Fido

Fido

Fido logoPurpose

Making publications accessible is skilled, time-consuming work. Fido is a tool from the DAISY Labs that uses AI to take on much of the heavy lifting — converting PDFs, describing images, detecting languages, analyzing structure and generating metadata.

Background

Fido was first released on the DAISY website at the end of April 2026. However, it was used to experiment and evaluate AI technologies and workflows for 12 months previously. Members of the DAISY Consortium AI Special Interest Group have been involved in shaping the functionality, design and outputs. It has been valuable as we develop ideas for how AI can be used in the production, remediation and conversion of accessible publications. The app is an incubator for ideas and evaluations, hence we use the phrase from the term ‘from the DAISY Labs’. This is not a production standard app with long-term support like other software tools from DAISY.

The app has also been increasingly used by participants in our Training and Technical Assistance projects, especially for PDF conversion and image descriptions. Partners organizations have been using Fido to help their production of accessible books in English, French, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic and more, and they have reported impressive time savings. Books into the hands of people with print disabilities, faster!

The feedback we are hearing from these partner organizations:

  • Fido isn’t a silver bullet – but is a serious shortcut.
  • Tasks that took days can now take hours.
  • Fido makes their people faster, but not redundant.

Who is Fido for?

We’ve made the experimental app available from the DAISY website because if you make, remediate or convert accessible publications you might also find Fido useful. If you use a workflow based on Microsoft Word for Windows, then you’ll find the Word add-in especially helpful.

To use most of Fido’s AI features you will need either an unlock code from DAISY or you’ll need to provide at least one API key from a cloud service.

Features

Convert from PDF to other formats (Word, EPUB, HTML). Works with both image only and searchable PDFs. Extracts text, headings, lists, images, tables and even math content. Many conversion services are supported, including Marker, Mistral, Tensorlake, MuPDF, PaddleOCR, Gemini and Claude.

Describe images in Word, PDF, EPUB and InDesign documents. Fido supports many cloud AI services including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral and more. Adjust the prompts to meet your content and editorial needs. Use custom prompts for different image types (Fido recognizes more than 100 image classifications). Generate extended descriptions (Word only).

Mark up phrases and paragraphs in different languages in Word or EPUB documents by using AI to detect words in different languages, ignoring proper nouns and ‘borrowed’ words that should remain unchanged.

Analyze heading structure to detect missing or misclassified heading levels. This feature is intended to help improve conversions from scanned documents or converted PDFs and works in Microsoft Word.

Generate metadata from your Word document by using AI to read the document to extract or generate fields such as title, authors, publisher, ISBN, language, keywords and summary.

Responsible use

AI services make mistakes. Always review and verify the output.

Each AI service has its own terms and conditions governing how data is processed and stored. You are responsible for ensuring your use of any AI service complies with its terms. The DAISY Consortium is not responsible for the services integrated into this app.

Can you help?

We welcome bug reports and feature suggestions which can be submitted using the GitHub issues button in the About Fido dialog.

Downloads

The latest version of Fido is 0.9.2 released 24 April 2026.