Accessibility

An app is bridging the language gap between the Indian government and its citizens, who speak a wide variety of languages. Jugalbandi helps Indians learn about government services, which typically are described online in English and Hindi, in their native tongues.

Neural Sleeve is intended to correct leg movements for people impacted by multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury, and stroke.

An Android app offers speech recognition model for speech impaired by cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, or traumatic brain injury.

Facebook disabled face recognition for uploaded photos and videos as well as its retrospective Memories service and promised to delete over 1 billion individual face recognition templates.

A remote sniper used an automated system to take out a human target located thousands of miles away.What happened: The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad used an AI-assisted rifle in the November killing of Iran’s chief nuclear scientist,

Facebook expanded a system of vision, language, and speech models designed to open the social network to users who are visually impaired. A Facebook service that describes photos in a synthesized voice now recognizes 1,200 visual concepts — 10 times more than the previous version.

A computer vision system is helping to keep runners with impaired vision on track.What’s new: A prototype smartphone app developed by Google translates camera images into audio signals.

A prosthetic leg that learns from the user’s motion could help amputees walk more naturally. Researchers from the University of Utah designed a robotic leg that uses machine learning to generate a human-like stride.

Bored with your Spotify playlists? Let this robot singer/songwriter take you on a trip “Into Your Mind.” A music-composing, marimba-playing robot named Shimon has learned to write and sing its own lyrics, IEEE Spectrum reports.

Amputees can control a robotic hand with their thoughts — plus machine learning. University of Michigan researchers developed a system that uses signals from an amputee’s nervous system to control a prosthetic hand.

In 2020, I hope the AI community will grapple with issues of fairness in ways that tangibly and directly benefit disadvantaged populations.

Robots designed to assist people with disabilities have become more capable, but they’ve also become harder to control. New research offers a way to operate such complex mechanical systems more intuitively.

Models that achieve state-of-the-art performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) often perform poorly on nonstandard speech. New research offers methods to make ASR more useful to users with heavy accents or speech impairment.

Unlike bats, humans can’t see with their ears. Now an app is giving sightless pedestrians the ability to navigate by ear. Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research Laboratory offers a free iPhone app called Soundscape.