Two North Texas high school seniors are proving you don’t have to wait until college to build cutting-edge technology.
Lifelong friends Shiven Velagapudi and Aadi Sanghvi turned their home office into their own artificial intelligence lab and spent months developing a program aimed at improving sign language prediction and understanding. The project is called Hand Wave, and it is an application that supports real-time translation of American Sign Language.
Velagapudi said the idea started outside the classroom.
“This had nothing to do with school at all. We just picked this up for a bit of fun and mainly because we realized this was a problem we wanted to solve in the real world,” Velagapudi said.
Our friends are using machine learning to program ASL letters and phrases. The sign looks like a hand skeleton and is translated through smart glasses with a built-in camera.
“I’m looking at you, you’re signing behind the camera, and you can hear the translation live in your ear,” Sanghvi said.
This idea came from personal experience. Sanghvi has an uncle who speaks ASL, and Velagapudi’s father suddenly lost hearing in one ear. Velagapudi said the technology is aimed at helping more people understand the ASL community.
“Sign language is what brings those communities together, and this is just a technology that helps them understand their communities better,” Velagapudi said.
Sanghvi said he sees the project as a way to bring people closer together.
“I think it promotes unity. I think there’s a lot going on in our world that makes it easy to feel divided, so I think it’s a reminder that we’re more alike than we expect,” Sanghvi said. “I think being able to communicate and share conversations on a human level about our fears, strengths, weaknesses, and dreams is something we need to do.”
With more time and money, the friends believe they could create a prototype that could be used outside of their home offices.
This article was originally reported for broadcast by NBC DFW. AI tools helped transform this story into a digital story, which was reedited by NBC DFW journalists before publication.
