At its 14th Ability summit, which kicks off today, Microsoft is highlighting developments and collaborations across its portfolio of assistive products. Much of that is around Azure AI, including features announced yesterday like AI-powered audio descriptions and the Azure AI studio that better enables developers with disabilities to create machine-learning applications. It also showed off new updates like more languages and richer AI-generated descriptions for its Seeing AI tool, as well as new playbooks offering guidelines for best practices in areas like building accessible campuses and greater mental health support.
The company is also previewing a feature called “Speak For Me,” which is coming later this year. Much like Apple’s Personal Voice, Speak For Me can help those with ALS and other speech disabilities to use custom neural voices to communicate. Work on this project has been ongoing “for some time” with partners like the non-profit ALS organization Team Gleason, and M
