

Ukrainian Students Develop Gloves That Translate Sign Language Into Speech - casemorton
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/enable-talk-imagine-cup/

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yuvadam
Previously: [http://www.tecca.com/news/2012/01/09/sign-language-glove-
and...](http://www.tecca.com/news/2012/01/09/sign-language-glove-android/)

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Sandman
Hmm, I'm thinking... couldn't Kinect be used for something similar? It could
observe the gestures, and the computer could translate them into spoken
language.

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duaneb
Probably, but I'm guessing it's more convenient (and easier) to use gloves. Do
you really want to haul a Kinect everywhere you might need someone to talk to
you?

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Sandman
No, of course not :). I was thinking more along the lines of a deaf-mute
person being able to give a presentation or hold a lecture for people that do
not understand sign language.

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arthurb2
Very cool. Unfortunately, it looks bulky.

Disney's Touche demonstrated how the capacitive profile across frequencies
could detect hand gestures. Ideally a simple wristband, coupled with a strong
predictive model could do the same thing.

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zachrose
It seems the hard part about this would be mapping kinematics to sign
language, hopefully this is decoupled from actually capturing the positions
and motions.

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dsrguru
Even harder is translating from the sign language to a spoken language.
Machine translation is a very much unsolved problem, and sign languages are no
more similar grammatically to spoken languages than spoken languages are to
spoken languages.

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electromagnetic
Even worse a deaf person can't _hear_ a typo when they say fuck pudding
instead of fig pudding.

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morsch
This is a fun thing to think about.

Typos: various effects caused by the interface used to write down language
(so, broadly comparable to ink blotches), _genuis_ , _betwween_ , [2]

Mis-spelling: caused by spelling a word different from a standard[0], _whole →
hole_

Mis-speaking/hearings: caused by not producing or processing a word according
to standard, or commonly due to losses in transmission, _cogenital defect →
<traffic noise>genital defect_ (not sure why that was the first thing I came
up with, but I'm sticking with it)

Mis-understandings in ASL: I assume these happen when the movement for a
certain sign is similar enough that it can be performed or read improperly. I
guess ASL was designed/evolved in a way that minimizes this, e.g. by
maximizing the contrast for for common neighbours (otherwise efficiency will
drive in the other direction).

What's fun about this is that these three classes of errors are almost direct
analogues in their respective domains, but they probably lead to very
different kinds of errors. Typos are basically arbitrary, but "comprehensible"
if you know QWERTY. Mis-spelling and mis-hearings both result from the
deviation from a standard or from transmission losses[1], and are often easily
comprehensible. I assume the same is true for mis-understandings in ASL for
people who know ASL -- but the character of being comprehensible gets lost in
translation.

YouTube sometimes offers the combination of speech recognition _plus_ machine
translation. That's a close equivalent to machine translating sign language:
audio/video recognition followed by machine translation. I don't think I have
_ever_ seen it work on a YouTube video, not even close. And I'm guessing ASL
translation is more difficult: transcribing audio is probably easier than
recognizing signs, and for audio there is an obvious target domain for
transcription (ie. written English/phonetic transcription); whereas I'm not
sure if there is any standard way to transcribe ASL, is there a "written ASL"?
Come to think of it, there has to be, at least for "meta" tasks like dicussing
or _teaching_ ASL in printed form.

... okay so what was I going to do half an hour ago?

[0] but often in line with intuitive phonetic rules; you might go as far as
calling standard English spelling another unrelated scheme ;)

[1] arguably _betwween_ and _genuis_ are also transmission losses; a more
extreme example for interface transmission losses (same source and target,
different interface) are showcased on pages like damn you autocorrect

[2] <http://bash.org/?5300>

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goggles99
As an ASL user I can tell you that there are so many similar signs and body
language that are used, only a couple hundred (very distinct) signs will be
available to the users of these gloves (just like those before them). The idea
I typed in my other comment would allow mutes to have unlimited conversations
with complete strangers.

These gloves are crap so stop making stupid excuses. ASL is only good for
communication between ASL users (few and far between). Every person signs
differently and some $25 gloves will never be able to interpret all the signs
and body language an ASL user uses (Thus the limitation of 200-250 words). Get
real. Sorry for the harsh tone, but how about some real innovation.

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josephcooney
This sounds incredibly harsh. In a world filled with people building
"facebook, but for dogs" and the like, it seems very harsh indeed to be
slamming some students for trying to build something in this space. I think
even just building something like this at the price-point that they have is
pretty cool. Even if this doesn't solve all the world's problems for ASL users
it might be an evolutionary stepping stone towards something more useful.

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goggles99
I am always a critic but seriously why??? This may be useful for young
children I suppose (who cannot read/spell yet), but typing is way faster than
signing. So why not just have a custom formed mini half keyboard attached on
each hip? The expense would be miniscule compared to this, the accuracy would
be much better and the thing could probably be on the market in 4 months.

These gloves will probably break or need maintenance every 2 months, They will
need constant replacing for growing users or users who gain weight, users will
not be able to work at any jobs in the food industry (or many other industries
for that matter)

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electromagnetic
Uh, because deaf people can't hear it.

Using keyboards to voice speak would essentially make all deaf people mute to
each other. Using gloves mean people who speak can be integrated into a deaf
community.

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goggles99
Given the choice would you rather be integrated into a deaf community or the
rest of the world? Also, nothing will stop ASL users from signing to other ASL
users. How would the keyboard idea stop this?

As an alternative, they could always have an e-ink display that the words can
be projected onto.

There are only 500k ASL users in the entire world. Deaf people are not that
common. They don't interact with each other that much in the real world.

This would never work anyway. As an ASL user I can tell you that there are so
many similar signs and body language that are used, only a couple hundred
words will be available to the users of these gloves (just like those before
them). The keyboard thing would allow mutes to have unlimited conversations
with complete strangers.

Would you rather be able to have unlimited conversation with anyone or only be
able to speak a few words (just enough to get by) but be able to speak with an
occasional mute. These gloves are crap so stop making stupid excuses. ASL is
only good for communication between ASL users (few and far between). Every
person signs differently and some $25 gloves will never be able to interpret
all the signs and body language an ASL user uses (Thus the limitation of
200-250 words)

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dr1337
The question really is whether the signing deaf community want to be
integrated with rest of the world.

An interesting but often forgotten part of the development of the Cochlear
Implant was the stiff opposition by the signing deaf community that considered
the implantation of deaf children as a form of 'genocide'.

It's actually still an active topic in the Bioethics field.
[http://www.neiu.edu/~gmoreno1/Special_Education__Courses_wit...](http://www.neiu.edu/~gmoreno1/Special_Education__Courses_with_Dr._Moreno/Module_Nine_files/ActivitySix.pdf)

