Montreal team develops app to help you decipher perplexing parking signs

New app to decipher Montreal parking signs A Montreal app developer has released an app that uses AI to help you understand perplexing parking signs.

A Montreal app developer has released a new tool to help you decipher Montreal parking signs.

“Parky AI” was born after the company's CEO got a parking ticket, which he blamed on confusing signs.

"Sometimes you can have four or five signs on the same pole," said Andrei Chira, a senior software engineer at Underlabs.

"We were four engineers, a lawyer and a creative director, and we gave ourselves the mission to decipher the parking signs, and it created a whole internal debate."

That’s when the team turned to artificial intelligence.

"We decided to create an app so simple that you would just take a picture of the parking signs, and it would tell you if you're allowed or not to park and the current time and hour," said Chira.

The app’s popularity has surpassed the company’s expectations.

In the first week, it was downloaded 10,000 times.

"Each eight hours, in the first two days, we had to double our server capacity," said Chira.

The app claims to be accurate 83 per cent of the time on simple signs and 74 per cent on more complex ones.