The blind and visually impaired will no longer be excluded from experiencing selfies and pictures of your cat on Facebook. A new feature rolling out Tuesday on the company's iPhone app will interpret what is in a picture using artificial intelligence, and then describe the image aloud, The Associated Press reports.
The system is still in its early stages and developers are taking it slow, a caution learned from other artificial intelligence mishaps, such as when Google's photo-interpreting software labeled a black couple as gorillas. For now, the Facebook app feature is only available in English and has a vocabulary of 100 words. As a result, it can't explain too many details — it can tell you three people are outdoors smiling, for example, but not necessarily what they are doing. However, as the technology grows, users in the future might even be able to pose questions to the app about the picture and have them answered.
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