Artificial intelligence has emerged as a foundational technology that is profoundly transforming every aspect of our lives. It is not only enhancing human capacities and producing new efficiencies, but also helping resolve humanitarian and environmental challenges.

As one of the first companies in Korea to jump into the world of AI, we have secured key technologies and capabilities in this field, trying out new and innovative ideas that can bring benefits to both our customers and the overall society.

In collaboration with brilliant social startups, we are now focusing on developing and offering AI-powered services that can enhance the accessibility of people with disabilities.

Promoting social inclusion of people with visual impairment

In Korea, 254,000 are registered as vision impaired and 92.4% of them are suffering from severe sight impairment resulting from diseases and accidents. In addition, 26.4% of the vision impaired are living alone, and only 46.6% are participating in economic activities. Sight impairment is acting as a big obstacle for people to become financially independent.

By working together with a Korean social venture Tuat, we applied our voice AI technology to ‘Sullivan Plus’ to further upgrade the visual assistance service/app for blind and low vision people.

Sullivan Plus is the most popular AI-based visual assistance service in Korea. When a person with visual impairment takes a picture of an object, person, or landscape with a smartphone camera, AI recognizes the image on the screen and describes it via voice. It gives detailed descriptions such as “a 33-year-old man is smiling” or “a white puppy is sitting”, and also recognizes and reads the text marked on objects or documents. Sullivan Plus is empowering blind and low vision people to do much more by themselves in their daily lives.

Since Sullivan Plus is based on deep learning, massive amounts of image data are required to improve the accuracy of the service. To accelerate the process of data acquisition, we recently launched a campaign, inviting people to upload their daily photos on social media with a designated hashtag. We are already witnessing an enthusiastic response from the public, and through their participation, Sullivan Plus will evolve into even a better, smarter service that enhances the quality of life for those living with visual impairment.

Assisting blind and low vision people at workplaces

With Tuat, we also developed ‘Sullivan A’ to enhance the work efficiency of people with visual impairments. With Sullivan A, users no longer have to spend time reading the whole document as the app will instantly understand and summarize the document. They can also search for specific parts of the documents based on keywords, and even send emails and make phone calls by scanning business cards with their smartphones.

By enhancing work productivity, Sullivan A is expected to help blind and low vision people to actively participate in economic activities. Kim Hyun-joo, a blind teacher at Daegu Kwangmyung School, said, “I’m delighted that Sullivan A is helping the visually impaired to work with greater convenience. Currently, there are not many visually impaired people working in office jobs, but I believe that Sullivan A will create more opportunities for them.”

Recognized for improving the accessibility of blind and low vision people, Sullivan A received CES 2023 Innovation Awards.