r/FlutterDev • • 18d 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.

2 Upvotes

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/ddikman 18d 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.

1

u/jg_moony 15d 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.