At the developer’s conference of Microsoft, the CEO of the company Satya Nadella announced a five year ‘Artificial Intelligence for Accessibility’ project of $25 million to utilize the full potential of AI for the betterment of the lives of people with disabilities. The project is for the researchers, the NGOs, and developers. During the conference, Satya Nadella said, “It is important for us to help more people and it’s been a passion of mine to help people suffering from disabilities like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and autism. The AI for accessibility will provide technologies and platform for the developers to use AI solutions to help billions of people”. Across the world, 1 out of 10 people with the disabilities has access to assistive technologies. The company believes that with the AI technology they can make a great impact in the society.

The project will be run by the Accessibility team and its leader, Jenny Lay-Flurrie, who has been working with engineers and developers since past three years in Microsoft.  The project will be accomplished in three ways. At first, they will be providing aid with technologies or AI tools to developers, non-governmental organizations, universities, and investors taking an AI-first approach focused on creating solutions that will create many opportunities to assist people with disabilities with work, life and human connections. The next step will be the selection of the best and promising projects on which they will make huge investments and assist them with Microsoft’s AI experts to bring them to scale and lastly, Microsoft with its partners will incorporate AI into platform-level services to empower others to maximize their accessibility offering.

Microsoft has already developed many Accessible technology solutions based on AI. Microsoft Translator, a multilingual machine translator cloud service, is empowering the deaf people with the real-time captioning of conversations. Helpicto, specially made for the children with autism in France, is an application which turns the voice command into images to better understand the situation and communicate with others. Seeing AI, built for the blind and low vision people, describes the surrounding with the help of the camera in a phone.

This is not the first time when Microsoft is utilizing AI for the society. Last year, for the betterment of the environment, Microsoft announced AI for Earth project in order to find the solutions to the environmental issues such as climate change, water, agriculture and biodiversity with the help of AI solutions.