Applications to Aid the Blind
A recent post highlighted a project to refine the capabilities of Mechanical Turk for use in software applications. While MIT researchers work on that project, University of Rochester scientists have taken a similar concept and created a way to aid the blind.
VizWiz is an iPhone app that works in conjunction with a Turkit application, allowing a blind user to snap a photo of something, record a question about something shown in the photograph, and then receive an answer back within seconds. Designing a computer program that can reliably recognize text and distinguish objects in the real world has proven to be a massive challenge for artificial intelligence researchers.
To ensure users get answers as quickly as possible, researchers designed an intelligent queuing system known as Quik Turkit to speed things up. Quik Turkit recruits Mechanical Turk workers even as a VizWiz user is taking a picture, so someone is always ready to answer an incoming query.
According to an article in New Scientist, eleven blind iPhone users tested out VizWiz, asking questions like: “What denomination is this bill?”, “Do you see picnic tables across the parking lot?”, and “What temperature is my oven set to?”
They initially received an average of three responses per query and waited an average of 133.3 seconds for the first answer. The first answer received was accurate or helpful in 71 of 82 cases. By the third answer, all questions were correctly answered.
In a second test, the volunteers got to use VizWiz 2.0, which includes improved image processing techniques. Their response time was cut to an average of 27 seconds.
VizWiz is still under development and not yet available for general use.
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