BlankOk, got a chance to play around with this amazing FREE app from Microsoft.
To say I'm "blown away," would be an understatement.

The app has five "channels": Short Text, Document recognition, Product 
Recognition, Picture, and Scene Recognition.

The short text is useful.  You can aim it at an envelope that came in the mail, 
say, and it will tell you what it recognizes immediately.  Same with currency. 
It is almost instantaneous.

If you aim it at your computer monitor in this mode, it will read the text on 
the monitor.  I've never had any app, including KNFB Reader, do this very 
accurately.  As I composed this message, it was reading my folders submenu; when 
I maximized the screen, it was reading the message that I'm writing -- not 
completely accurately, but above sixty percent.

The product recognition works quite nicely.  It will start beeping when it finds 
a bar code.  Unlike the IdMate, it doesn't matter if you have the barcode 
oriented horizontally (correctly) or not, it will read it if you get the beeping 
fast enough.  When it recognizes the code, it gives a different sounding beep.

If you go to the Picture app, it will tell you a description of the face.  It 
will say like 52-year-old woman with brown hair as it did for my wife.

If you hit the Menu button in this app, you can take three pictures of the same 
face, label it, and whenever the camera is pointed at that face, it will tell 
you by name.  If you do the recognition, it defaults to "front-facing" camera, 
but you can set it to rear-facing if you are taking a picture of somebody else.

The Scene recognition is decent.  It is better than most of what I've 
encountered.  I took a few pics of surroundings in our living room.  Pointing it 
at a wall it says "Large room with white walls".  Pointing it at our cat, it 
variously said it was a mammal, an animal, a dog, and if the cat stood still 
enough, it did say cat.


My wife has a purse with a cat on the side with green eyes.  Pointing it at the 
purse it said "close up of a cat."

I thought I'd pen this to the list here, as well as a couple tech lists I'm on, 
because I saw a few posts that claimed certain features like Product Recognition 
didn't work.

Steve
Lansing, MI