Seeing AI, winner of Best App in the 2024 AppleVis Golden Apple awards.

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by Aiko, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Hello there, and welcome to another episode of the AppleVis Extra Podcast.

My name is David Nason and I am delighted to be joining you again to talk about the 2024 Golden Apple Awards.

Today's focus is the best app category.

We had 10 brilliant nominees in this category and they were One Password, Anytime Podcast Player, Drafts, Mona from Astadon, OKO, Cross Street and Maps, PixieBot, Seeing AI, Tapit Pro Audio Recorder, Todoist, To Do List and Calendar, and Voice Vista.

So a great list of nominees there, very strong.

Our runners up getting special mention are PixieBot and Voice Vista.

So again, huge well done to them for being runners up.

Our winner and a very familiar winner, I think it's their fourth Golden Apple, which is amazing, is Microsoft's Seeing AI.

So huge well done to them.

It's an app that's been around a long time and is still available in the App Store.

If you search for Seeing AI from Microsoft.

So yes, huge well done to Seeing AI for winning the best app, Golden Apple 2024.

And to chat about it, I am delighted to be joined from the Microsoft Seeing AI team by Saqib Shaikh.

Hello Saqib, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here.

And you're here because Seeing AI, I don't think for the first time won a Golden Apple Award for 2024 in the best app category, which is fantastic.

So congratulations on that, first of all.

Thank you.

A great honor and actually a surprise.

And it means so much because it's from the community.

You know, there are so many awards from either the government or industry, but I think the ones from the community just mean that much more.

Absolutely.

You know, to be voted by the people who are using apps and there's, you know, a great range of apps nominated this year.

So to top the pole is absolutely brilliant.

And actually, before we jump into too much detail, maybe for the uninitiated, if there are any in our community, can you give us a quick rundown of what Seeing AI is?

Good point.

Seeing AI, we talked about it as a talking camera app or a visual assistant.

It's a mobile app where you open it up and it uses the camera to tell you what it can see.

And it has different modes for different tasks in your daily life from reading things to you, whether that's immediately or more slightly with formatting through to describing photos that you take or from your camera roll or from other apps, all the way through to very task-specific channels, as we call them, like finding something or exploring the world around you or knowing if the lights are on.

Amazing.

What do you do yourself on the team out of interest and are you there long?

Have you been there, you know, part of Seeing AI from the start or can you…