CAIRO – American Muslim developer has announced the release of a new Microsoft application that helps visually impaired or blind have a better understanding of the world around them.

The app was first announced in a video shown at the Microsoft Build 2016 Developer Conference in San Francisco Wednesday.

In it, Saqib Shaikh demonstrates how the app could help serve sight impaired people by describing the world around him.

The app itself runs on smartphones and also on pivothead smartglasses. The glasses are built with a side button that the user touches while wearing to take a snapshot of the world in front of them.

The image capture and analysis software that the glasses (or smartphone) uses is able to plug into cloud-based services that will help determine what the user is looking at.

In the video, Shaikh takes a photo of the menu on his phone as a voice in the app guides him until he’s got the image centered. The artificial intelligence will read for him the contents of the menu.

The app is designed to run on smartphones and also works with special smart glasses that have a tiny camera built in.

The camera can “see” people or things in their path, the app recognizes who or what they are, and a digital voice relays the information to the user in real time.

The project is part of Microsoft’s larger push to advance artificial intelligence and incorporate it into more aspects of life in the near future.

The software used to develop Seeing AI is part of the larger Cortana Intelligence Suite, which makes “big data, machine learning, perception, analytics, and intelligent bots” available to developers, according to a Microsoft press release.