DeepMind's newest model allows Pixel 11 devices to transcribe sign language into text - Engadget

The tool will come to other devices in the future. Smartphones have long offered voice-to-text transcription, but the same can't be said for sign-language-to-text. That's changing today with the launch of the Pixel 11 family, which marks the debut of DeepMind's new sign-language-to-text (SL2T) model. Google has embedded the model inside of Gboard and Live Transcribe, where it will allow deaf and hard of hearing users to sign to their phone anywhere where they would have normally typed in the past. In practice, that will give those users a faster, more natural way to search the web, write messages and converse with Google's Gemini chatbot. "There is great diversity among deaf people in terms of their level of proficiency in signing, speaking, reading, and writing, so it is important to support access in all modalities," says DeepMind. "Deaf people can benefit from sign language processing in the same way that hearing people benefit from spoken language processing, plus the technology opens new possibilities for bridging the communication gap between Deaf and hearing communities." DeepMind trained SL2T on more than 100,000 hours of multilingual sign language data, with approximately