Abstract
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than hundreds of
million people have some type of visual disability today. Vision
impairment has a personal impact with lifelong consequences because more
than 80\% of our perception, cognition, learning, and
daily activities are mediated through vision. As a result, visually
impaired and blind people stagnate at work and in education due to
inaccessible technologies. In this regard, we present a speech-based
assistive system for visually impaired and blind people to interact with
ChatGPT. The system employs automatic speech recognition (ASR),
text-to-speech (TTS), and a messenger bot (Telegram) to enable a natural
interface to ChatGPT for people with visual disabilities. Our
preliminary experiments showed the feasibility of the proposed system as
an assistive technology. We have made the source code publicly available
at https://github.com/IS2AI/telegram-bot-chatgpt to stimulate the
development of assistive systems for the visually impaired and blind.