Facebook Automated Captions Improve Accessibility, Provide Additional Insights

Yesterday, Facebook announced the release of automatic alternative text - or automatic alt text - for images posted to Facebook. Automatic alt text uses object recognition technology to generate a description of a photo, processing each through Facebook's artificial intelligence engine to establish image content. It's the latest advancement in Facebook's image recognition technology, a system they've been working on for the last few years, with artificial intelligence guru and New York University professor Yann LeCun at the helm. Last November, Facebook showcased the progress they'd made with their image recognition AI, with their system able to distinguish between objects in a photo 30% faster, and using 10x less training data, than previous industry benchmarks. The live launch of automated captions show just how far their system has advanced, and while it's still not able to provide full, detailed descriptions of everything in each image, the fact that it can be reliably used at all in a live environment is relatively impressive.