LetsTalkSign aims to break down the communication barriers faced by people with hearing & speech disabilities

The difficulties faced by people who are deaf and hard of hearing in communicating with the world around them translates to acute isolation and discrimination. A scenario that LetsTalkSign, developed by Indian start-up DeepVisionTech.AI aims to change. Find out how.

Be it early education or at the workplace, the communication barriers faced by deaf and hard of hearing people are immense. What it translates into is acute isolation at every stage.

Consider this. Of the estimated 20 lakh deaf children in India, only 12 lakh attend basic schooling. Rest either drop out or have no access to education. Those who do attend deaf schools don’t have access to quality education or are denied access to sign language, restricting development.

LetsTalkSign aims to end social isolation faced by deaf

Indian start-up DeepVisionTech.AI aims to change this with LetsTalkSign, an artificial intelligence-powered solution that enables easy two-way communication for people with hearing or speech impairments.

DeepVisionTech.AI Founder-CEO Jayasudan Munsamy started LetsTalkSign as a project to assimilate his understanding of Machine Learning/Deep Learning. As he dug deeper, he was surprised by the lack of affordable solutions for the deaf and hard of hearing community.

I realised how LetsTalkSign can help change lives of millions of hearing impaired and took it upon as a challenge to build it as a solution. Since then I have made good progress – researching on technology choices, building a solution that can be easily used by anyone, making the solution affordable to everyone, optimising the solution for various devices, improving the performance of the solution to make it interpret in real-time on any device and patenting the solution. – Jayasudan Munsamy, Founder-CEO, DeepVisionTech.AI

Two-way communication that offers many firsts

LetsTalkSign enables easy two-way communication between people with hearing or speech impairments using sign language with others who don’t know sign language. Jayasudan says the design takes into account:

• Ease of use and affordability to enable regular use.
• Support of mobile devices across platforms and devices with camera and web browser capabilities.
• Interpretation on the device without cellular network or internet connection.
• Interpretations, real-time and offline.
• Can be scaled and customised to translate any sign language across industries.
• Enables in-person conversation and online multi-user conversations.

“We believe that our patented solution will revolutionise the way people communicate with the hearing and speech impaired community”, adds Jayasudan. Currently his team is focusing on India.

“We are working on a couple of pilot implementations as of now and other functionalities development are work in progress. Our primary target is India and hence LetsTalkSign interprets Indian Sign Language promoted by the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC). Since we use Deep Learning technology, it’s easy to extend to any other sign language”. Talks are on to extend to American Sign Language as well.

LetsTalkSign needs no extra hardware

What makes LetsTalkSign such a unique and complete platform is that it is the first to provide two-way communication without additional hardware like instrumented gloves or gesture-capturing devices, etc to convert sign language to text. There are not many that work on real-time either or support multiple languages.

The initial feedback from the deaf and hard of hearing community has been positive. One user praised the “innovative use of AI”, calling this much needed. Another user praised the easy usage on mobile phones.

Clearly, LetsTalkSign has all the makings of a game changer for the deaf community.

Visit the websites of Let’sTalkSign and DeepVisionTech.AI to know more.

Watch in Sign Language

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