The Transformation Journey

Two years ago, starting my career in Site Engineering with a Telecom giant, I didn't imagine I would ever grow myself as a Developer. But here I am sharing my experience of what I feel is my biggest achievement till now as I have worked towards giving something back to the society.

I was recently invited to participate in the Power Up Automation Hackathon'2019 during the UiPath Family Meetup. I took it up as a challenge and with the help of my manager's encouragement and an amazingly supportive team, we transformed this opportunity into something which can now be used worldwide to make lives of many of our Blind colleagues easier. 

#IdeaInspiration 

While looking around for ideas that could use automation to simplify the day to day problems faced in my organization, I came across Dinesh, who is a Senior Developer in my company. Though Dinesh as well as his wife are visually impaired, it doesn't let them affect their work as developers. With great practice and dedication they have mastered the art of coding and debugging using Microsoft and other narrators. But still they face some issues here and there. Taking upon one such issue as a challenge our team decided to build a software that would read images present in Emails.

#WhatAndHow

The current narrators that are present in the market fail to read out the information that might be present in a image. For example, a mail chain circulated to inform regarding an event that is taking place might contain a banner in the form of image containing all the information, which is missed by the narrator. We used Google vision and UiPath capabilities to extract the fields out of the image that might contain some useful information and convert the same into speech data. We asked Dinesh to share the mails which he rejected due to narrator's lacking capabilities and together worked on these mails to figure out an algorithm for the same.

#WhyUiPath

Although i have worked on many RPA Tools , still i chose UiPath for this idea because of its immense AI and OCR capabilities. Its inbuilt available libraries on UiPathGo provided us a platform on top of which we have created our model with ease .

Its pre established huge presence in the market will also enable high acceptance of our product worldwide.

#ChallengesFaced

There are many types of mails which we as individual are not aware off. Mails with links, mails with links embedded on an image, mails with attachments hidden, mails with native text on text boxes etc. It was a very challenging task to create a flow which could take care of all the mailing variations. The solution created handles all these variations. Another challenge was to manage speed of the speech for Dinesh. We needed to create a speed controller which can help him in listening the mails properly.

#FinalOutput

Although my Team won UiPath's Gurgaon Hackathon in the "RPA for a cause" category. But one think that really makes me proud is that Dinesh and many others might find their life working in a organization a bit more easier now. He personally has given appreciation to my manager and has raised it to the IT department to use this organization wide.

#ExcitingNewTechnologiesLearnt

Google vision, OCR, Parallel activities launch, hotkey trigger and many more functionalities of UiPath.

#What'sNext

1.  Integration with Narrator – Integrating our current solution with laptop's default narrator.
2. Advanced Speed Controller – We need a advanced controller, as different people use different controlling speed of narrator.
3. Geolocation Navigator- It is difficult for visually impaired people to navigate within company premises. We want to use companies network like routers, RFID , sensors with uipath that will help them to navigate correctly within company premises where Google map fails.
4. Integration with Alexa- To make it a ease for blinds when working.

A big thanks to CEO and founder of UiPath Daniel Dines for having a vision for this product and giving us this platform to showcase our skills. Special thanks to meetup mentors for their guidance and support Vibhor Shrivastava Udit Jain Indu Manglotra Rahul Kakkar.

Thanks UiPath for everything !! Indeed a Family now !!

Please find below the links for the Visual Assistant for blind demo -