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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

This app is cool and useful, but a major piece of the puzzle is missing.

Communication between a Deaf person and a hearing person is a two-way street, and this tool really only addresses one of those streets.

The tool transcribes the audible speech of the hearing person, allowing the Deaf person to read the transcription.

But if the Deaf person wants to sign a response, they're out of luck. Instead, they need to type their response on the device.

That's OK, but in a "this'll make do in a pinch" kind of way. The ideal is that both the Deaf person and the Hearing person are able to communicate without typing.

There is some pretty cool research around signing-to-text translation -- Matt Huenerfauth https://huenerfauth.ist.rit.edu is doing some really interesting stuff, for example -- but as far as I know it's not ready for prime time.

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As a deaf person, I use https://www.ava.me/ most of the time. It allows me to host a group conversation and have speakers labeled if everyone else uses the app but that's a chore to set up sometimes. It's also quite pricey at $30 per month and some months I use it for less than a hour. It can voice what you type if you want, but I normally voice for myself. I also used to use Keep Notes & the 'mic' icon in a pinch, but that would turn itself off if it didn't pick up any speech in some time.

>Communication between a Deaf person and a hearing person is a two-way street, and this tool really only addresses one of those streets.

Could have not said it better myself.

Repairing one lane of a two way street is still useful. :)

> This app is cool and useful, but a major piece of the puzzle is missing

While I agree pieces are missing when sign communication is needed, just this piece can still life changing for the hard of hearing (who vastly outnumber the deaf). This is for my mother in-law who stopped going to group lunches because she felt so left out, even with hearing aids. If this app works as advertised, there are going to be tablets mounted on the walls running it. And maybe a phone adapter.

There is a keyboard button on the toolbar (portrait mode). When you press it, a keyboard shows up so that the user can communicate back to the speaker.

I read about it and tried it out, and I couldn't figure out how to use it. After typing my text, I kept looking for the button to trigger text to speech.

But, it just dawned on me that the idea is to type something and then show it to the other person. Which works, it just wasn't what I was expecting.

Ah yes. Speech to text would be cool, but I guess the speech would get heard by the app again.

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