We have seen a dramatic enhance within the capabilities of synthetic intelligence (AI) over the previous couple of years and the tech group continues to be making an attempt to determine the potential functions and ramifications. Fashions like ChatGPT and DALL-E have apparent use circumstances on the earth of content material creation—one thing skilled content material creators like myself discover troubling — however makers discover extra revolutionary makes use of for the know-how on daily basis. Mina Fahmi took benefit of a number of completely different AI companies to create Challenge Ring, which is a hand-worn system that perceives the world and communicates what it sees to the consumer.
Challenge Ring is a small system that straps onto the highest of the consumer’s hand and features a ring extension worn on the consumer’s index finger. The principle unit on the hand homes a lot of the {hardware} needed for processing, whereas the ring unit accommodates a joystick for consumer interplay and a digital camera to take a look at its environment. When the consumer factors the digital camera at one thing, Challenge Ring will analyze what it sees and supply a spoken description to the consumer by their headphones. It additionally listens for consumer instructions to help in interplay.
All of this works utilizing current AI companies that anybody can make the most of. The kicker is that Fahmi additionally programmed your entire system utilizing an AI service (GPT-4). So, in a fashion of talking, an AI created this system that makes use of AI.
After all, Fahmi nonetheless needed to conceptualize the system, information the AI programming, devise a {hardware} technique, design the 3D-printed components, and assemble every little thing. The first piece of {hardware} is a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board pc, which accepts enter from the joystick and digital camera. It communicates with Google Cloud Run to entry the assorted AI companies wanted for this all to return collectively: image-to-text, voice-to-text, text-to-text, and text-to-voice. The Raspberry Pi does not do any of that processing itself and as an alternative offloads every little thing to those cloud companies, that means that it requires an web connection.
Challenge Ring speaks to the consumer by their Android cellphone and a headset. If, for instance, the consumer asks Challenge Ring (with a voice command) to explain what it sees, then it is going to: seize a picture with the digital camera, run that by the image-to-text service, then run it by the text-to-speech service to generate the audio fed to the consumer’s headset.
And whereas Challenge Ring is generally simply an experiment in what one can obtain with AI, it may have real-world advantages for those that have poor eyesight.
