Facebook has been adding features to make it even better. Speaking at a Web Summit, Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, talked about a new feature that the company has been developing to better understand what's happening in photos and be able to translate that to language.
As CNBC reports, Facebook is testing an artificial intelligence (AI) feature that can answer questions about a photo. More so, this feature is aimed at helping blind people somehow see the uploaded images to the social network.
Alongside Apple and Google, Facebook has been working hard in developing its AI capabilities. This technology is seen as a key for the future of these tech companies.
Earlier this year, the social media titan unveiled a technology called "Memory Networks" which allows a machine to perform sophisticated questioning and answering according to the report. The same concept will be used wherein a system is able to identify the different aspects of a picture. In turn, it can answer questions about it, a feature most helpful to visually impaired individuals.
"So much of the world is visual. So much of sharing on social networks is photos and videos. Much of your brain is dedicated to processing visual imagery. So one of the keys to building systems that work is teaching computers to understand the visual world," Schroepfer said during a keynote at Web Summit.
"Next month, we're going to talk about some breakthrough work we've done...on image segmentation," he added.
As reported by Financial Spots, Facebook is using a number of features like speech and image recognition to identify the attribute of a photo. An example demonstrated was a baseball game where the system can tell the game played and if it's daytime or not. Users may ask questions and the system will give the closest answer.
"Imagine that you are one of the hundreds of millions of people with some sort of vision disability and you have trouble participating in the visual part of social networks. And one of your friends, who just had a baby, posts a photo and captions it. There's technology already out there to read all the text on the screen to you...but you wanted to learn more about what this photo is. We built a system that allows you to ask questions about a photo that it's never seen before," Schroepfer said.
Facebook is keeping with other tech companies in developing their capabilities. It will not be surprising to see sci-fi movies become a reality decades from now. What do you think? Is this feature helpful? Share us your thoughts by leaving your comments below.
