Discover accessibility by way of Amazon Alexa at Sight Tech International 2022 • TechCrunch

Just a little-appreciated reality about Amazon’s Alexa is the place the voice service’s public debut occurred earlier than it turned broadly obtainable to prospects. The venue was CSUN, the longstanding convention devoted to assistive know-how for folks with disabilities, notably imaginative and prescient loss. Nobody had extra to realize from a machine that would present fast replies to spoken questions, and no group may present extra incisive suggestions. 

On the upcoming Sight Tech International convention on December 7 & 8 (digital and free — register right here), two of Amazon’s foremost accessibility leaders, Peter Korn, Director of Accessibility, Gadgets & Providers, and Dr. Joshua Miele, Principal Accessibility Researcher, will talk about how Amazon continues to dig deeper into the accessibility and equity surrounding the exceptional Alexa voice service, which is utilized by tens of millions of consumers all over the world, billions of occasions every week. 

As Korn and Miele will level out, the benefits Alexa confers to blind folks, for instance, doesn’t essentially work in the identical means for individuals who have speech disabilities; on the similar time, Alexa’s capabilities way back escaped the bounds of speech-based interplay. At the moment, 30% of Alexa interactions within the dwelling usually are not prompted by customers’ voice instructions however by Alexa’s fascinating aspect hustles like Hunches and Routines. 

And in a nod to the fact that not everybody speaks in a means that Alexa can perceive immediately, Amazon lately joined a consortium of know-how firms, together with Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, to launch the Speech Accessibility Mission with the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), which is utilizing AI and new voice datasets to make speech recognition methods, like Alexa, and different voice companies higher capable of perceive numerous speech patterns. 

For individuals who work in assistive applied sciences, it was no shock that Alexa’s first public debut was at CSUN. Many exceptional applied sciences have began with the blind. It was know-how legend Ray Kurzweil who in 1976 took an enormous step ahead in optical character recognition (OCR), the ancestor of immediately’s pc imaginative and prescient, when he unveiled the $50,000 Kurzweil Studying Machine at a press convention hosted by the Nationwide Federation of the Blind. OCR spawned numerous companies exterior of accessibility, in addition to many highly effective and just about free instruments utilized by the blind immediately, together with many we talk about at Sight Tech International. 

The Alexa that Amazon demoed practically eight years in the past in entrance of the CSUN viewers has carried out simply the identical, rising right into a service with an enormous variety of options, like Present and Inform and Notify When Close by, that assist an growing variety of folks, partially due to the Amazon group’s concentrate on an inclusive method that goals to depart nobody behind whereas additionally making Alexa higher and extra useful for everybody. 

Be part of Sight Tech International for this session and lots of extra, which you’ll be able to see on the full agenda. Now in its third 12 months, Sight Tech International brings collectively the world’s prime technologists in AI and different superior applied sciences to deal with assistive know-how for the people who find themselves blind. Register immediately. 

We’re grateful to sponsors iSenpai, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, HumanWare, Microsoft, Ford, Fable, APH and Waymo. If you want to sponsor the occasion, please contact us. All sponsorship revenues go to the nonprofit Vista Heart for the Blind and Visually Impaired, which has been serving the Silicon Valley group for 75 years.