Microsoft’s Neural Voice tool for people with speech difficulties will arrive later this year

At the 14th Power Summit, which kicks off today, Microsoft is highlighting developments and collaborations across its suite of assistive products. A lot of that revolves around Azure AI, including the features Announced yesterday Such as AI-powered audio descriptions and Azure AI Studio that better enables developers with disabilities to create machine learning applications. It also showcased new updates such as more languages ​​and richer AI-generated descriptions for the Seeing AI tool, as well as new playbooks providing best practice guidance in areas such as building an accessible campus and greater mental health support.

The company is also previewing a feature called “Speak For Me,” which will be released later this year. Much like Apple’s Personal Voice, Speak For Me can help people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other speech disabilities use personalized neural signals Voices To communicate. Work on this project has been ongoing “for some time” with partners such as ALS nonprofit Team Gleason, and Microsoft said it is “committed to making sure this technology is used for good and plans to launch it later in the year.” The company also shared that it is working with Answer ALS and the ALS Therapy Development Institute (TDI) to “nearly double the clinical and genomic data available for research.”

One of the most important accessibility updates coming this month is just that The co-pilot will have new access skills Which enables users to ask Assistant to run Live Caption and Narrator, among other utilities. Access Assistant feature Announced last year It will be available today in Insider Preview for M365 apps like Word, with the company saying it will be coming “soon” to Outlook and PowerPoint. Microsoft is also publishing four new playbooks today, including the Mental Health Toolkit, which covers “tips for product makers to build experiences that support mental health conditions, created in partnership.” [with] Mental Health America.

Ahead of the summit, Jenny Leigh-Fleury, the company’s chief accessibility officer, spoke with Engadget to share more insight on the news as well as her thoughts on the role of generative AI in building assistive products.

“In many ways, AI is not new,” she said, adding that “this chapter is new.” Generative AI may be all the rage right now, but Leigh-Fleury believes the basic principle behind her team hasn’t changed. “Responsible AI is accessible,” she said.

However, generative AI can bring many benefits. “Despite this, this chapter opens up some potential opportunities for the accessibility sector and people with disabilities to be more productive and use technology to power their day,” she said. She highlighted a survey the company conducted with the diverse community around Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the response from the few hundred people who responded was, “This reduces the time for me to create content and reduces the gap between thought and action.” Flory said.

The idea of ​​taking responsibility for embracing new technology trends when designing for accessibility is never far from Leigh Fleury’s mind. “We still need to be very principled and thoughtful, and if we step back, it’s to make sure we’re protecting those basic rights of accessibility.”

Elsewhere at the summit, Microsoft is hosting guest speakers such as actress Michelle Williams and her employee Katie Jo Wright, to discuss mental health and their experience of living with chronic Lyme disease, respectively. We will also see the Rijksmusem in Amsterdam Share how Use Azure AI computer vision and generative AI to provide image descriptions of over a million pieces of art to visitors who are blind or have low vision.

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