Sign Language Avatars: The German Gold Rush to Undercut Flesh And Blood Interpreters
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The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) almost immediately saw several startups claiming to have solved the ongoing issue of sign language avatars not being good enough. Sign language avatars are essentially toolkits that more or less aim to translate spoken or written language into signed languages by ways of animated computer models looking like low effort Pixar style animated characters. These have been plagued with the “uncanny valley” effect, the phenomenon where computer animations are almost lifelike but to the human eye still look immediately “off”. This means that sign language avatars as a replacement for human translations are by and large mostly useless because they need almost as much work or cost as much as human translation. The fall of 2023 saw a company in Germany make a big splash in the media by selling sign language avatar kits to municipalities nationwide, and media reporting that AI could be used to make texts accessible. The very questionable result was rightly scolded by a local Deaf initiative. At the same time, the National Association of the Deaf, the DGB, announced that it recommended explicitly against the use of avatars because the technology is not yet mature enough. Interestingly enough, the DGB spokesperson was involved with one of the Deaf enterprises that were partnered with the avatar producing (hearing-led) company. Our research also uncovered that there are potentially millions to be made by selling this relatively “low effort”, questionable solution to municipalities across the nation since German law requires public institutions to have sign language accessibility baked into their websites. The subject matter is complex, and we tried our best to condense it in this summary paragraph. For further details, continue to read the whole original article that goes in-depth, covering the issue of the avatar/AI gold rush from a German perspective. We hope you enjoy this experiment to bring complex investigative journalism to the Deaf communities.