Teachable AI

Teachable AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that allow end users to personalize the system by providing their own training examples, high-level constraints, or prompts — without requiring programming or machine learning expertise. In the accessibility context, teachable AI is particularly valuable because it gives people with disabilities agency to customize AI applications for their specific needs, addressing the long-tail distribution of user requirements that no pre-built model can fully anticipate. For example, a blind user might teach a teachable object recognizer to identify their personal belongings, or a deaf user might train a personalized sound recognizer for their home environment. The key design challenge is balancing the effort of teaching with the benefit of personalization received.