I met up with Ava co-founder and CEO Thibault Duchemin at his place here in San Francisco earlier this week to catch up and talk tech for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Like me, Duchemin is a CODA—child of deaf adults—and is one of only a few I personally know to be fellow CODAs. It’s a unique brotherhood, as Duchemin and I spent the better part of our hour together discussing the shared experiences of living with Deaf parents. CODAs are special insofar as we literally live between two worlds, hearing and deaf, and much of that straddling involves communication. Being a CODA oftentimes means being the live-in, unpaid interpreter for your parent(s), which means you’re the conduit through which your parents access the world. Learning sign language is not only important as a means to communicate at home, but it’s arguably more important because it’s necessary everywhere else too.
As CODAs, it’s easy for people like Duchemin and I to see how and where modern-day technology could have come in really handy decades ago when we still lived at home. The smartphone obviously represents the truest illustration of this, as its communicative capabilities from iMessage to FaceTime and beyond have given people around the world, Deaf or not, the ability to communicate in real-time with unparalleled fidelity. Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPads are popular with the Deaf community for this very reason; FaceTime in particular is a tool with which many Deaf people communicate, especially since Apple expanded the number of people who can participate in group calls.
In an exclusive interview with me recently conducted via videoconference, Duchemin, whose company Ava makes AI-powered captioning software for iOS, Mac, Android, and Windows, said accessibility has come a long way for Deaf people as technology has risen in prominence and ubiquity in the last several years. Prior to that, he said, Deaf people were “really in a far-from-ideal situation” in terms of access to communication, particularly in terms of captioning. As capable as technology has become, Duchemin said it’s important not to treat it as a panacea; it needs to be “focused and disciplined” in order to positively influence the world. Accessibility for disabled people, he added, should be an inalienable right so everyone can use technology to its fullest.
My discussion with Duchemin coincided with the San Francisco-based Ava’s announcement of a “groundbreaking new technology” called Ava Voice. The company describes the technology as giving Deaf and hard-of-hearing people the ability to have two-way conversations between a deaf and hearing person. When combined with Ava Scribe, which enables accurate and affordable real-time captions, Ava Voice allows, as Ava said, to be “literally heard” by transforming text into naturally-sounding voices. This is a notable achievement for Duchemin and Ava, as the technology builds upon and exceeds the FCC’s new rules, set to go into effect in the coming months, that mandate captioning for live video must be “accurate, synchronized, and displayed at a speed that is readable and comprehensible” while organizations also are required to provide text-to-speech functionality for any textual elements. The overarching goal of this regulation is to make communication more accessible and inclusive for people who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing.
Duchemin told me while popular videoconferencing apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams should be commended for supporting captions, it’s been his experience that accuracy and intelligibility oftentimes is lacking. It isn’t possible to call up a professional captioner or interpreter in the middle of a meeting, after all. And it isn’t solely Deaf people either; Duchemin pointed to people who have speech impediments like stuttering or accents, which can be difficult for the AI processor to decipher. Ava was built mainly to service the needs of one community, but the relevancy of the technology extends far beyond deaf individuals. This is true for Duchemin himself, a native Frenchman with a thick accent that can be hard to understand. Ava, Duchemin said, wants to make its own contribution towards making communication easier and more equitable for all. That’s Ava’s modus operandi in a nutshell.
“There’s a lot of excitement right now,” Duchemin said. “We’ll play our role in this field.”
Duchemin was keen to give recognition to who he called a “key member” of the Ava team in Alexandre Bécourt. Bécourt is Ava’s founding engineer and mobile engineering lead who helped shepherd Ava from conception to fruition on iOS. He, Duchemin said, helped bring Ava Voice to life. Duchemin and team are grateful for his contributions.
“Skinner [Cheng, Ava’s co-founder and CTO] and myself have worked alongside in the office for years, and I remember him juggling between all these apps to communicate,” Bécourt said about building Ava Voice in a statement provided to me. “What really helps Deaf people I realize, is to have access to great technology all-in one place, not scattered around. And this technology needs to see the world like they do. Ava Voice will help you choose a voice by describing how they sound, as it won’t assume you can hear like other text-to-speech apps do. Or the feature we have that helps you flash words you typed to attract the attention of a busy waiter. Being very thoughtful in approaching our Ava apps was essential for our team to truly build a companion for our users.”
Looking towards the future, Duchemin hearkened back to the past, telling me the rapidity with which technology advances is again something he could’ve used growing up with his parents. The ever-burgeoning capabilities of artificial intelligence, he said, will allow Ava to commensurately become more capable over time. He can envision a day in the not-too-distant future when an AI interpreter will be able to co-exist in a Zoom call and offer as much fluency and fidelity as the professional but pricey human interpretation services. Technology, especially nowadays with AI, is helping to break so many barriers, but Duchemin reiterated its crucial to remain focused and disciplined on harnessing it for genuine good like democratizing communication.