I’m an avid fan of the Webby Awards, which celebrate innovative sites, apps and tech tools. The Webbys also created a whole other award platform for those tools, brands, sites and initiatives dedicated to social impact.
Here are some of my favorite nominees for the Anthem Awards.
(P.S. — I originally included a tool called Rescue Writer in this list. Rescue Writer was supposed to help animal shelters create fun animal bios to attract attention from potential adopters. But the tool didn’t really work, so I made my own! You gotta see this.)
Quick Links
Bringing Roadside Images to Life
I. Love. This. App.
Soaking up the scenes through your car window is something those of us with unimpaired vision take for granted. Scenic Audio uses AI to narrate the real-time scenes for the vision impaired. It uses info such as the weather, time of day, season and more to create a narrative about the scenes, nature, landmarks and more that pass by when someone is using the app.
Sadly, it looks like it’s so new it’s not in the app stores yet. I wrote to them to find out more, and they said, “Hi, Beth- Our Beta testing has paused and we will share news when we can. Thank you so much for your interest!”
In the meantime, use the demo to get a feel for how cool it is. I entered the address of one of the many places I lived as a kid.
ANOTHER NOTE: This worked last night in Chrome on the plane, and this morning it gave me errors. But it worked on Safari, so I think it’s a Chrome issue. Sigh. Dang technology. I told them about the error as well.
And watch the video for an overview.
Empowering Regular People to Understand New Law Decisions
My husband is a lawyer, and I think he’s gonna love this.
Descrybe.ai aggregates judicial opinions to let anyone do their own research for legal issues. Lawyers often pay dearly for tools such as LexisNexis or rely on Google Scholar, which is free for everyone. But these tools still require reading and parsing and lots of work.
Descrybe provides AI summaries to help the average person get an overview of a case without having to understand legalese — and it offers the info in Spanish and English.
Raising Awareness for Dangers for Teens
Ok, this one really makes me uncomfortable, but it does an important job.
No Escape Room takes people through a simulation of a child predator trying to engage with a child online. The tool was created for parents to help identify the ways that predators seek out and manipulate kids online.
Preparing Aspiring Entrepreneurs for Success
One of my attendees told me that she and her husband love playing Venture Valley, a multiplayer business-building role-playing game that introduces young people (and older ones!) to the challenges and victories of building their own businesses. The app, created by a financial literacy non-profit, is not only free to download, it’s also ad-free, in-app-purchase-free, data-stealing-free and fun to play.
Contributing Your Voice to Digital Speech Database
Hmmm. I really have mixed feelings about Common Voice, an open-source database of real voices that developers can use for speech generation tools.
On one hand, do we want to give our own voices away to train digital voice tools?
I mean, I know mine is out there already and is a pretty generic American English female voice. But it makes me feel oogy to proactively add it to a training database.
But on the other hand, the aim of the project is not to collect run-of-the-mill voices like mine. It’s to diversify the synthetic voices that are usually based on run-of-the-mill voices like mine. Mozilla, a pioneer in the internet browser space, wants to add a rainbow of voices to the databases that developers use so that people with accents, people with speech impediments and people with socially diverse voices can literally be a part of the conversations we hear on digitally synthesized soundtracks.
You can listen to other voices and validate the entries or add your own voice in a few seconds. It’s easy and intriguing, but I still feel kinda weird.
