Here is the whole idea. A blind person points their phone at something they can't work out, a tin with no label they can read, a letter, a pill, and it rings the phone of a stranger who can see. That stranger is me. I look, and I tell them what's there.
The first time I read the app's promise, I thought I'd be busy. Is this coconut milk, or chicken soup? I wanted to be the one who answered that.
Ten million of us. For a little over a million blind and low-vision people who actually use it. That's about ten of me, stood around, for every one person who needs a hand.
Answered in seconds, every time, by one of the other nine million. I got a couple of these in my first months. I haven't been called since. There just aren't enough to go round, and that is the whole good news.
And that zero is the good news. It means when a blind stranger holds up a tin at 2am, nobody's left waiting. Someone always picks up. Make helping this small and this quick, and it turns out people show up in numbers nobody planned for.
A volunteer called Lauren finally got her call. A mum, asking a stranger to look at her blind son and tell her he'd be alright. Lauren cried. You sign up to help someone, and you're the one who ends up in bits.
When I joined, there were about eighteen of us for every person who needed us. Since then the number of blind people using it has grown almost fivefold. You'd think we'd finally be needed. We're still ten to one.
Two years ago a machine started helping too. The same kind of AI everyone calls slop, pointed at a blind person's kitchen, describing the world in a sentence, in a hundred and eighty languages, at any hour. It didn't take my place, nobody here was ever paid. It just took the quick stuff, so the humans are left for the calls that need a human. A lot of AI is noise. This, quietly, is not.
the receipts
Be My Eyes reports over 10 million registered volunteers and more than 1 million blind or low-vision users (official milestone, 12 March 2026); its live counter read 10,673,157 volunteers and 1,066,362 users on 9 July 2026, almost exactly 10 to 1. The ratio was about 18 to 1 in February 2020 and tightened to 10 to 1 as the user base grew roughly fivefold. And yes, I really am a volunteer, I answered a couple of calls in my early months and haven't been called since, which is exactly what a 10-to-1 ratio does.
"Coconut milk or chicken soup" and Lauren's reassurance-about-a-son call are documented (NPR, 2023; Straight Arrow News). The other tasks come from blind and low-vision writers describing their own use. The app matches you with a volunteer in your language and time zone, so the "stranger across the world at 3am" idea is mostly a myth, and I've left it out.
Be My AI (GPT-4 vision, with OpenAI) launched in 2023 and was used a million times within weeks. Be My Eyes hasn't published how much it reduced human calls, so I don't claim a number. The point is older than the AI: the surplus of willing helpers was already ~18:1 before any of this existed.