Sherwood has been blind for over 15 years, but he still manages to have a family, a prosperous financial job, and a dog named Chris who guides him around. But he claims that he still faces obstacles to his freedom in routine activities like shopping.
Soon, artificial intelligence might be useful.
Sherwood currently reports that he frequently utilizes an app called Be My Eyes, which combines visually impaired people with sighted volunteers who assist, via live video, with tasks like determining if a milk bottle has expired or whether a shirt matches the rest of an outfit. However, the necessity for volunteer aid on the other end is already starting to disappear due to developments in AI technology.
Be My Eyes and OpenAI collaborated last year to make it possible for its AI model to observe and describe what is in front of a user instead of a human. A video of someone using the AI-powered Be My Eyes app to hail a taxi was shown in OpenAI's most recent product demo. The software instructed the user on precisely when to raise their arm for the vehicle. In May, Google unveiled a comparable function for its visually challenged user assistance tool "Lookout."
A growing number of AI-powered tools have been released by Apple, Google, and other tech companies to help people with a variety of disabilities. These tools range from eye-tracking devices that allow physically disabled users to control their iPhones with their eyes to comprehensive voice guidance for blind users of Google Maps.
It is been abundantly evident since ChatGPT's amazing launch over a year ago that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to drastically alter our environment, including the way we work, communicate, and even perceive reality. However, AI also has the potential to have a whole other kind of life-altering impact on individuals with impairments.
"Previously, if you were blind and worked in business, you needed an administrative assistance to read to you," Sherwood remarked. However, you now possess this new ability. Some think this technology is fantastic. For those who are blind, this presents a chance to achieve in their career as well as to compete in the corporate world.
The benefits of AI for accessibility
For years, tech businesses have been applying early AI to improve the accessibility of their products. Examples of this include screen readers and automatically generated closed captioning for films.
However, scientists claim that the massive data sets and powerful computing systems behind the most recent AI models are expanding the limits of what is possible in assistive technology. For example, an AI tool must be extremely skilled at identifying what a taxi does and does not look like to enable blind individuals reliably hail cabs. This requires training the model on a large corpus of instances.
A further example: Google has enhanced a tool that informs disabled or blind users about what is on their screen by adding a "question and answer" function that uses the company's generative AI technology.
Eve Andersson, senior director of product inclusion, equality, and accessibility at Google, told CNN that while artificial intelligence (AI) shows potential, it needs to achieve a certain quality level before being a practical feature in goods.
The ability of new generative AI tools to comprehend and generate content in a variety of formats, including as text, music, images, and videos, makes them particularly attractive for applications related to accessibility. This means that AI can serve as a go-between if a person needs to consume information in a certain format; for example, AI can convert an audio file into written language for a user who is hard of hearing.
"A wide class of disabilities are actually about input and output, it is about how a person sees information," according to Andersson. "People's accessibility needs take many various shapes," she added. "There are many distinct modalities (of information) that may be required for hearing impairments, vision, motor, speech, and cognitive impairments. One area where AI excels is translating between modalities."
Designing inclusive AI systems
Sustaining AI systems that adapt to diverse user needs necessitates continuous investment.
Experts warned that since AI models are educated on data produced by people, they can reproduce human stereotypes. Early instances of this have already surfaced, such as AI picture generators that seemed to have trouble understanding the notion of race or an algorithm that supposedly displayed employment ads predicated on gender stereotypes.
A number of Big Tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others, have collaborated with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign academics to develop a training dataset for AI voice recognition systems that encompasses a variety of speech patterns in an attempt to mitigate that risk.
For users with disabilities, speech recognition tools—such as voice assistants, interpreters, and voice-to-text applications—can be extremely valuable.
The Speech Accessibility Project is an initiative that involves recording volunteers with speech-impairing illnesses like Parkinson's, Down syndrome, ALS, and other conditions. A sample speech recognition program developed by the researchers misunderstands speech only 12% of the time, down from 20% before it was trained on the new dataset, thanks to the project's now more than 200,000 recordings.
Clarion Mendes, a clinical assistant professor and speech language pathologist who co-leads the project, stated, "The more diverse types of speech we can get into those machine learning systems and the greater variety of severity, the better those systems are going to be at understanding individuals that do not have 'audiobook narrator' speech."
"During this study, I have spoken with a great number of people who struggle with communication and suffer significant obstacles to participating in life. These people have good degrees but are unable to obtain employment due to communication problems," Mendes stated. "If assistive technology can help people find fulfillment in their work and hobbies, suddenly these activities that took a lot of time or required the person to rely on other people become much easier for them to do, and that greatly increases their independence."
Furthermore, Andersson noted that it makes sound financial sense to invest in AI for accessibility in addition to being the moral thing to do.
"We wish to ensure that no one is left behind. In general, technology can level the playing field, according to Andersson. "However, there are other financial benefits as well, such as the ability to sell your goods to the government and academic organizations."