At its 14th Ability summit, which kicks off today, Microsoft is highlighting developments and collaborations across its portfolio of assistive products. Much of that is around Azure AI, including features announced yesterday like AI-powered audio descriptions and the Azure AI studio that better enables developers with disabilities to create machine-learning applications. It also showed off new updates like more languages and richer AI-generated descriptions for its Seeing AI tool, as well as new playbooks offering guidelines for best practices in areas like building accessible campuses and greater mental health support. The company is also previewing a feature called "Speak For Me," which is coming later this year. Much like Apple's Personal Voice, Speak For Me can help those with ALS and other speech disabilities to use custom neural voices to communicate.

Microsoft is known as one of the more inclusive companies in the technology industry, with products including an adaptive Xbox controller and initiatives such as hiring people with autism and funding startups that use artificial intelligence to help people with disabilities. The company is also one of the few that has a chief accessibility officer, having created the role in 2010. Jenny Lay-Flurrie assumed the post in 2016 as Microsoft restructured the accessibility division to make it more central to the company. Ms. Lay-Flurrie, who is deaf and who initially hid her disability by relying on lip reading, spoke to the Experience Report by video call about her role and the moves she and others with her remit should be making. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Talk of artificial intelligence often leads to speculation about how machines may displace workers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks we should talk more about how AI algorithms can expand the workforce now--by helping people with disabilities. "There are a billion people in the world who don't fully participate in our economies or societies," Nadella said, at the WIRED25 Summit in San Francisco. "Technology can allow them to fully participate." Nadella, a WIRED25 Icon, nominated Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft's chief accessibility officer, as someone who will shape the next 25 years of technology.

Microsoft's mission to create technology that can empower every person doesn't just begin and end with the products it is creating. It extends to the people it hires, the standards it holds its partners and vendors to, and the workplace it has created. And the man at the top, CEO Satya Nadella, is personally inspired by all of it he said during a discussion at the company's Ability Summit in Redmond, Wash., on Thursday. "The consciousness of the place has changed, which is what's most exciting to me," Nadella said during the event aimed at showcasing accessible technology and the importance of inclusive design. "That's at least what leads to the start of all big things."

With a billion people worldwide living with some form of disability, there is tremendous scope for the development of assistive technologies – a market expected be worth over $26 Billion by 2024. In the next 10 years, billions of IoT smart devices will be connected. AI will enable these devides to listen, see, reason and predict without a 24/7 dependence on the cloud (this physical interface between humans and machines is what Microsoft terms the "intelligent edge") and the average smart home will generate around 50GB of data every single day. It's happening, Join 15k digital minds to shape what's next for your business Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a crucial part of that puzzle, as AI advances such as predictive text, visual recognition and speech-to-text transcription are already showing enormous potential for helping people with vision, hearing, cognitive, learning, mobility disabilities – as well as a range of mental health conditions. "AI can be a game changer for people with disabilities. Already we're witnessing this as people with disabilities expand their use of computers to hear, see and reason with impressive accuracy," explains Brad Smith, President and CLO at Microsoft.

"It cracks me up when I meet someone who says, 'Hey, I don't think I have people with disabilities in my company.' And that's when I know they've got people there that are not speaking up." We've bogarted a few chairs in a hallway at the Washington State Conference Center in Seattle, where the company is holding its annual Build developer conference. Lay-Flurrie, who is deaf, speaks with a crisp English accent. Though she never signs when addressing me, she has brought a sign language interpreter to clarify the questions I'm asking, in case lip reading ever falls short.

"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.