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Who loves the idea of autonomous, driverless taxis best? Hard to say, but anyone who is blind will likely tell you they can’t wait. Why? The human drivers in ride-share apps turn down passengers with guide dogs, and driving with a stranger is that much more stressful when you can’t see them. And fundamentally, it’s about mobility without reliance on other people. That’s why Lighthouse and NFB took a big interest in Waymo’s San Francisco rollout and even took up the cause for the autonomous taxis.

Envision is a pioneer in the effort to connect computer vision with everyday life in the form of tech-enabled glasses that can tell a blind user about their surroundings. Using the Google glass platform, Envision found a market with blind users who value a hands-free interaction, and the experience only got better with the launch of scene description AIs in the past two years. But what’s really changed the game for Envision is generative AI, and the tantalizing possibility of a multimodal AI that’s more like an all-around personal assistant.

Immediately following this session, Karthik Mahadevan will be available to take questions live in a breakout session.

To watch the recently released “All The Light We Cannot See” with audio descriptions “on” is a revelation, at least for a sighted person. The audio description uses words sparingly to augment the obvious soundscape and to call out subtle details anyone might easily miss. It’s art only a human team could produce (sorry AI proponents), but then it’s also expensive and time consuming. In that regard, producing alt text for images online or audio descriptions for video face the same challenge: how to do more and do it well. At Scribely and MAX, the human-first approach is uppermost, but they are also exploring how AI and related tech can be narrowly channeled to speed up their vital work.