Researchers at Ohio State University are currently developing AI software to make the internet more accessible to people with disabilities. Credit: Dreamstime | TNS [Original caption: One thing both skeptics and enthusiasts alike can agree on: Artificial intelligence will have a banner year in 2024.]
Artificial intelligence software currently in development called Mind2Web aims to make the internet more accessible to people with disabilities by enabling them to perform complex online tasks with simple text requests.
Created by researchers in Ohio, this AI helps people complete more than 2,000 online tasks, from finding documents and making doctor’s appointments to watching comedy movies on Netflix and following celebrities on social media. will help you. Dr. Boyuan Zhen is a computer science student and co-author of the following books: the study Commenting on the development of the tool, he said the software could also help people with visual impairments accomplish tasks in the digital world.
“It’s like a guide dog in cyberspace,” says Zheng.
Zheng said AI can not only help people with disabilities, but also people who are less tech-savvy.
“and [Generation Z]we’re used to this kind of web search and this kind of software and we take it for granted, but it’s not necessarily easy for everyone,” Zheng said.
Ultimately, this technology could change the way people who use the Internet regularly interact with it, said Huang Sun, associate professor of computer science and co-author of the study. .
“Ideally, you can leverage this tool to perform tasks automatically,” Sun says. “Plus, it increases everyone’s productivity to a certain extent, and it saves us a lot of time by not having to do all this tedious work.”
Researchers began developing AI by creating Mind2Web, a dataset that allows software to perform tasks and learn new tasks. Unlike his other AI agents, which were developed and trained using synthetic websites, Mind2Web was created by downloading 137 real sites from the internet, Zheng said.
According to Sun, the AI agent, MindAct, itself uses a long language model (algorithms trained to detect and understand human language) to perform actions on a web page when a person gives it a task. Predict what actions to take.
“The large language model is the backbone model,” Sun says. “You can make correct predictions and take actions until you reach the final step, where the user is presented with a list of options to choose from.”
Although the AI currently only has a 50% success rate, Zheng is excited about the progress made so far and what the future holds for the project.
“I’m very excited,” Zheng said. “Every day I wake up, I feel so excited. There’s a lot of exciting work to do, and we’re getting very close to actual implementation. [of our AI]”
You can download Mind2Web now using this link.
