Checking a medication label. Sorting the mail. Confirming that the shirt you grabbed matches the pants you are wearing. For most people, these tasks dissolve into the background of a normal day. For someone who is blind or has low vision, they can mean a phone call to a family member who may be unavailable, a workaround that costs time and privacy, or simply going without.

Be My Eyes was built to close that specific gap, and in ten years it has grown into something that says as much about people as it does about technology.

What Be My Eyes Does

The app connects blind and low-vision users with sighted volunteers through a live video call. When a user needs help, they press a button, hold their phone camera toward what they want to show, and speak to whoever answers. The volunteer sees the camera feed and describes what is there.

Most calls last a few minutes. They cover reading expiration dates, identifying which button on an unfamiliar appliance does what, confirming which bills are in a wallet, picking a color-coordinated outfit, troubleshooting a TV remote, or working through any number of instructions printed on packaging that was designed for sighted readers.

What matters about that list is not how varied it is. It is how specific each situation is, and how completely a brief call resolves it. The gap Be My Eyes fills is not theoretical. It shows up in dozens of ordinary moments across a week, and filling it reliably changes what independence looks like in practice.

Close to one million blind and low-vision people use the app. More than 9.9 million sighted volunteers have signed up. The service is available in over 180 languages across 150 countries, and calls connect in under thirty seconds, around the clock.

What Happens on Both Sides of the Call

When a blind user requests help, the app sends a push notification to available volunteers in the same language. The first person to accept connects. Everyone else gets a dismissal. By the time a volunteer unlocks their phone, the call has often already been answered.

For volunteers, that speed defines the experience in an interesting way. You sign up with no training required, no schedule to keep, no minimum number of calls. You accept what you can and miss what you cannot, and both are acceptable because the network is large enough to cover the difference. Some volunteers go months without a call. Others have only ever managed to answer a handful.

Something draws people in and keeps the app installed on tens of millions of phones despite the relative rarity of calls, and it is worth understanding. The volunteer accepts a call without knowing what they will be asked. They have agreed to help before they know what helping will mean. The person on the other end has done something parallel: extended their phone toward a stranger and trusted them with the moment. Something happens in that exchange that no amount of automation fully replicates.

The tasks are small. The trust involved is not. Helping someone identify which of two nearly identical bottles is their blood pressure medication is not a dramatic moment. It is also not nothing.

When AI Is the Right Tool

In 2023, Be My Eyes introduced Be My AI, which gives users on-demand access to AI-generated visual descriptions without waiting for a volunteer call.

A user submits a photo and asks a question about it. Be My AI responds in text, with the ability to follow up. It works in 36 languages, any time, without needing anyone available on the other end. It handles the same kinds of tasks a volunteer would: reading a label, describing the contents of a photo, identifying colors or objects, working through a form.

The two tools are genuinely complementary. A live call is better when the situation is unfolding in real time and back-and-forth guidance matters. Be My AI is better when the situation is already captured in a photo, when the question is discrete, when what you need is a clear written answer you can save and return to. Having both means users are not choosing between access and convenience. They have access in the form that fits the moment.

Be My Eyes has also extended this reach to wearable technology, building integration with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses so volunteers can assist users who prefer hands-free access.

The Scale Behind the App

Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a visually impaired carpenter from Denmark, founded Be My Eyes in 2015. He understood the problem from the inside. He also recognized something about the people around him: most sighted people were already willing to help with these kinds of tasks. What they lacked was an easy and reliable way to do it.

When the app launched, ten thousand volunteers signed up on its first day.

The ratio of volunteers to users has remained unusually high ever since. There are now roughly ten sighted volunteers for every blind or low-vision user. That imbalance is what keeps wait times short and gives the service its 24-hour reliability across time zones and languages.

The company keeps the app free for all blind and low-vision users. It generates revenue through a business-facing version of the platform, where companies pay to offer Be My Eyes support to their customers directly. Amtrak now uses it at over fifty stations.

Getting Started

For blind or low-vision users

Download Be My Eyes on iOS, Android, or Windows. Create a free account, select your preferred language, and press the call button when you need help. No subscription is required, and the service has no usage limits.

For volunteers

Download the app, create a free account, and enable notifications. You can set your availability or leave it open. When someone in your language group requests help, you will receive a notification. Accept when you are in a position to help. When you are not, the call moves to the next available person. There is no expectation of a minimum response rate, and no training is needed to participate.

The technology here is real and it works. But what Be My Eyes ultimately reflects is a choice that nearly ten million people made separately: to leave an app running in the background so they could be useful, briefly and anonymously, to someone they will never meet. For blind and low-vision users navigating a world that asks constant accommodations of them, knowing that help is available in thirty seconds, in their language, any hour of the day, changes what it means to move through that world with confidence.