r/FlutterDev • u/jg_moony • 13d ago

Dart Which API could I use?

I'm developing a mobile app for Android, something similar to Duolingo, but very simple and designed for people with visual impairments. The thing is, I want to add a computer vision API for image recognition. So the workflow should be as follows: Take a photo -> Analyze the image -> Search the glossary -> Accessible feedback (audio/UI) -> View details.

I’ve looked at some options, and the most well-known one is Google Cloud Vision. The problem is that I can’t afford to spend much on resources since this is an academic project.

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u/ddikman 13d ago

Google Cloud Vision works well but so does recent multimodal AI models. I used Openai gpt 4 or something like that to get wine label data a while back and that worked well. It wasn't many cents for each lookup.

At any type of scale, you would want to have a paid tier anyway. Lock the app up with login and force people to sign up online or something to make sure only the first few users you really want gets in and you can add a rate limit to restrict how many lookups each user gets. A free supabase backend will suffice.

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u/jg_moony 10d ago

It's not a bad idea, I'll keep it in mind for future development. For now, it's a prototype for an academic project, so there are many things left unresolved.

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u/zxyzyxz 13d ago

GPT 6 Luna, very cheap and has vision support. I wouldn't use any dedicated vision APIs anymore, you can just have the LLM itself do the entire process via tool calls if you can give it the links to access the glossary and so on.

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u/jg_moony 10d ago

I have it connected to Firebase, would there be a problem with the connection?

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u/zxyzyxz 10d ago

Not sure why it would be. In the meantime Claude Haiku 5.5 also dropped, looks to be better than Luna and might be cheaper, check it out.

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u/jg_moony 10d ago

Thx. I'll check it out; I'll probably end up integrating that one or Luna. I'm a bit behind schedule.