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IN TOUCH – Artificial Intelligence; European Blind Football League

TX:Ìý 11.04.2023Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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White

Good evening.Ìý Well, I hope you had an enjoyable Easter weekend, however you spent it.Ìý I’m a bit of a football fan meself and, as usual, there was quite a full programme of games but I hadn’t expected to hear this:

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Clip

Shimwell trying to turn inside the box, dragged along to his right foot, can he get a shot – oh he can, it’s there.Ìý Well done, effort.

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Superb effort there.Ìý Into that far corner, exactly the lift Hereford needed.

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White

That was a European Champions League blind style from Hereford.Ìý The results and significance of that game coming up later.

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Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has been very much in the news lately.Ìý Some experts have begun to worry about whether AI is going too far, too fast.Ìý Others, though, see it as promising huge benefits and not least for visually impaired people.

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For some time now smartphone users have been able to take advantage of services like Be My Eyes, which does what it says on the tin – it enables you to hook up with human help to see things, whether it’s checking which counter you’re in front of in a shop, finding a lost object, checking your outfit for the evening matches, etc.Ìý But now, the service says it’s on the verge of introducing an additional feature that is AI driven with no humans involved, which you can interrogate.Ìý Well, we’ll be talking to Be My Eyes chief executive in a moment.Ìý But first, we thought we’d better get an experienced user of such services to try it out.Ìý So, who better than the 91Èȱ¬â€™s Senior Correspondent in the United States – Gary °¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð.

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Gary, you’ve been using it for the first time this weekend I think, how did it go?

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

I think it’s worth saying that there have been AI elements in some other apps that have been on the market up until now and they’ve done a pretty good job at times but they’re very general.Ìý I think what we’ve got with this is a kind of new level, I think it really is a sort of step change in the kind of information we can get.Ìý Now I’m not going to do a tutorial on how this system works and it’s not public yet anyway but I want to give you a bit of a flavour of what it sounds like and how it works.

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So, I’ve got a magazine in front of me and I’m going to ask the virtual volunteer to describe the cover.Ìý And what I have to do, first of all, is take a picture of it.

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Synthetic voice

Take picture.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

And now I’m going to go to a box where I can type in a question to interrogate the picture.

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Synthetic voice

Write question here.Ìý Text field, insertion point at end.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

What’s on the cover of this magazine?

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Synthetic voice

Please wait.Ìý Virtual volunteer is writing a message.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

Now this will take about 10 seconds.Ìý I’m going to leave this 10 seconds in for now, so that you get an idea of the time, then I’ll edit it out in the subsequent conversation for time purposes.Ìý So, we’re still waiting.

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Synthetic speech

Virtual volunteer:Ìý the cover of the magazine has a blue background with the text Calvert Woodley fine wines and spirits and celebrate 40 years of Calvert Woodley.Ìý There is also an image of a champagne bottle with the label Dom Perignon and vintage 1982.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

What else is on the cover?

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Synthetic speech

There are also gold confetti pieces scattered around the cover and a black ribbon around the neck of the champagne bottle.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

You said it was a bottle of Dom Perignon 1982, go on to the internet and find out how much that would cost.

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Synthetic voice

I am not able to provide an accurate price for the Dom Perignon in 1982 as the price can vary depending on the cellar and the condition of the bottle.Ìý However, I did find some listings online ranging from $400 to $800.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

Now no doubt your cellar is stocked with all of those things, Peter…

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White

Absolutely.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

…and I want to stress that I’ve edited out a lot of the gaps there and a lot of the manipulation on the smartphone that you do have to do.Ìý So, this is the ideal but I wanted to give an impression of its capability.Ìý Take a listen to this because I think this shows its strength even more.Ìý I took another part of the magazine and asked it to do a few more sophisticated things.

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Synthetic voice

Take picture.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

What does this page show?

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Synthetic voice

Virtual volunteer:Ìý This page shows a list of Spanish white and rose wines that are on sale.Ìý There is also a section about the 2021 Julien [indistinct name] chardonnay from Nievera, Spain and a cheese pairing suggestion for Campo de Montalban.Ìý Additionally, there is an image of a vineyard at the bottom of the page.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

Give me an idea of the prices that are shown on the page.

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Synthetic voice

The prices for the wines range from $9.69 to $37.99 with the majority of the wines being priced between $15 and $25.Ìý The cheese pairing Campo de Montalban is on sale for $14.99 per pound.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

I think you’ll agree it’s a level of detail and interrogation and natural language that we’ve simply not seen before.Ìý The AI system, at least at this stage, doesn’t do things that humans can’t do but it does allow you that sort of extra level of freedom.

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White

You sound on the verge – and you’re a very calm reporter – of being quite excited about this.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

Look, I think this is early days and you do need a level of knowledge on how to use a smartphone, that sounded very easy the way I’d edited that, for the time it takes for this to happen and the way you have to manipulate the software, all those things could potentially be barriers to some blind and visually impaired people.Ìý And, you’re right, I’m paid to be a sceptic, this, I think, has enormous potential.

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White

Well look, stay where you are.Ìý Listening to that is Mike Buckley, who is Be My Eyes chief executive.Ìý Mike, you are making great claims for this, you know, never knowingly undersold, you’ve used the term game changer, why so confident?

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Buckley

Let me hedge for just a minute.Ìý The phrases that I often use, I tend to mimic the phrases that are used by the people who are blind or low vision testing the app.Ìý I am very, very wary of the hype cycle currently that exists around artificial intelligence.Ìý That said, I do believe the possibilities here are limitless for what this tech will eventually be able to do.Ìý It will eventually involve video, it will be real time and much faster and I think what we see and what we hope is that this will live in some type of wearable, right, that provides a state-of-the-art digital visual assistant for the more than 250 million people who are blind or low vision around the world.

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White

Now you’re working with a company called Open AI on this project, can you just explain, in the simplest terms you can manage, how this technology works because a lot of people are very puzzled by it?

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Buckley

Yes.Ìý Imagine that you or I, as a human being, very credibly and capably learned and digested trillions of pieces of information and got smarter off that, that’s how AI works.Ìý So, the machine in the system ingests trillions of pieces of data and gains a knowledge base and therefore can kind of spit that knowledge back to you, based on a whole series of questions.Ìý And one way to think about it is, imagine a customer service agent that had read every consumer user manual in existence and could interpret and explain it quickly, that’s kind of the verge of what we’re on right now.Ìý The questions you ask and the way you prompt is going to dictate your experience.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

I’m interested to know the extent to which this will be able to be tailored to blind and visually impaired people because my understanding, at the moment, is that the engine here, if you like, doesn’t know I’m blind when I’m asking these questions.Ìý I mean the answers are pretty good but it might tailor those answers even more to someone who’s visually impaired.

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Buckley

I think you will see that over time, Gary.Ìý Generally speaking, these AI systems operate the same way that sort of a Google search does, wherein the results get better over time anyway.Ìý And so, through the interaction with people who are blind and low vision it should get better.Ìý And, hopefully, this will have a long-term relationship with Open AI where we work on this project specifically for people who are blind and low vision together.Ìý The other thing is that You Be My Eyes job as really performing the function that you’re talking about, nothing matters more to us than kind of serving the needs of this community.Ìý And so, I view that as our responsibility.

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White

Right, which leads me on to a question, which is if it’s that good, can it remain free?

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Buckley

Well, I hope so.Ìý Look, we’ve always kept our services for free, it’s our intention to continue doing so.Ìý I never say never because I never want to lie, right, like our business model has always been that we charge large enterprises to help them with their accessibility tools, often in their customer service centres.Ìý For us to fulfil our mission of really serving this community well, we have to keep the service for free.

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

I was going to ask you, Mike, how do you open this out to younger people because the power of this potentially in education is obvious – getting this system to describe the makeup or the form of a helix in a biology lesson – is there a way of doing that while protecting younger people from the potential abuses of this system?

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Buckley

I would hope so, Gary.Ìý What you’re pointing out is something huge, right, the ability to make education accessible, it’s of huge importance.Ìý And that’s why we’re being really slow and really cautious about rolling this out because safety and accuracy is really everything, when it comes to this game.

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White

Can I pin you down a bit more on timescale?Ìý Because we’ve seen various…

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Buckley

You can try.

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White

…well, we’ve seen various different estimates of this and I’ve seen you quoted as saying it could be in the hands of visually impaired people in weeks.Ìý Well, that could be two weeks or 500 weeks, Mike, what’s the truth of the matter?

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Buckley

I hope it’s two months but this is going to be a decision that we do jointly with Open AI and, again, it’s based on accuracy and safety.Ìý But the most important thing is we have to take the feedback and the direction from the people who are blind and low vision testing this product, to make sure it’s doing what they want it to do.Ìý And so, it’s going to sound wishy washy because I can’t give you a – hey, July 27th – right?

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White

But my understanding is that no one else is using this yet, at the moment, so how come you’re so far ahead of the game?

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Buckley

They called us and we called them.Ìý I can’t say why they decided to work with us, although I’m thankful for that.

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White

Could it be that they’re attracted by the idea that this puts them in a very good light when there’s anxiety about AI around the place, this is helping a vulnerable group of people?

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Buckley

I’m sure that played a part of the calculus, right, they’re not dumb.Ìý I will say that in all my interactions with the team at Open AI we’ve been impressed by their kind of openness and their directness.Ìý I’m trying not to sound, you know, that I’ve drunk all the Kool-Aid, as the American expression would be, and kind of believing anything I’ve been told but they’ve been remarkably good to work with and very straightforward from the get-go.Ìý

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White

Gary, do you think you’ll be using this?

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°¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð

Yes, I have been using it and I will continue to use it.Ìý And the possibilities are endless.Ìý I mean it’s worth noting, for example, IRA, when they started, they said – well, we think, you know, people will use our service mainly for navigation, for helping getting around places.Ìý What turned out to be the case, is that they now say that the vast majority of their calls are information or calls, blind people wanting to know – what’s this, what’s on this, what does this say.Ìý And this is absolutely tailored to that sort of task.

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White

Mike Buckley and Gary °¿â€™D´Ç²Ô´Ç²µ³ó³Ü±ð, thank you both very much indeed.

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Now, I reckon most football fans who are old enough would agree that the modern era really arrived when England decided, rather reluctantly at first, to take part in what was then called the European Cup.Ìý And the same with women’s football when they, memorably, won the European finals last year.Ìý So, could it soon be the same for the blind version of the game?Ìý The trail blazers in the 1950s were Manchester United.Ìý At the weekend, it was the Royal National College for the Blind at Hereford who played a crucial game against the Belgium team, with whom they were running neck and neck in the first European Blind Football League season.

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Lovely dribble for here by Amjid, here’s still going into the box.Ìý Oh yes, that’s fantastic, into the cop corner, Eesa Amjid lovely dribble, he gets a pat on the back.Ìý What a striker and what a run that was.

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White

Well, that brought RNC level with Charleroi, two each as you heard, the final score in fact, so they’re still neck and neck.Ìý Well, joining me in my after-match role as Gary Lineker are team manager and coach Adam Bendall and RNC captain Azeem Amir.Ìý Let’s start with you Azeem.Ìý Exciting game.Ìý I guess you might be a bit disappointed not to have actually won it but is the real significance of this about raising the profile of the blind game?

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Amir

It definitely is, I mean what a day in general, in terms of the coverage, the fact that we were able to be on English soil and the fact that this is our first season doing the European Blind League.Ìý It was massive progress in terms of this being our… a kind of fixture of that.Ìý Meant a lot to us but the result, I think, it was bigger than just a two-two.Ìý To have a local business sponsor our league and wider than that – people coming to watch us.Ìý What was great was the fact that it was streamed across Europe, so we had people tuning in from all over the place and we really did set the standard.

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White

Now for people who can’t, perhaps, imagine how totally blind people play football, I mean what would you say are the main challenges?Ìý I mean, presumably, one big difference is that you must need there to be a certain amount of quiet really because the calling is quite an important part of the game for blind people, isn’t it?

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Amir

Communication is massive in the game of blind football.Ìý So, it’s a five-a-side sport, played by four outfield players who have got blindfolds on to ensure that it’s kind of an even playing field, with a ball with ball bearings in it which makes a sound.Ìý The goalkeeper’s fully sighted and we play on a specialist pitch which has boards going down the side.Ìý And one of our coaches will stand behind the goal that we’re shooting towards and act as a kind of audible Tannoy, trying to get into the final third as to where to shoot, where to place the ball.

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White

Let me bring in your coach – Adam Bendall.Ìý Do you see RNC as pioneers in promoting blind football?

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Bendall

Yeah, I think in blind sport, in general, we try and be in pioneers in the UK in terms of getting people that may have never played any sport in mainstream schools into sport when they join us as a student.Ìý So, we cater for a lot of different blind sports.Ìý But there are a lot of other football clubs and other blind football clubs in the UK that are really trying to increase the profile of the game.

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White

Where do England and the other home countries stand in the rankings for blind football, how are we doing?

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Bendall

We are ranked 12th in the world as an England team.Ìý We’ve been in and around like the top 10 for the last couple of years, we missed out on the Paralympics in Tokyo, we lost on a penalty shoot-out, which seems to be quite common for most teams.

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White

It’s a bit of an English habit, isn’t it?

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Bendall

Yeah and it is – and it is for our blind football team as well.Ìý But in terms of rankings, we kind of punch well above our weight.Ìý We’re really well supported by the FA but we don’t have a massive player pool to choose from.

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White

And how do you feel about the result on Saturday?Ìý I mean you are still just ahead, aren’t you, on goal difference?

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Bendall

Yeah, I think our goal difference now is plus 10 above Charleroi, so that’s a nice little buffer.Ìý Was probably a little bit disappointed that we drew the game against Charleroi, I think we had a lot more chances than they did and then we went on and beat the Romanian national team five-nil, which out in Romania we only managed to beat them one-nil.Ìý So, yeah, there’s lots of improvements and all in all it was a great day.

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White

Just finally back to you Azeem, what’s your next big challenge in the sport because I know IBSA, that’s the International Blind Sports Association, those championships are coming up in the summer, aren’t they?

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Amir

Yeah, we’ve got a huge few months ahead in terms of preparations for the World Games and we’ve got a few kind of tours away to Brazil and France in preparation for that.Ìý And the hope is, as an individual, to kind of give myself the best opportunity and get into the best position for selection.Ìý But as a squad, if we can kind of strive to move forward technically, tactically and psychologically, to the best of our ability, coming up to August at home championships where not only is there a medal up for grabs but also potential qualification to the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, we’ll be in a good position.

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White

Yeah, the Paralympics is a good example really of how sport for disabled people can actually really catch on as a spectator sport, isn’t it?

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Amir

Yeah definitely and the event on Saturday was – a great highlight of that is just raising the awareness that this is what a person with a disability can achieve and wider than that, you know, our boys they deserved the recognition, some of them are managing careers, studies, all sorts and to be able to turn up and put performances in and show their abilities, it deserves lots and lots of recognition.

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White

Okay.Ìý Well, Azeem Amir, Adam Bendall, thank you both very much indeed.Ìý And we should also mention the commentator you heard there was Keith Hall.

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And that’s it for today.Ìý We’re planning to look at TV advertising soon and whether they bear in mind visually impaired people when they’re creating their ads.Ìý Tell us your pet hates and you can even throw in the odd accolade.Ìý You can email intouch@bbc.co.uk, leave voice messages on 0161 836 1338 or go to our website bbc.co.uk/intouch where you can download tonight’s and previous editions of the programme.Ìý

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From me, Peter White, producer Beth Hemmings and studio manager Sue Stonestreet, goodbye.