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Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

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Re: Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

#81
post #79

What are the privacy/security issues with this? Does this mean every conversation a person wearing these has (or that occurs within earshot) is being collected and harvested by someone? Will the AR be used to insert ads into people's conversations or plaster images of ads all over the place? Will certain words or phrases be automatically censored? This is cool tech, that could be used to help people, but it comes wit…

I don't see how this is inherently worse than mobile phones, which are carried by everyone in the developed world all the time.

The likelihood that what you say "in person" is recorded and stored by someone easily subpoenaed increases quite a bit. While mobile apps might record and upload without the owner of the phone knowing, the odds seem low; this changes the situation significantly.

Re: Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

#82

What are the privacy/security issues with this? Does this mean every conversation a person wearing these has (or that occurs within earshot) is being collected and harvested by someone? Will the AR be used to insert ads into people's conversations or plaster images of ads all over the place? Will certain words or phrases be automatically censored? This is cool tech, that could be used to help people, but it comes wit…

It's not that easy to pick up every speech utterance in a wide range and separate it by speaker. The further away the sound is, the less intelligible it is. An artificial non-directional microphone is unlikely to pick up with the same clarity or distance as with your own ears. There should not be any privacy concern with having a microphone ear vs a biological ear. If there is a concern the best way to manage it is to not talk about confidential topics with other people in the room.

There won't be any ads, because people would just use their phones instead which don't have ads. Specifically Google Live Transcribe, Otter and the like. Those require a data connection to the network, but there are versions that don't need the network at all. E.g. Chrome's Live Caption option. Eventually as technology becomes more power efficient and miniaturized it won't need to be paired to a phone.

The advantage of glasses is that people find it very distracting seeing a phone scrolling away, my GP stares at the phone instead of me because he is fascinated by it. Sometimes you can't be holding a phone up if something is being worked on. The glasses would also allow for a bit more directionality. It's a promising tool depending on how well it is implemented.

Re: Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

#83
post #27

Thanks for the shout-out! To try and answer your questions: 1) The cocktail party problem is still a WIP. This is a very hard problem to solve. 2) These are not 'viewer' glasses they are 3DOF glasses which support moving and pinning the subtitles in 3D space 3) Whilst we targeted the Deaf and HOF to begin, we see broad applicability beyond this 4) You don't need glasses to test it, just an Android 12+ phone. Download…

Hi there: Some feedback from a sing language interpreter, my wife, as I showed her this. > 4) You don't need glasses to test it, just an Android 12+ phone. This exactly pointed her. Some deaf people will use any dictation software on the phone, and look at the phone when needed. This glasses instead will cover some field of view. Note that view for deaf people is more important and used than for the rest of us. She c…

The advantage of using AR glasses is you can still look at the person, see their facial expressions, the reactions etc without always having to look down at your phone. The glasses aren't very bulky or heavy. We're just providing an option for those that want it. It's a magical experience :)

Re: Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, there are very few Deaf people, so there is no world in which everyone learns ASL just in case they meet a Deaf person. It just doesn't scale, and so what you end up with is isolating them even further. The best approach is to bridge the gap: similar glasses can be used by hearing folks to translate sign language, and it theoretically generalizes to all foreign languages.

Check out that first link about Martha’s Vineyard ;)

Yeah that's what I'm replying to. Most of the country is not like that so ASL is not going to be a shared language, and expecting them to move is not feasible either.

Re: Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

#86
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sign language is a complex language, so something has to learn yet another language. Perhaps made all the more complex as it's spatial and visual instead of verbal or written. Not every deaf person uses sign language and there are many different sign languages in the world. American Sign Language(ASL) is but one of these languages.

> Sign language is a complex language Specifically, sign languages are not visual representations of existing languages (e.g. ASL and English) but completely different languages altogether.

And even then, there are different dialects of ASL.

Re: Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

#87

What are the privacy/security issues with this? Does this mean every conversation a person wearing these has (or that occurs within earshot) is being collected and harvested by someone? Will the AR be used to insert ads into people's conversations or plaster images of ads all over the place? Will certain words or phrases be automatically censored? This is cool tech, that could be used to help people, but it comes wit…

We've taken a privacy-first approach here. All data is only ever stored on the device, owned by the user, inaccessible to us. It's only ever transcribing when a user asks it to and only stored if the user asks it to be. We don't censor anything. We are soon to release purely on-device transcription, but the quality of this is still not as good as the cloud providers offer. The app itself is what powers the glasses, they are just output devices.

Re: Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

#88
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true and something more people should understand that ASL is not a signed version English, but most ASL speakers are pretty much bilingual. They are taught to read English, and most places also encourage learning to speak English, generally with speech-language pathologists, though some in the community are understandably reluctant.

"most" is an interesting choice of word here. It's true. 70% of deaf children learn to read English [1]. But I don't think that's enough to consider it a safe assumption. [1] https://www.handsandvoices.org/articles/education/advocacy/w...

Why isn't it more than 70%? I'm assuming this is in an english language majority language, so everyone that can should want to be able to read english.

Re: Live-caption glasses let deaf people read conversations [video]

#90
post #28

I'm a hearing person and I've spent a summer interning in a 50/50 mixed Deaf and hearing research group. My take is that this is a huge UI improvement for AI speech to text, which a lot of Deaf people are already using to listen to conversations. It seems particularity great because it allows this technology to provide situational awareness while, for example, walking. It's important to remember, though that, for con…

We get this wrong even for hearing people in a lot of situations. Conference calls in particular, the people in the room have a different experience from those on the call. Side conversations in a single room can be disruptive, but over a phone the secondary conversation and the primary can turn into an unintelligible mash.

Hard of hearing people have the same problem in person. We aren't really at a place yet where someone wearing hearing aids still has 3d hearing. So like on a conference call, they can't figure out what's going on when four people are talking at once.

I know a partially deaf kid who prefers socializing on Discord, because of this. Everyone is equal and all conversations have to be 2 people at a time.

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