About the app

Sight Buddy is an assistant you can talk to about whatever is in front of you. Ask it a question, ask it to describe the scene, to read a letter out loud, to summarise a page of text, or to find a particular object.

It runs on your phone

Sight Buddy's AI can run entirely on your own phone. Download the model once and the app answers on the device itself: no API key, no account, no internet connection, and nothing sent to anyone.

Will it run on your phone?

The AI model is a large download, about 2.6 GB, and it needs a reasonably powerful phone, so it is not right for every device.

You do not have to work that out yourself. The app checks your phone and recommends the model only when your phone is suitable; where it is not, the app suggests the much smaller voice models instead, so speech recognition still works on the device. Nothing is locked away either way — the AI model stays available in Advanced settings whatever the app recommends, so you can always download it and try it for yourself. Downloads are optional, never automatic, and you can delete a model later to free the space.

If you prefer, use your own OpenAI key

Adding your own OpenAI API key is optional. It works on any phone, there is no subscription, and you pay only for what you use — in our own testing, one dollar of credit covered roughly 500 requests. The app uses OpenAI only while Use API is on and the phone is online; turn that off, or remove the key, and nothing is sent to OpenAI. Our Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is sent and when.

Saved chats

You can save a chat to read again later. Saved chats are text only, they stay in the app's private storage on your phone, and they are not included in Google's cloud backup. You can rename or delete any of them in the app.

Open source

Sight Buddy is open source under the MIT licence, and the on-device AI model — Google's Gemma — is under the Apache 2.0 licence. Anyone who wants to extend the app to other providers is welcome to: the source is at github.com/DrophouseLtd/SightBuddy. The licences of everything the app is built on are listed in the app, under Settings → Privacy → Open-source licences.

The app is on Google Play: Sight Buddy on Google Play.