Helping New Parents Understand How Family Leave Laws Affect Them
PaidLeave.AI
Moms First, a nonprofit started by Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani, teamed up with OpenAI to develop Paidleave.ai, a new generative AI model that helps new parents in the state of New York determine whether they’re eligible for paid family leave and guides them through the application process.
Benefits like paid maternity and family leave are challenging to access, requiring parents to jump through hoops, navigate insurance paperwork, and decipher complicated websites and application processes to attain the support they need. Paidleave.ai uses AI to simplify the process and provide new parents with a clear action plan regarding their eligibility for paid leave, the amount of financial support they can receive, and how to access their benefits.
The Paidleave.ai system prompts users to type their situation into the tool as a prompt and then uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to parse the query and help a person determine whether they’re eligible for paid leave and what forms and other information they need to gather. Paidleave.ai then sends an email to the user with an action plan.
Paidleave.ai is currently limited to New York State but serves as a model for how the power of AI can be harnessed to bring about impactful social and economic change, particularly in closing the gender pay gap and empowering women with greater access to family leave laws.
Improving Accessibility for the Vision-Impaired
Be My Eyes
Since 2012, Be My Eyes has been creating technology for the community of over 250 million people who are blind or have low vision. The Danish startup connects people who are blind or have low vision with volunteers for help with hundreds of daily life tasks like identifying a product or navigating an airport. Be My Eyes recently teamed up with OpenAI to develop Be My AI, the first-ever digital visual assistant. With the power of OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, the Be My Eyes app is now able to generate the same level of context and understanding as a human volunteer. This new technology will have profound implications for global accessibility, providing the blind and low vision community with new and powerful tools and capabilities for a host of visual interpretation needs that will introduce a greater degree of independence in their lives.
Using AI to Give a Paralyzed Woman Her Voice Back
UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley
At the age of 30, Ann suffered a brainstem stroke that left her severely paralyzed. She lost control of all the muscles in her body and was unable even to breathe. For the next five years, Ann went to bed each night afraid she would die in her sleep. It took years of physical therapy before she could move her facial muscles enough to laugh or cry. Still, the muscles that would have allowed her to speak remained immobile. Today, Ann is helping researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley develop new brain-computer technology that could one day allow people like her to communicate more naturally through a digital avatar that resembles a person. It is the first time that either speech or facial expressions have been synthesized from brain signals. The system can also decode these signals into text at nearly 80 words per minute, a vast improvement over the 14 words per minute that her current communication device delivers.