Technology & Products

How AI is Changing the Lives of People With Disabilities

Aug 24, 2020

This past month, members of the Tech Access Group (TAG) discussed ways AI is changing the lives of individuals with disabilities. At its core, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is computer programming that learns and adapts. It can’t solve every problem, but its potential to improve our lives is profound. Companies like Google have used AI to make products more useful—like easier to compose emails and photos that pop the fun stuff out for you to enjoy.

But beyond products, Google is using AI to help people tackle urgent problems— such as these school students who are building AI-powered sensors to predict the risk of wildfires, farmers monitoring the health of their herds and doctors diagnosing cancer and preventing blindness.

Today we’re highlighting one of Google’s most recent AI driven research initiatives, Project Euphonia. Using AI to improve speech recognition technology by making it more accessible and better understood by people with diverse speech patterns.

A Deep Dive Into Project Euphonia 

For millions of people around the world whose speech is difficult for some to understand, face-to-face communication can be challenging. Using voice activated technologies can be frustrating as well. While tools like Google Home or Google Assistant can help people call someone or adjust lighting or music, they may not work as efficiently or accurately for those with impaired voices. This is due to the fact that speech recognition algorithms have heard millions of examples from people whose voices sound “typical,” but not many examples from people with speech impairments.

Ultimately, the goal is to improve peoples’ independence and ability to communicate by making technology work better for everyone.  As a first concrete step in this research, Google is looking to gather enough voice recordings from people with speech impairments to train speech recognition models to better understand diverse speech patterns.

Example of phrases that Google asks participants to read.

Google software turns recorded voice samples into a spectrogram, or a visual representation of the sound. The computer then uses transcriptions of these spectrograms to “train” the system to better understand less common types of speech patterns. In addition to improving speech recognition, they are also training personalized AI algorithms to detect specific sounds or gestures, and then take user-defined actions such as generating spoken commands to Google Home or sending text messages. Something that may be particularly helpful to people who are severely disabled or cannot speak.

Members of the United Spinal Association are excited to see where this can take us, but first, Google needs your help. These improvements to speech recognition technologies are only possible if they have many speech samples to train the system. If you have slurred or hard to understand speech, please consider filling out this short form to volunteer and record a set of phrases. Watch the videos below and visit g.co/euphonia to learn more.

Project Euphonia: Helping everyone be better understood

Age of AI: How Tim Shaw regained his voice

A message from our friends at Google

We recognize that such powerful technology raises equally powerful questions about its use. So today, we’d like to highlight seven principles that guide our work.

Objectives for AI applications— we believe that AI should:

  1. Be socially beneficial
  2. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias
  3. Be built and tested for safety
  4. Be accountable to people
  5. Incorporate privacy design principles
  6. Uphold high standards of scientific excellence
  7. Be made available for uses that accord with these principles

AI applications we will not pursue:

In addition to the above objectives, we will not design or deploy AI in the following areas:

  1. Technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm.
  2. Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.
  3. Technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.
  4. Technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.

Read more to learn about Google’s AI principles and our AI for Good initiatives.

Google Accessibility Resources