Symbol Creator AI Beta Testing and Prompt Hints

During the last few months the Global Symbols team have been involved in the redesign oof Symbol Creator AI app thanks to a follow-up Microsoft AI for Accessibility grant, collaboration with Sensory App House PiCom and feedback from last years users. A new generation of AI models has meant that the generated symbols can be created more speedily, when compared to our original model and the use of simple text descriptions rather than the complex sentences created in the past seem to produce more acceptable symbols, for example 'a boy playing football' in Jellow symbol style

PiCom collaboration has meant that we have been introduced to Flux. 1 Schnell resulting in several new AI symbol sets providing realistic, cartoon and cute symbols alongside a collection of high contrast and action symbols using a 3D person we have called Sommi. These are all available on the Global Symbols repository and have helped us to learn much more about the process of generating AAC symbols using AI.

By using extra machine learning techniques, it has also been possible to fine-tune our five pre-trained open licenced symbol sets to offer better symbol style matching, so building on last year’s work. The upshot is a new version of Symbol Creator AI with a choice of using the app directly within Board Builder or as a standalone tool to generate new AAC symbols. Both versions are part of the Global Symbols site making it possible to save newly generated symbols directly into communication boards or into a personal library of images. AI generated symbols can also be downloaded as pngs or adapted in Symbol Designer, where other features can be added such as other symbols from the repository to make combined pictographics e.g. 'medicine time' being represented by a clock and tablets or the past tense of a verb with the addition of an arrow.

We are very aware that it is important to manage expectations when it comes to generative AI. AI does not know what precisely we may have in mind when we want to create a symbol. It may produce some really odd images, not in the least like something we have visualised.

So, try to…

1. Use clearly defined visual descriptions (prompts) - Instead of “a man,” try “a man standing face on wearing a t-shirt and trousers.”
   
2. Choose a symbol set style and type in a culture if needed
3. Add additional supporting words like “on a white background” at the end of the sentence if you are getting too many symbols with a complex background.
4. Keep trying to improve your description if you have some failures, but keep them simple
5. Refine your symbols after generation by removing backgrounds, adjusting colours, deleting extraneous objects or adding supporting arrows etc.

You may want a perfect match to a symbol set, but AI can only generate new content by combining existing data and we are aware that there is still more training to be done to the pre-trained symbol sets. We are in a beta phase and hope you will help with any feedback you have time to give us.

So please try the new Symbol Creator AI and make sure you select the stars to let us know whether the outcome was acceptable – personal data is not recorded just the results of your symbol creation.