The intelligent system was designed with young children in mind, and is being developed in conjunction with young users with hearing and speech impediments. Hardware embedded inside the glove reads the user’s finger movements, and compares these to an internal database based on American Sign Language.
The mobile app then translates this to speech immediately – and users can set the gender, pitch, tempo and delay of the voice that represents them.
Designed with two of his nieces in mind, Allela is learning sign-language himself in order to understand the challenges that the machine learning algorithm is going to face as it develops. Sign-IO, which stands for Sign-Input-Output, is currently being tested by children as young as five, with the hope that the next iteration will be ready as a gift for his nieces’ sixth birthday.
