Accessibility & LLMs

I am not sure if the scale of my perspectives are accurate to most. But, I feel I have been exposed to a lot of online communities over the years. Observing various threads, conversations and banter, both negative and positive. A consistent pattern of negatives out weighing the positives. Fear driven or trained to speak in a tonality that creates fear.

LLMs have lots of great applications in the accessibility industry. Since the dawn of cleverbot.com back in 2008, till today. I have dreamt of it reaching the heights we are currently seeing. Researching companies/orgs like Adept, Anthropic, Inflection, & Stability, I am very excited for the future.

In 2016 I had built a chat bot called Clarke, that helped with emotional guidance. A weekly diary that would summarize your moods in a quantitive manner. Focusing on addressing core variables in your daily routines to improve upon. Helping create a path for the following week to improve your trends/habits for the better. But, since then I have always felt there was this missing piece. This piece that helped maintain consistency and/or loyalty from the user. A sense of trust that could provide a person with true self-awareness of change occurring.

Inflection’s Pi is quite astounding and truly felt like the missing piece to Clarke.

But, I’d like to talk about accessibility in its true form. How can technologies like these help persons whom are deaf or blind? I feel focusing on building creative experiences that aid for these people to benefit from, would be the last mile of LLMs in its entirety. We’ve seen how GPT, can assess ambiguity and uncover hidden links, aligning thoughts seamlessly (most of the time). I just wonder how, we can bridge this into the world of accessibility and provide options for sight and hearing. Maybe, true sight and hearing isn’t what we think it is. Maybe there’s another way to re-integrate such senses so it respects the boundaries of whom were born deaf or blind, whom knew the world prior and entered one without, and those who are able all together. Perception is subjective, there’s a reason music and food are globally enjoyed despite racial biases, transcending variables of birth. The only uncontrollable variable we vowed, as a civilization/society, to equalize over time.