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Comment by andrewacove | Hacker News Reader

This is a really interesting situation, certainly not one I'd thought about before. My knee-jerk reaction was "well, this sounds like something you should start a company to solve." (ASL to speech apps?)

I'm rarely the pitch recipient, but I'd be interested to know how people would respond if you carried a video of your pitch on your phone. Sure, you'd have to iterate it a lot, and that's trickier with a video, but it might enable you to deliver the initial message clearly.

The other idea that comes to mind is . . . what about an interpreter? Could you go to events with a friend (or, ideally, a cofounder) who you can communicate with, who can then relay that information effectively?

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I don't really have any close contacts or any friends remotely interested in joining my ambitious pursuits short of we'll try it out when you're done.

I don't know sign language though. That's an interesting idea to have ASL to speech apps but I think it would work strongly if there was gloves with tags so the software could automatically read it.

You weren't born almost completely deaf, were you? (I ask because your writing is so good, and you said you don't know sign language) Can you speak at all? If you can speak, I'd suggest getting two phones (at least one blackberry) and fire up an IPRelay call. Have whoever you want to speak speak into the phone, then you can read the text in close to real time, and speak right back. You could let the operator know that the call is going to be a multi-person call.

I've worked with a bunch of deaf people (i.e. more than 5, most the day). Half of them could read lips, and that helped out a ton. One guy could read lips and approximate speech, although in very limited english, but it was fine communicating with him.

I was brought up to pronounce pretty well although I try to say some new words as I read them. Sadly, I know so many long words but can't say it offline which makes me come across as incompetent in some cases.

The two phones sound like a impressive idea. Has it worked before?

Also where did you work with deaf people?

Sorenson Communications. I wish I picked up more ASL while I was there, but the deaf people I worked with made it almost unnecessary to know ASL because they could read lips so well and we often had interpreters nearby.

Georgia Tech has had an ongoing project for ASL recognition using gloves. They've since upgraded to a Kinect though. Seems to work pretty well. http://kinecthacks.net/american-sign-language-recognition-us...

There is one deaf researcher I know of that is working on ASL recognition. http://research.gallaudet.edu/~cvogler/research/

FWIW, my grad studies were in computer vision but I'm more interested in multimedia and protocols these days.

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