AI captioning empowers deaf people to better participate at work and beyond.
By Real Leaders
Thibault Duchemin grew up with two deaf parents and a deaf sister, interpreting for them since age 5. He witnessed firsthand the accessibility challenges that isolated and excluded his loved ones from participating in the world around them, and he yearned for a better way.
After a life-changing trip to India and a double master’s in machine learning and AI from Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and the University of California, Berkeley, Duchemin was ready to put his skills and determination to work for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. In 2014 he founded Ava with Skinner Cheng, deaf since age 2, to help create the change they wished to see. Early on, they met with the founders of Google Speech, Siri, and Shazam to learn about where their products fell short.
The Beginning
In 2018, the company merged real-time captioners with AI, reinventing AI-based speech recognition technology, revolutionizing the industry, and changing the structure of professional accessibility. The company pioneered group captioning technology to differentiate multiple voices in a conversation, leading the field and inspiring others to research and develop similar solutions. Ava continues to innovate and advance its speech recognition technology, such as recently adding a feature that allows deaf people to connect on Zoom calls and type their own voice in real time.
Ava has built among the fastest captioning systems for any conversation, letting any individual or organization be fully accessible to those with hearing limitations on ava.me and on its app. Ava’s award-winning accessibility system is used in some of the world’s largest companies, schools, conferences, and museums for events, meetings, and regular communication.
Bringing it home, it’s also used by Duchemin’s family.
“I’m super proud to report that my sister uses Ava every day,” Duchemin says. “She became a lawyer and uses it when she goes to trial.”
Of course, there are challenges to adopting the technology, such as convincing employers who may be resistant to change and an added cost.
Another challenge is that AI poses risks, such as creating deepfakes and applying biases. Ava takes precautions to help mitigate these risks, such as developing real-time differentiation of voices and information.
While AI threatens to replace the jobs of people providing real-time captioning services, he sees the solution in providing training for them to become supersubscribes to handle the trickier conversations and voices that are more difficult for AI to discern.
Ava is always working on its next innovation. “Think of us like tinker innovators in the field of accessibility to bring it further where it was not before and to keep churning new things,” Duchemin says.
Take Action
Duchemin encourages leaders to make these moves to create a more inclusive, accessible workplace.
- Accommodate diverse employees’ needs in technology and communication in the office and remotely.
- Conduct a survey to gather insights on your workforce’s awareness of people with disabilities.
- Hire an accessibility consultant to help the company work toward inclusivity, and address any biases or stigmas that may exist.
- Include people with disabilities in decision-making processes. It’s a win-win that will bring more ideas to the table.
