In this episode of This Week in Cognitive, host Noelle Russell introduces Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility program, a five‑year, $25 million initiative that encourages developers to build inclusive AI solutions for people with disabilities. She outlines three focus areas—employment, daily life, and community—and shares examples such as Puffin Innovations (a quadriplegic CEO building software), autonomous driving wheelchairs in Japan, and a demo app that uses Microsoft Intelligence APIs to detect age, gender, and emotions on smartphones and Pivothead smart glasses. Russell explains how developers can leverage Cognitive Services (vision OCR, speech translation, language detection, etc.) to create these solutions, describes the simple online application process, and mentions the first grantee announced on the program’s blog. The episode closes with an invitation for developers to submit ideas, emphasizing both business and societal benefits of accessible technology.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of This Week in Cognitive. My name is Noelle Russell and I am your host, and I will be sharing with you some of the latest and greatest exciting news that's happening in Cognitive Services and Applied AI. I have a really interesting announcement to make today. We actually have announced it in previous developer conferences, but I really want to take a moment to get you guys excited about what we have to offer. However, before I do that, I always like to remind you of all of the opportunity that's available in building with Cognitive Services and Applied AI. This is just a snapshot of the models that are available for your use, right? All the different types of things. In a couple of minutes, I'm going to share with you some opportunities to build technology for a specific demographic, All of these models can help you do that. I'll be referring to them, but it's always good to just take a look, right? Vision using OCR, right? Speech being able to translate, being able to use language detection, being able to meet your users, your customers where they are and where their needs are. So, this is a great opportunity for me to just share with you a new project that we've announced here at Microsoft, and it's called AI for Accessibility. Now, AI for accessibility, it's an interesting concept because my thought process around it is that if you are a developer, we should be building for everyone, right? Every person, every capability, every need, we should be thinking about that as we design products for our customers and for even our internal employees. We've decided at Microsoft though that it's extremely important that we incent and infuse this environment and all of the developers to build for these, types of solutions. So we've created a 5-year program. We're going to be granting $25 million to all of the different teams that might be participating. I'm going to share with you our focus areas for this. This is an opportunity, right? If you've ever thought to yourself, "I always wanted to build an app that does this," or I, for example, personally, I have a child with special needs. I have tons of ideas of apps I want to build, right? So it's a chance for you to build something you've always wanted to build, but now have a company like Microsoft backing you up. So our focus areas for this project are in 3 different areas. One is around employment. How can we help people get employed, right? Can you create an app, for example, leveraging language and speech to be able to do interviewing techniques? Or can you help in daily life, right? Like just communication or being able to create connection and opportunity for groups of people with a similar disability to come together. The opportunity is limitless. There are an infinite number of projects and applications that you could build with this technology, especially deciding to build on purpose for inclusion. So just to rack your brain a little bit and get some ideas flowing, I wanted to share with you some opportunities in these spaces. One is employment, being able to build and use AI to help people with disabilities get employed. I recently was working with a group called Puffin Innovations. Their lead, their CEO has has CP, or cerebral palsy, and she can't control her muscles. She's a quadriplegic. But she is writing and building incredible software. So one of the things that we really want to focus on is having you engage with the community of those who are disabled. Or if you yourself are disabled, we want to make sure that you have the funding and support you need to build impactful solutions. So employment is huge, because getting people Basically, there's an unconscious bias of capability when we look at someone with a disability. And the reality is, is that they are just as capable and can build incredible solutions for our companies and for our customers. So we want to try to create software that will help them do that even better. Daily life, right? Just making daily life easier. Building software that will help devices be more reactive, more context-aware. So that as a person with a disability, whether it's cognitive, whether it's people who are physically disabled will be able to work in their daily life with less friction. Today it's extremely difficult for people to do just common everyday things like visit their parents or go to the mall, right? How can we use technology to make that better? I recently heard of a study in Japan, right, where they created a bunch of autonomous driving wheelchairs for a hospital, which was awesome because people could just get in a wheelchair and they didn't need to call someone over or have a nurse or wait for a nurse. That autonomous driving wheelchair would just take take them where they needed to go. Really exciting stuff. The last one is around community and building communication and connection. What could you build that could help people of all abilities just become more closely knit, become more of a community, help each other? So the interesting thing about this is accessibility, right? You should build software that can, if you're good at listening, that it can listen. If you're good at speaking, that it can speak, right? If you're good at reading, you can read. We want to provide the opportunity for all of our website, all of our software to be able to meet users where they are, both cognitively and physically. The thing I uncovered as I was going through the research for this project was, "Oh my goodness, it's actually not that hard for me to do that if I do it at the right phase of development." So, we're asking you to have accessibility in mind when you're designing your software, and now you have a program that you can participate in to help get funded as well.
I teamed up with like-minded engineers to make an app which lets you know who and what is around you. It's based on top of the Microsoft Intelligence APIs, which makes it so much easier to make this kind of thing. The app runs on smartphones but also on the Pivothead smart glasses. When you're talking to a bigger group, sometimes you can talk and talk and there's no response and you think, "Is everyone listening really well or are they half asleep?" And you never know.
I see two faces. 40-year-old man with a beard looking surprised. 20-year-old woman looking happy.
The app can describe the general age and gender of the people around me and what their emotions are, which is incredible.
So this is just some common questions. You know, how do you apply? I know some of you are probably extremely interested. You already have a project in mind. You can go online. There's a website available for you to do that. We also just announced our first grantee on our blog, so you can go take a look at that as well. But there's huge opportunity today, so you don't have to, of course, build software that will change your company, that will impact your customers, but oh my goodness, why don't you just build software that also helps people with accessibility needs access your software too? Open the funnel. It's great for business and it's great for the world. So thanks for joining me again today. I'll leave you with this. Final set of links, um, and I really look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Thanks for joining us, and I'll see you next time.
