Putting sign language AI into users’ hands

Automated excerpt

August 12, 2026 ModelsGoogle DeepMind Sign Language TeamIntroducing sign-language-to-text (SL2T), our breakthrough model powering new sign language features for Deaf and hard of hearing users. AI's ability to process spoken languages has advanced rapidly over recent decades, enabling automatic translation, dictation, and conversational interfaces that feel effortless to hearing users. Despite this opportunity for positive social impact, progress in sign language AI has been slow — both because building AI for sign languages presents complex challenges and because widespread misconceptions exist about how the languages themselves work. Compared to spoken language transcription, sign language translation presents two core challenges.

Selected automatically from source text; not independently written or fact-checked. Read the original for full context.