Family and social life
Ordering food. Making an appointment. Following a conversation at a family dinner. Everyday moments become negotiations, and the result is isolation that compounds over a lifetime.
In beta testing now
Every Deaf person deserves
Every Deaf person deserves
to be understood.
DeafAI is building a Virtual Personal Interpreter: an app that learns how you sign, then speaks for you in real time. No interpreter to book. No notes passed back and forth.
At the doctor's office.
In a job interview.
At the dinner table.
Anywhere you go.
DeafAI, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Every gift is tax deductible.
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Deaf Americans depend on ASL
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Most used language in the US
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Lower employment rate for Deaf workers
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Deaf people worldwide
The problem
The barrier was never Deaf people.
American Sign Language is a complete, rich language. The problem is that almost nobody on the other side of the conversation speaks it, and the cost of that gap lands on Deaf people every single day.
Employment
The Deaf employment rate is 23 percent lower than the hearing rate. For Black Deaf workers it is 40 percent lower. Those who are hired are widely under-employed, held back by meetings they cannot fully join.
Healthcare
Qualified interpreters are scarce, especially in rural areas and in emergencies. Miscommunication in a clinical setting leads to misdiagnosis, medication errors, and measurably worse health outcomes.
Blindness separates us from things, but deafness separates us from people. Helen Keller
The solution
An interpreter that lives in your pocket.
The Virtual Personal Interpreter uses the camera already on your phone. You sign. The app interprets your signing into spoken English and text for the hearing person. They speak back, and the app returns their words to you.
What makes it different is that it does not treat every signer as interchangeable. It learns your signing style, your vocabulary, the signs you actually use, and gets faster and more accurate the more you use it.
See the full technology
Why personalization
No two signers are the same.
Every major technology company has worked on sign language recognition. They all train on generic libraries. That is why the results stall out. DeafAI starts from the same libraries, then adds what no library can hold: you.
Off the shelf
Generic recognition
- × Trained only on standard sign libraries
- × Misreads regional and personal sign variation
- × No knowledge of your name signs or vocabulary
- × Accuracy plateaus, so people stop using it
DeafAI
Personalized interpretation
- ✓ Learns your specific signing style
- ✓ Generates synthetic training data from your signs
- ✓ Tuned for home, school, work, and social settings
- ✓ Accuracy and speed improve the more you use it
Where we are
This is not a concept. It is running.
The app is in beta testing today. Deaf users are training it to interpret fingerspelling and selected phrases right now. What we need to reach a public release is engineering time, and that is what donations buy.
Beta
The app is built and in active testing with Deaf users
200
Deaf testers we are recruiting for feedback cycles
$380K
Full development budget for the current phase
501(c)(3)
Georgia nonprofit, FEIN 33-3594114
Help take DeafAI public.
A working beta already exists. Every dollar from here goes into the engineering that turns it into something any Deaf person can download and use.
DeafAI, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. FEIN 33-3594114. Every gift is tax deductible.