Liam O’Dell

January 27, 2025

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has already revolutionised our interactions with the written and spoken word, but what about the uniquely visual medium of sign language? Liam O’Dell finds out more about ‘SignGPT’, an initiative which plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) to solve the “complex translation problem” with British Sign Language (BSL) and English.

This may sound familiar. A new project involving academics from Surrey, Oxford and University College London’s Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL) is looking to translate BSL into spoken English, and vice versa. Tech – including wearable devices – has long sought to tackle this particular language barrier, producing little success, and a lot of consternation from the Deaf community.

So what’s the main stumbling block which has impacted previous translation technology?

“Fundamentally, people try and solve a problem that they don’t understand, right,” explains Professor Bowden, principal investigator of the SignGPT study. “Time and time again, you have hearing people that come along and they go, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be great if we build a system that would allow all these poor Deaf people to be able to communicate.’ But they don’t really understand what the problem is that they’re trying to solve. They know nothing about BSL or sign.

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Source: https://liamodell.com/