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Sight Buddy

Drophouse Ltd

Sight Buddy — an Android app for blind and partially sighted people

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 is on Google Play and it works. What I do not know is whether it is genuinely useful day to day — and the only people who can tell me that are the people it was built for.

It runs on your phone. Download the optional AI model once and Sight Buddy answers on the device itself — no key, no account, no internet connection, and nothing sent to anyone.

Hear it working

This is a recording of the app being used out loud, so you can judge it before installing anything from someone you do not know. It lasts 1 minute 35 seconds.

Why I am asking

I am one person. Drophouse Ltd is my company, registered in England and Wales, and I built Sight Buddy myself.

I can test it all day at my own kitchen table, but that tells me very little. What actually matters is whether it holds up on real post, in bad light, in a shop, when you are in a hurry. I can only learn that from people who genuinely need it, and I would really appreciate hearing from you.

What I am asking

Ten minutes. Open the app, try it on something real — a letter that came in the post, whatever is on the table in front of you, a food label — and then tell me one thing that did not work.

That is the whole request. Not a study, not a form, no commitment. If you try it once and never open it again, that is still useful information and I would like to hear it.

Send it however suits you: reply by email, or ask me and we can arrange a voice note on WhatsApp or Telegram instead. Voice notes are completely fine and often easier.

There is also a Leave feedback button in the app itself. It is the last button in Settings, right at the bottom, and it opens your email app with my address already filled in.

What you get

The app is free, with no account and no subscription. On a recent phone you need nothing else from me: download the AI model once and everything runs on the device.

That 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 models it can run, and the AI model stays available in Advanced settings whatever it recommends.

How to get it

Email contact@drophouse.uk and say you would like to try Sight Buddy.

Download the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drophouse.sightbuddy&hl

Then, whenever you have had a go, tell me what did not work. That is all I ask in return, and it is a request rather than a condition — nothing is expected of you either way.

Who I am

If you want to check any of that before emailing me, please do.

What the app does with your data

With the on-device model, nothing leaves your phone. The photos you take and the text you scan are processed on the device, and nothing is sent to me or to anyone else.

If you use your own OpenAI API key instead, the photos you take and the text you send are transmitted to OpenAI for processing and a response comes back. It is worth knowing before you point it at anything private.

Our Privacy Policy sets out the detail.