Nvidia is partnering with the American Society for Deaf Children and Hello Monday to build an AI platform that will teach American Sign Language (ASL).
“American Sign Language is the third most prevalent language in the United States, but there are vastly fewer AI tools developed with ASL data than data representing the country’s most common languages, English and Spanish,” Nvidia explains. “Nvidia, the American Society for Deaf Children, and creative agency Hello Monday are helping close this gap with Signs, an interactive web platform built to support ASL learning and the development of accessible AI applications.”
Signs is a web app that uses your webcam and backend AI to help users learn ASL for free. And if you know ASL, you can help improve the platform by recording signs and build up its dataset. Nvidia hopes to grow that dataset to over 1,000 signed words and 400,000 video clips, and contributions are validated by fluent ASL users and interpreters to ensure accuracy. It will make the dataset available as a public resource so that anyone can build accessible technologies like AI agents, video conferencing tools, and other apps that need real-time, AI-powered ASL support.
“Most deaf children are born to hearing parents,” American Society for Deaf Children executive director Cheri Dowling says. “Giving family members accessible tools like Signs to start learning ASL early enables them to open an effective communication channel with children as young as six to eight months old. And knowing that professional ASL teachers have validated all the vocabulary on the platform, users can be confident in what they’re learning.”
Nvidia is also working with researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology to see how nuances like slang and regional language variations can be represented in Signs to further enrich its ASL dataset. The company and its partners will release the Signs dataset later in 2025.