Thanks @adrienm for hunting us - this is one of these special moments we've been really looking forward to! Hey guys! Ava is an unusual product, and we're humbled to be here. We just released the 1.0 on the Appstore and Playstore, and we'd love to get feedback & thoughts from all the community - it's our first time here (hi 👋!). I grew up the only hearing person in a Deaf family. When you get to be in the middle of these 2 worlds, you see a ton of issues. We started Ava to solve what we believe to be the most essential problem today for 400M deaf & hard-of-hearing people: understanding and participating to group conversations. Lunch, business meetings, hanging out with friends can become a nightmare to follow when you only rely on lip-reading. Only other solutions involve a professional interpreter/captioner and cost $100/hour. Talk about an expensive coffee meeting 👀. Ava aims to make the crazy idea of a 24/7 accessibility to conversations, possible. Ava connects the smartphones of a group of people who downloaded the app, and turns them into a smart microphone system. With some speech recognition & speaker identification magic✨, Ava can then show who says what in less than a second to the deaf person. We use it everyday for meetings, standups, lunches. We have to: our cofounder & CTO is himself deaf. But because it just needs smartphones, Ava is flexible, simple, and works in many other situations. The most interesting thing was to realize the range of situations our early users decided to use Ava for and that we hadn't predicted. Stargazing with friends because reading lips in the dark is impossible, communicating from the other ends of a house, understanding their doctor, captioning a parents/students meeting... And sometimes they even stretched to its extreme 😁 :) While Ava isn't always getting what people say right, it's a definite leap from no accessibility at all. And it's just the beginning: Ava gets smarter as time goes, learning to distinguish your voice better everyday 🤓. We're excited to share the 1.0 to the world today, and to announce a $1.8M seed round, led by visionary investors who support us in this vision of a truly 24/7 accessible world. Our wish? To make Thanksgiving dinners actually great again for 15M deaf & hard-of-hearing Americans this year. Learn more about it here: https://medium.com/@AvaScribe/in... If you know a deaf/hard-of-hearing person, pass it around please: this little app might actually change the life of someone! We'd love to hear what you think of Ava - we'll be here all day! Cheers, Thibault & the Ava Team

@t_duchemin @adrienm @avascribe It's really refreshing to see someone in the tech world make a product to solve such a huge social problem. Great work!

@t_duchemin This is so very awesome! I had a dream of building something like this 15 years ago when the tech didn't exist to make it happen! So great to see you make this a reality! Congrats!

@cecimetropolis great question! first we had to learn how to communicate super effectively with about 40% of our early users, who were Deaf: we learnt ASL - it was easier for me than for Pieter, who self-taught in 3 months from scratch :) we tend to have a few key principles we believe in, pick a few very important features we want to build, and try to really focus on nailing the experience. key principles: 1. We go for distributed: because our system is made of everyone's devices, it forces us to want to design the most seamless way of connecting everyone with this constraint. For example, we have no account creation if you're hearing and join the first conversation, or that it takes a tap to connect 2 people on Ava already 2. Designing for very non-tech savvy people: there's all ages, deafness being sort of randomly distributed. We always have them in mind 3. Focus on the core functionality Regarding the testing, we made a Slack community with deaf/hard-of-hearing users (so tech-savvy feedback) and kept testing also face to face with normal users, look at their behavior, etc. We don't have a lot of features right now, but they should work well. For example, saving transcripts isn't something we do. We could, but what matters right now is to nail the actual following of the conversation :) Hope this helps!

@jon_lay it's been a true honor to build Ava and get your feedback all the way. You & @wearehanno are also super inspiring us to build a great culture every day 😉

@clemenslm Thanks for the question! We're already available in a few English-speaking countries (AUS, UK, CA, South Africa). The availability is limited by the different languages the speech recognition system supports. The more users in a country, the better. Our wish? To have something ready for Christmas time in some countries where we're working with communities already, depending on bandwidth & how today goes ✨

@adamscochran very much aware of it! let's say the mobile version is the first brick of the system . would love to discuss more about it - we have a few ideas around this.

thank you @cyrilpaglino for the #CODA ❤️!

thanks so much @ysharb ! There's so much more that awaits, but now is the time to launch it!

@eva_maria_zoll looking forward to more us vs. the world rock'n'roll moments at HLAA conferences. Happy to reinvent hearing tech with you guys!

@wilhempujar Can't help but love your bluntness! We're trying our best to not get lost in the maze.

@damienromito Thanks for the kind words!!

@alexandrejais thanks a lot! so many other compelling uses still to hunt for :)

@tao_tristan Thanks! I want to take the opportunity to mention our co-founder, and CTO, Skinner, who is rarely in the foreground, but is the most incredible developer! Since Skinner is also deaf, he is the very first user of Ava!

@ravsydney It's been an amazing journey for us. We're learning a lot every day! While building Ava, we've gotten to understand the challenges, but also the beauties of deaf and hard of hearing cultures. In the end of the day, we're all the same human beings, and our 'different abilities' should not impact our social and professional opportunities. It is easy to take our every day for granted, and forget that we all have to make an effort together for equal access. Thanks a lot for recognizing this, and for your kind words!

@jess3 just a bit of patience :)

@t_duchemin 🔜 Live video stream subtitles?

@johannes_koeppel thanks! happy to see Alex's fantastic work pay off here! You should try with multiple phones connected if you can, see how it holds on & detects the speaker!