  Vision plays a crucial role in comprehending the world around us. More than
85% of the external information is obtained through the vision system. It
influences our mobility, cognition, information access, and interaction with
the environment and other people. Blindness prevents a person from gaining
knowledge of the surrounding environment and makes unassisted navigation,
object recognition, obstacle avoidance, and reading tasks significant
challenges. Many existing systems are often limited by cost and complexity. To
help the visually challenged overcome these difficulties faced in everyday
life, we propose VisBuddy, a smart assistant to help the visually challenged
with their day-to-day activities. VisBuddy is a voice-based assistant where the
user can give voice commands to perform specific tasks. It uses the techniques
of image captioning for describing the user's surroundings, optical character
recognition (OCR) for reading the text in the user's view, object detection to
search and find the objects in a room and web scraping to give the user the
latest news. VisBuddy has been built by combining the concepts from Deep
Learning and the Internet of Things. Thus, VisBuddy serves as a cost-efficient,
powerful, all-in-one assistant for the visually challenged by helping them with
their day-to-day activities.
