Facebook Artificial Intelligence (AI) To Assist The Blind

Facebook Begins Using Artificial Intelligence to Describe Photos to Blind Users

Second Sight

Casey Newton | April 5, 2016

Ask a member of Facebook’s growth team what feature played the biggest role in getting the company to a billion daily users, and they’ll likely tell you it was photos. The endless stream of pictures, which users have been able to upload since 2005, a year after Facebook’s launch, makes the social network irresistible to a global audience. It’s difficult to imagine Facebook without photos. Yet for millions of blind and visually impaired people, that’s been the reality for over a decade.
Not anymore. Today Facebook will begin automatically describing the content of photos to blind and visually impaired users.

Source: http://www.zeit.de/digital/mobil/2016-04/facebook-bilderkennung-neuronales-netzwerk

<more at http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/5/11364914/facebook-automatic-alt-tags-blind-visually-impared; related links: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/04/using-artificial-intelligence-to-help-blind-people-see-facebook/ (Using Artificial Intelligence to Help Blind People ‘See’ Facebook. April 4, 2016) and http://www.wired.com/2016/04/facebook-using-ai-write-photo-captions-blind-users/ (Facebook’s AI Is Now Automatically Writing Photo Captions. April 5, 2016)>