Putting Sign Language AI into Users Hands

Putting Sign Language AI into Users Hands(deepmind.google)

5 points by elil17 9 days ago | 5 comments

There's a huge list of "low hanging fruit" that are at the same time niche enough or low-user enough that no one has taken a stab at it so far. Or, if they did, they were expensive / captive / terrible ux solutions. Goog has the money / aura / willingness to actually do something about it, and put things in people's hands. Really cool stuff. We already have "star trek" technology in CotS phones, it's mind blowing.

elil17 9 days ago |

That is big news if it's actually good enough to use. People have been trying to build sign-to-text and sign-to-speech systems for decades and they've never been usable.

The videos show it translating ASL as it's naturally used; without making the users adapt their signing to English grammar. That's a big leap forward.

palata 9 days ago |

This is quite amazing. I wonder: do people actually use the international sign language? Isn't it like Esperanto?

elil17 9 days ago | |

It's not like Esperanto at all actually. To quote Wikipedia: "There is no consensus on what International Sign is exactly. It may either refer to the way strangers sign with each other when they lack a common sign language, or it can refer to a conventionalized form used by a group of people with regular contact."

Because iconicity (signs that look like what they mean - the sign language equivalent to onomatopoeia in spoken languages) is so common in sign languages, it's much easier for users of different languages to communicate. Something like 30% to 50% of vocabulary in sign languages is iconic, so it's much easier to guess at the meanings of words from someone else's language.

It's like if the delegates showed up to the first UN meeting and tried to communicate like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1vmqc2i/peppa...

Speakers are prioritizing words and grammar they think will be understood by their conversation partners. Then, over time, people started to standardize, and in some cases write down, which words were best used in that context.

palata 8 days ago | | |

Oh that's super interesting, thanks for that!