AI Use by DAISY Members 2024 Survey Results
At DAISY we closely follow the latest developments in AI, working with companies to test and provide feedback on some of those initiatives. To help inform our work a few months ago we conducted a short survey of library services around the world about their AI use and interests. This was an informal survey which attracted 31 responses, of which 23 were fully populated and suitable for analysis.
The survey analysis identified a few key themes:
- Interest: Overall, there were high levels of interest in the adoption of AI with over half already using AI within their services and 70% planning to implement the technology in the coming years.
- Application: Interest in AI use covered a wide range of applications including image description, text-to-speech generation, voice creation, content summarisation, and user support.
- Motivation: There was a strong focus on the desire to use AI to enhance accessibility, along with achieving more with limited resources and enhancing the user experience.
- Challenges and Concerns: The cost of AI services and the lack of technical expertise were both identified as potential barriers to adoption, along with data privacy, ethical concerns, and integration challenges.
- Need for Support: Libraries identified an opportunity for DAISY in providing guidance on AI implementation, training, best practices, and potentially even developing or negotiating access to affordable AI-powered tools
Areas of interest were broad, with the potential for AI to benefit many aspects of content conversion, generation and library services, but there were clear areas of peaks of interest around using AI for text-to-speech and to aid image description generation.
Responding library services were very interested in the potential for AI to aid book conversion processes in formats like braille and audio, with the promise of being able to speed up the transcription process, potentially enabling more books to be created in a shorter period of time and expanding the reading options for users.
Since AI is such a rapidly developing technology, the libraries involved in the survey expressed a strong desire for collaboration and knowledge sharing on AI best practices, case studies, and technical insights.
Our thanks to everyone who contributed to this survey. As a result of your feedback DAISY will be hosting a series of workshops and briefing sessions on AI topics in 2025 for the DAISY community to learn together, share insights and investigate new developments. We look forward to sharing further details in the coming months.