Microsoft using AI to empower people living with disabilities ZDNet

"Accessibility by design" is an important concept for Microsoft, and one that underpins many of its artificial intelligence-powered products, including Seeing AI. Announced on Wednesday among a series of other AI tools, Seeing AI is a free mobile application designed to support people with visual impairments by narrating the world around them. The app -- which is an ongoing research project bringing together deep learning and Microsoft Cognitive Services -- can read documents, making sense of structural elements such as headings, paragraphs, and lists, as well as identify a product using its barcode. It can additionally recognise and describe images in other apps, and even pinpoint people's faces and provide a description of their appearance, though camera quality and lighting might influence its description. At the Microsoft Future of Artificial Intelligence event in Sydney, Kenny Johar Singh, a Melbourne-based cloud solutions architect at Microsoft, demonstrated Seeing AI, which he uses to help navigate the physical world.