Entertainment

New App Lets Users Easily Search And Extract Information From Photos, Turning Your Phone Camera Into A Visual Assistant

Retana, an AI-powered camera application, today announces the launch of its iOS app which allows users to easily search and extract information from their digital camera rolls. The app recognizes text, objects, phone numbers and email addresses in photos, giving users the power to transform visual information into searchable and actionable objects.

Retana works like a camera app, maintaining its own searchable library of photos which are securely backed up on the cloud. However, unlike traditional camera rolls, Retana uses AI and natural language understanding to analyze photos for text, objects and other defining attributes that might be used to search for the photo later on. Users can then include additional tags and search for the photos using both text and a hands-free voice assistant, eliminating the need to manually organize and hunt for photos hidden deep in their camera rolls.

Moreover, the app frees visual information which would otherwise be trapped in photos — such as street addresses, place names, phone numbers and email addresses — making it easily actionable within the app. If users take a photo of a business card, for example, the app instantly recognizes the phone number and allows users to call without ever having to type it in.

Retana’s iOS app is free to use, but also offers two subscription plans with additional features: Retana Basic and Retana Pro. For $0.99 a month, Retana Basic includes text transcription and calling and emailing directly from photos for up to 100 photos per month. For $4.99, Retana Pro offers the same basic features but with up to 1,000 photos per month.

Thanks to higher quality smartphone cameras, people are now taking more than 1.2 trillion digital photos per year. With a growing amount of photos stored on phones, it is therefore proving harder for people to organize their photo libraries or find specific photos. Rather than having to scroll through endless photos to re-find that one picture of the wifi router, for example, the Retana app extracts and stores this information directly from the photo, saving time and stress whenever someone asks for the wifi password.

“Computer vision is going to enable us to work better, shop better, and quickly get information about the world around us. Retana is the first step to turning your camera into a visual assistant,” said Juan Soberanis, CEO of Retana.

Retana’s mission is to bridge the visual world with the digital world in order to help people be better informed and more productive. Just as AI is assisting more people in other aspects of their daily tasks, now it can be used to bring intelligence to people’s cameras, too.

 

Sam Brake Guia

Sam is an energetic and passionate writer/presenter, always looking for the next adventure. In August 2016 he donated all of his possessions to charity, quit his job, and left the UK. Since then he has been on the road travelling through North, Central and South America searching for new adventures and amazing stories.

View Comments

  • This is a super handy app for organizing all of the images reminders I take, so they don’t get deleted in the depths of my camera roll.

Recent Posts

Reality intelligence startup Track3D raises $10M to tackle construction delays

Construction is one of the world’s most complex industries to manage. Projects run late, costs…

1 day ago

UK to force digital ID, Blair Institute claims 62% of Brits favor digital identity

Illegal immigration is the Trojan Horse of choice to deliver mandatory digital ID: perspective Using…

1 day ago

97% of CIOs, CTOs concerned about unethical use of AI at companies: Report

Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, use of artificial intelligence (AI) has…

2 days ago

We can’t eat it, but AI will feed the world

Since its massification in the early 2020s, AI has been slowly integrated into sectors as…

1 week ago

To monitor disinformation Von der Leyen urges European Democracy Shield, Center for Democratic Resilience

The EU, UN, WEF, and G20 all call on stakeholders to mitigate the harmful effects…

1 week ago

Trump Takes Aim at Remote Work—Is He the Movement’s Top Adversary?

Back in 2018, I wrote a story, To Kill an Outsourcing Bird. For my younger readers,…

1 week ago