Microsoft Says Its Ai Tools Are Helping A Billion People With Disabilities

As over one billion people — roughly 15 per cent of the world’s population — grapple with some form of disability, Microsoft has begun unlocking the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve assistive technologies in several ways, the company’s India President Anant Maheshwari said on Monday.

Leveraging AI capabilities in computer vision for the blind and the low-vision community, the Microsoft app uses Optical character recognition (OCR) to read text, scans barcodes and recognizes faces, emotions and objects to describe the world.

Microsoft “AI for Accessibility” is a new, $25 million, five-year program from Microsoft for developers globally, including in India.