Facebook has been crashing quite a lot lately and the image outage earlier this month was the most recent incident.
During the outage, many iOS and Web Facebook users consequently discovered how the Social Networking platform’s AI tags their pictures. When the uploaded images were browsed, instead of actual pictures, a text was shown instead, describing what can be found in the picture. For example, “image may contain: tree” or "X number of people indoor". The same approach is also followed on Instagram.
In addition to describing the details in the photos, Facebook’s image recognition AI can also help in suggesting the person in the image.
This is how Facebook utilizes machine learning to “read” pictures and has been doing so for more than 3 years now.
Now that many people are aware of the alternate text that can replace the photos when needed, it raises a question i.e. why has it not been made available for Android yet?
Luckily, we won’t need to wait for someone to answer that question as according to renowned app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook is finally making the alternate text editing available for Android.
For what it’s worth, Twitter has also taken notice of the importance of this feature and is working on rolling out an alternate text editor of its own for the images uploaded on the platform.
It remains to be seen when the Facebook plans on implementing the alt text editing option for its Android version. However, considering the news that arrangements for porting the feature are already under way, it shouldn’t take long now.
Read next: Messenger and Facebook rank the highest in worldwide app downloads for Q2 2019
During the outage, many iOS and Web Facebook users consequently discovered how the Social Networking platform’s AI tags their pictures. When the uploaded images were browsed, instead of actual pictures, a text was shown instead, describing what can be found in the picture. For example, “image may contain: tree” or "X number of people indoor". The same approach is also followed on Instagram.
In addition to describing the details in the photos, Facebook’s image recognition AI can also help in suggesting the person in the image.
This is how Facebook utilizes machine learning to “read” pictures and has been doing so for more than 3 years now.
Now that many people are aware of the alternate text that can replace the photos when needed, it raises a question i.e. why has it not been made available for Android yet?
Luckily, we won’t need to wait for someone to answer that question as according to renowned app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook is finally making the alternate text editing available for Android.
Facebook will finally ship alt-text editing for Android after it being available for web and iOS pic.twitter.com/UBdGcGA0rq— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) July 12, 2019
For what it’s worth, Twitter has also taken notice of the importance of this feature and is working on rolling out an alternate text editor of its own for the images uploaded on the platform.
It remains to be seen when the Facebook plans on implementing the alt text editing option for its Android version. However, considering the news that arrangements for porting the feature are already under way, it shouldn’t take long now.
Read next: Messenger and Facebook rank the highest in worldwide app downloads for Q2 2019
