AI accessibility empowering ordinary people

Infinite possibilities

A large number of adults in the competition used AI to address unmet needs in real life.

Wang Mengqi, a 32-year-old social entrepreneur with vision impairment, developed the tool ScriptGrid to help those with seeing difficulties better enjoy movies.

"When we provide audio descriptions, or narrate movies for the blind, our biggest concern is that the narration will overlap with the dialogue and the original soundtrack. Not only would that fail to help anyone, but it would cause interference instead," said Wang, who leads an accessibility public service volunteer team.

Working in the accessibility sector for many years, Wang focuses on audio description services for the blind community. Yet, this niche sector has for a long time lacked commercial tools tailored to content creation.

Previously, the creation of audio descriptions relied on human efforts, including timeline management, manuscript organization and proofreading, which are time-consuming, labor-intensive and highly inefficient, he said. It usually takes Wang's volunteer team a month to prepare the audio descriptions for one movie.

About one year ago, Wang turned to AI to begin development of ScriptGrid, which was born in one week.

Continuously updated based on user feedback, the tool supports two-way conversion between spreadsheets and subtitle formats, resolving the issues of format incompatibility and the inability to conduct collaborative reviews.

It also features a unique intelligent timing function for spoken scripts. After importing the full dialogue subtitles from a video, it can automatically identify silent segments and generate a standard timeline and placeholder script. This function can eliminate the need for manual timeline creation, lowering the creative barrier and reducing time costs with improved efficiency.

"I hope that in the future, blind people will be able to walk into any theater instead of having to participate in special charity events to enjoy a movie at their leisure — just like everyone else," said Wang.

Wang Yiting, a 24-year-old strategy product manager at Tencent, tackled parking problems in urban communities. The independent developer's team won a second place prize in the competition with Parking Genie, an AI-driven parking space-sharing solution.

Through surveys and on-site investigations, the team found out that the core issue with urban parking is the mismatch between vehicles in terms of time, space and users.

However, traditional parking apps can only navigate the parking lots, and cannot allocate available parking spaces. With Parking Genie, Wang said she hopes to help build a community that connects car owners, unused parking space providers, and communities seeking to improve governance efficiency.

Yang Peijie, a PhD candidate at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a dog owner for over 10 years, developed PawPilot for pets and took a third-place prize in the competition.

As an avid user of AI tools, Yang spent three months creating his work, which aims to address the challenges of fragmented pet health data and veterinary care management. PawPilot has been well received by his pet-owner friends, and features functions such as pet-health consultations, data tracking, veterinary clinic searches, pet-friendly travel, and guidance for first-time pet owners.

BitBubble, an AI "social desktop pet" created by 25-year-old independent developer Liu Hongtan, won a second place prize. With a "reserved personality" and keen observational skills, the pet addresses the social needs of young people who "don't want high-intensity, real-time social interaction but still hope to stay connected," Liu said.

The product features cross-device visiting, messaging and interaction functions, allowing the desktop pet to help users break the ice. It has completed testing across multiple scenarios, and is available for installation and use.

Looking back on two years of coding, Liu realized the true value of AI lies in helping break down a "vague idea" into a product structure, technical solution, user interface, and finally a working version.

"I'm amazed by this era, where every single person's idea can evolve into a relatively complete product in a short time," said Liu.