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Very fair point. I've never seen it used, but SignWriting is already in the Unicode standard[0] (at U+1D800 - U+1DAAF).

I suspect Meta/Facebook doesn't have a lot of content to work off of. I've only been able to find community-generated examples of SignWriting on the official website[1], and none of those seem to be using Unicode characters. MMS is an audio-to-text tool, so it seems unlikely that it can be trivially expanded to take in visual data (pictures of text or video of ASL being performed).

I suspect the process of turning viewed ASL into SignWriting text will be very difficult to automate. I would not be surprised if such a project would either use a different textual encoding or directly translate out to English (which also sounds terribly hard, but these LLM advances recently have surprised me).

[0] https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D800.pdf

[1] https://signwriting.org/#RecentPostingsUS



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