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Adrien Montcoudiol
@adrienm · Mangrove cofounder
I met Thibault 3 years ago. He was just getting started with his vision of making communications between deaf & hearing people easier. The 1st project was a glove that would translate gestures into text, and today there's this app that can litterally change the life of 400 million deaf & hard-of-hearing people in the world 🙌
His story is incredible - he comes from a Deaf family - and I'd say this is a product that has been 25 years in the making.
Super excited to see them got this far. Would love @t_duchemin to explain his vision for this really unique product ;)
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Thibault Duchemin
@t_duchemin · CEO @AvaScribe - Beyond barriers
Thanks @adrienm for hunting us - this is one of these special moments we've been really looking forward to!
Hey guys!
Ava is an unusual product, and we're humbled to be here.
We just released the 1.0 on the Appstore and Playstore, and we'd love to get feedback & thoughts from all the community - it's our first time here (hi 👋!).
I grew up the only hearing person in a Deaf family.
When you get to be in the middle of these 2 worlds, you see a ton of issues.
We started Ava to solve what we believe to be the most essential problem today for 400M deaf & hard-of-hearing people: understanding and participating to group conversations.
Lunch, business meetings, hanging out with friends can become a nightmare to follow when you only rely on lip-reading. Only other solutions involve a professional interpreter/captioner and cost $100/hour. Talk about an expensive coffee meeting 👀.
Ava aims to make the crazy idea of a 24/7 accessibility to conversations, possible.
Ava connects the smartphones of a group of people who downloaded the app, and turns them into a smart microphone system. With some speech recognition & speaker identification magic✨, Ava can then show who says what in less than a second to the deaf person.
We use it everyday for meetings, standups, lunches. We have to: our cofounder & CTO is himself deaf.
But because it just needs smartphones, Ava is flexible, simple, and works in many other situations.
The most interesting thing was to realize the range of situations our early users decided to use Ava for and that we hadn't predicted.
Stargazing with friends because reading lips in the dark is impossible, communicating from the other ends of a house, understanding their doctor, captioning a parents/students meeting... And sometimes they even stretched to its extreme 😁 :)
While Ava isn't always getting what people say right, it's a definite leap from no accessibility at all. And it's just the beginning: Ava gets smarter as time goes, learning to distinguish your voice better everyday 🤓.
We're excited to share the 1.0 to the world today, and to announce a $1.8M seed round, led by visionary investors who support us in this vision of a truly 24/7 accessible world.
Our wish? To make Thanksgiving dinners actually great again for 15M deaf & hard-of-hearing Americans this year.
Learn more about it here: https://medium.com/@AvaScribe/in...
If you know a deaf/hard-of-hearing person, pass it around please: this little app might actually change the life of someone!
We'd love to hear what you think of Ava - we'll be here all day!
Cheers,
Thibault & the Ava Team
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Monica Mueller
@monzimuel
@t_duchemin Congrats on the launch! Can't wait to hear about the impact you'll have.
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Anatoly Sharifulin
@sharifulin · CEO & Co-Founder at AppFollow.io
@t_duchemin good job, I'll test your app
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Matthew Boogaard
@boogsau · Director
@t_duchemin @adrienm @avascribe It's really refreshing to see someone in the tech world make a product to solve such a huge social problem. Great work!
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Greg Ellis
@greg_ellis · Owner, EllisApps Inc.
@t_duchemin This is so very awesome! I had a dream of building something like this 15 years ago when the tech didn't exist to make it happen! So great to see you make this a reality! Congrats!
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