免费色情视频

Kara Technologies: Increasing accessibility for the Deaf

Initiative type:
Start-up
Sector:
Digital Tech; Social Enterprise
Website:
UniServices Contact:

Opportunity

From emergency announcements to online banking, movies to social media, people must navigate huge amounts of information to live a full life. For Deaf people, however, not only can speech be incomprehensible, text also poses challenges for many.

Because most Deaf children are born to hearing parents, many of whom can鈥檛 provide them with adequate daily communication, a significant portion of these children fail to develop essential language skills in early life. This often results in Deaf adults having lower reading abilities than their hearing counterparts.

Expressive sign language avatars

Kara Technologies is a small start-up with a big vision: making the lives of Deaf people as easy as those of hearing people. To do that, it鈥檚 developing digital sign language avatars that will ultimately be able to sign everything Deaf people need or want to know.

鈥淓nglish isn鈥檛 Deaf people鈥檚 native language. It鈥檚 unfair to ask a community to rely on their second language to access vital information.鈥
Grace Covey, Kara Technologies

鈥淓nglish isn鈥檛 Deaf people鈥檚 native language,鈥 says Grace Covey, Kara Technologies鈥 Deaf communications manager and sign language expert. 鈥淚t鈥檚 unfair to ask a community to rely on their second language to access vital information.鈥

The seed for Kara Technologies was planted in 2016, when Arash Tayebi, then a PhD student in electrical engineering at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of 免费色情视频, lost his hearing in one ear and was told he had a 30 percent chance of becoming completely deaf.

As he learned 免费色情视频 Sign Language and got to know the Deaf community, Tayebi had the idea of 鈥榯eaching鈥 digital avatars to sign.

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Arash Tayebi
鈥淲ithout the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and UniServices, we wouldn鈥檛 even exist at all 鈥 they gave us the confidence to do it and helped connect us to the resources we needed.鈥
Arash Tayebi,
Kara Technologies CEO

However, Tayebi discovered that most existing avatars鈥 faces hardly moved. Other avatars had more expressive faces but lacked hands. Both are problems because sign language relies heavily on face and body movements.

Figuring the best way to create impact would be to start a company, Tayebi and some university friends did just that, with Tayebi as CEO. In 2017, the group was the social enterprise winner of the , which enabled it to participate in the incubator programme.

UniServices provided advice and invested in Kara through the University of 免费色情视频 Inventors鈥 Fund. It also helped connect the company with other investors.

鈥淭he support was amazing,鈥 says Tayebi. 鈥淲ithout the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and UniServices, we wouldn鈥檛 even exist at all 鈥 they gave us the confidence to do it and helped connect us to the resources we needed.鈥

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Grace Covey and Arash Tayebi in the motion capture studio

Performance

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Kara Technologies team at the NZ Hi-Tech Awards

Tayebi was recognised in the . In 2022, Kara Technologies was highly commended in the , in the Best Hi-Tech Solution for the Public Good category. The same year, Kara raised $1.3 million in seed funding and was accepted into the Startmate Accelerator in Australia and the Alchemist Accelerator in the United States.

The company has created emergency messages, signed children鈥檚 books, and an avatar to perform alongside Emma Watkins (Emma Memma), a children鈥檚 entertainer and former Wiggles star.

The company鈥檚 vision is that signing avatars become ubiquitous 鈥 not to replace human sign language interpreters but to fill in the gaps, because human interpreters can鈥檛 cover everything.

鈥淭his technology would change Deaf people鈥檚 lives by making it possible for us to participate in everything without struggling,鈥 says Covey.

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