In anticipation of Microsoft’s mysterious March event on AI, it seems there are more companies interested in using artificial intelligence to improve the user experience of its services and one of these turned to the Redmond giant.
We are talking about Reddit, which is now in the process of implement Microsoft’s “Florence” system to generate captions that identify subjects and actions in the images on the platform, a feature aimed at users with special vision needs.
The presence of all text on the web it is practically essential for visually impaired peoplewhich in this way can understand what is depicted on a page by making it read aloud, for example, to an automatic screen reader, but it can also have its usefulness on the technical front, contributing to the indexing of the contents of the social platform on major search engines and to make internal research more effective for the total benefit of users.
Usually, these descriptions are entered manually by development team personnel but it takes expenditure of economic and time resources to achieve what Florence would be able to do in a fully automated way. This particular AI model, moreover, would be capable even “to understand the difference between a Cosmic Crisp apple and a Honeycrisp apple“, to quote the words of the Azure AI CVP on the pages of TechRadar.
Still about Artificial Intelligence, if on Reddit should you happen to come across DAN, ChatGPT’s “evil” alter ego, don’t worry… everything is fine!