Scientists in Ho Chi Minh City have developed a text-to-voice app that allows visually impaired Vietnamese to use smart phones more effectively.

The first of its kind, the app recognizes over 7,000 Vietnamese words and 1357 English words commonly used on mobile devices in addition to 939 Vietnamese words without accents, reports Tuoi Tre. 

The app, called VOS (Voice of Southern Vietnam), was developed by scientists at the Artificial Intelligence Lab (AILab) of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Science.

When users leave their finger over a portion of the screen for a set amount of time, the application recognizes applications, words, numbers, scientific symbols as well as abbreviations and reads them back in Vietnamese. It also gives the option for sound icons or sending information to a Braille output device.

VOS is said to be compatible with 80% of smart phones currently on the market, according to Ho Minh Nhat, a team member on the VOS project.

According to a recent survey by the World Health Organization, Vietnam is reported to have over 2 million visually impaired citizens.

When asked why the Android platform was chosen, Nhat said statistics show 81.3% of the market share is occupied by Android with iOS at 13.4% and Windows at 4.1%.

“We wanted to create a product that is readily available to any visually impaired users [sic],” stated Associate Professor Vu Hai Quan, Ph.D., leader of the AILab team.

Interestingly, while called Voice of Southern Vietnam, the app speaks in a Hanoi accent. 

[Tuoi Tre // Photo via Kent Chen]