DeepMind just released SL2T, sign language-to-text model, deaf users can now sign into their phones instead of typing, developed with heavy input from the Deaf community

Deaf users can now sign into their phones instead of typing. This feels like one of those quiet but huge accessibility + AI milestones. The model reads simultaneous hand, body, and facial movements and turns them into English text in real time. In the blog post linked below they explain how they made it work for practical situations too, like one-handed signing while holding the phone. Pose tracking happens on-device for privacy, and the actual translation runs on the server. DeepMind says it’s state-of-the-art on academic benchmarks and was developed with heavy input from the Deaf community. They’re planning to expand it to more languages next. Source: https://deepmind.google/blog/putting-sign-language-ai-into-users-hands/
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