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Ava — Making conversations accessible for the deaf
Ava empowers 400m deaf & hard-of-hearing people to 24/7 accessible conversations with their hearing peers.
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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!
I'm following Thibault's project since we met in Silicon Valley 3 years ago and I'm super excited to see Ava live on ProductHunt today. His story and the Ava's mission is just great inspiration for all of us, with a product aiming to make life of people sometimes forgotten by our societies, 100 times easier. Kudos guys, can't wait to see the next steps!
I've been testing the beta for a while now, totally love the idea, this is huge help for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
I love this! I grew up with a sibling that is legally deaf, and talking in groups was always a problem. This seems like a really great idea to break down that barrier and make all conversations accessible!
Beautiful mission.
I've first heard about AVA and Thibaut last year, when my deaf Mum told me about it. She was friends of Thibault's Mum. I can thanks Thibault and his team enough for working on this issue that make life easier for 400M people, my mum included. This project needs support and visibility.
Don't hesitate to spread the word !!!! Wish you the best guys.
This app looks really incredible! And the video does a great job of showing the benefits. Great job!
Any plans or timeline to bring this to app stores outside of the US?
@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 ✨
This is awesome! Accessibility-UX matters. Reminds me of Be My Eyes (http://www.bemyeyes.org/)
Question: why is it important to have everyone download and opt-into the conversation? I bet it would improve quality in a crowded room / dinner table. But what about those ad hoc moments or when you're in a new group -- can you use voice-to-text from a single device and separate the different speakers algorithmically?
@hameto_ we love BeMyEyes too! that's exactly it for us as well: how using social dynamics in place to solve a problem together (our logo "&" reflects this thoughts of shared action).
Great question re: this important use case of a "networking" moment. One of the answers is that you'd diminish the accuracy by behaviorally putting the microphones too far from the speakers. So it's not that much the identification who is really the issue here.
The trade-off is: keeping accuracy at a high level or asking to the rest of the group to download an app. For now, Ava isn't optimal in these situations, but we have a few ideas we'll pursue on (& maybe come back here for!)
Great execution on a real problem. A team of passionate technologists putting their talent and heart at work to make people's life better. Congrats to Thibault and the Ava team.
@mattbrian Thanks for your questions. The app requires a certain version of the Android operating system on your phone. It seems that your Moto G4 Plus is not updated enough. You can try doing a software update, otherwise I'm afraid it won't work for that device. Right now it's not available in Brazil yet. Feel free to leave your contact information behind on our website (www.ava.me), so that we can keep you posted on any updates. Thanks again!
@pieter_doevendans @mattbrian please send us an email at team@ava.me, we'll ping you when we have dates for Brazil. Obrigado!
It's not working for me right now (Germany)but I've experienced a demo a while ago. Even back then I was amazed by the product, the tech and the team I was so fortunate to meet! I can only imagine how much better it is now. Great work guys! Keep it up 😁👏😘
@gknook Hey Guido, indeed, we're not available in Germany, but only English-speaking countries for now. Happy about it because our servers are being hit like crazy 😅
We'll give a timeline a bit later to open for the other countries.
Might also be worth thanking your pre-investor backers @t_duchemin 🐸 some of us handed over $500 or more before there was an alpha.
I'm hard-of-hearing and I've been lucky enough to back this product right from the start with their IndieGoGo and help out the Ava team with some little design things here and there. It has come a long, long way since that initial alpha release!
I'm so excited about where Ava can potentially go in the next few years as their team gets a little bit bigger (they're hunting for some great devs and data scientists) and their AI starts to get better and better.
If you do give the app a go, my 1 tip would be to try it more than once. It can sometimes be a little scrappy when dealing with a strange accent or picking up your own voice, but I've been super impressed at how it self-improves after a couple of calls.
For me, this is such a HUGE, huge thing, that I really hope all the guys manage to make this a big success. They've put an insane amount of work into the product for years and they totally deserve to make it happen. I know there's a ton of people in the Deaf community who'll find this absolutely life-changing if it manages to take off.
@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 😉
Siri - Used 10 minutes a year max
Ava - Used 10 minutes a day at least
Any Data scientists looking for large data samples? :)
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