We keep calling AI intelligent. But it has never seen a human face. Over the past two years, artificial intelligence has undergone a meteoric rise. We’ve watched it master the Bar Exam, write sophisticated code in seconds, and translate ancient dialects with startling precision. By all accounts, AI is becoming "smarter" than us. But there is a fundamental, glaring flaw in the current AI revolution: Almost every AI you interact with is legally blind. The Text-Only Delusion We are currently living in the era of "Text-Only Intelligence." You type a prompt into a box, and a machine generates a response based on the statistical probability of the next word. It is a world of pure syntax, devoid of the very things that make human communication meaningful. In the real world, humans don't just "exchange data." We communicate through a complex, silent language of: Micro-reactions that betray our true feelings. Tonal shifts that turn a statement into a questio...
Amazon has announced that it will add two new features that would make it's Kindle e-book reader more accessible to blind and vision-impaired suers. "Monday's announcement comes a month after Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y., and the University of Wisconsin-Madison said they would not consider widely deploying the device as an alternative to paper textbooks until Amazon makes it easier for blind students to use. Both universities bought some Kindles to test this fall." So with it's new feature of Text-To-Speech, Amazon will make it more vision-impaired friendly and stand by it's commitment to improving the device for the visualy challenged. "The update will be available during the "summer" of 2010 and was prompted by feedback from Amazon users. "The Kindle will have a read-aloud feature that could be advantageous to blind students and those with other disabilities including dyslexia, but getting to that point is a problem. T...