Who We Are
Signpost is a small company started by me, Max, one of my good friends, Jerry, and a longtime software development partner of mine, Rhiley. I came up with the concept in the shower one night during my Senior year of high school. I had an ASL test the next day on one of our ASL 2 units, and I thought, "I feel like someone could cheat on ASL tests if they had some way to understand what was being signed in real time," and that's where this entire idea was born. I hopped onto my computer and wrote the prototype of our machine learning model. It couldn't do gestures at all and was literally just a hold-and-guess model, but it actually worked. Ever since that day, I have been more and more interested in this concept and have gotten others, who have no ASL knowledge at all, to learn using this tool and give me feedback as we go.
Our Mission
When I originally made Signpost, I noticed a gap in how ASL learning was translated to students. Finding an instructor who could sit with you one-on-one was ruining the total productivity of each individual student. There is one teacher for 30-35 students, and traditional practice methods of ASL are not nearly advanced enough to be meaningful practice. I saw firsthand how some students would just not practice at all because they were unsupervised, and I always felt bad for my teacher because there was nothing she could really do about it.
Ever since then, we have been working on a way to bring Signpost into the classroom as a tool for students, educators, and people who just want a platform to learn on. We see so many innovations nowadays that are trying to take Deaf people out of their comfortable environment. We are currently in a world where "AI translation tools" and "Auto-translating gloves" are cool things, sure, but they are costly, and I believe they defeat the point of why the Deaf community is such a strong place. We shouldn't take people out of the Deaf community to accommodate them in a hearing world; we should give people resources to help them better understand the Deaf community.
We are not here to do this for the money, fame, or because we think that someday we are going to exit this company and sell it to some language giant and basically just take away the core principles of why we started this in the first place. We genuinely see a place where a tool like Signpost can empower without overriding the good that the Deaf community has done, and we strive to keep this true.
Stop practicing in the dark.
Signpost watches your hands through your webcam and tells you, in real time, whether your sign is right. Try the free demo, no sign-up needed.
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