SIGN LANGUAGE INTO SPEECH! TIMELESS BLACK EXCELLENCE: ROY ALLELA

• ROY ALLELA
• Software engineer and Intel programmer manager Roy Allela is the founder and lead engineer for Sign-IO, a glove that translates sign language to speech.
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• Roy Allela’s six-year-old niece was born deaf and found it extremely difficult to communicate with her family, none of whom knew sign language.
• 25-year-old Roy to invent smart gloves that convert sign language movements into audio speech.
• Sign-io’s sign language to speech translation glove recognizes various letters signed by sign language users and transmits this data to an Android application where it is vocalized.
• The glove has been designed to connect through Bluetooth to an Android phone and uses the device’s text-to-speech function to provide translated speech based on the hand gestures of the person signing.
• Allela’s wearable technology features sensors that have been placed on each finger, detecting the positioning of each finger. This includes detecting how much each finger will bend into a certain position.
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• Allela made sure that his technolgy is comfortable for everyone to use accommodating all degrees of sign speed - fast or slow - at which people communicate.
• Additionally, the app also allows users to set the language, gender and pitch of the vocalization, with accuracy results averaging 93%, according to Allela. The gloves can also be packaged in any style the user likes, to help kids sees the gloves as “cool” to fight the stigma associated with being deaf or having a speech impediment, says Allela.
• The gloves were initially piloted at a special needs school in rural Migori county in south-west Kenya. The feedback he received from this test helped him to improve upon the speed at which language is converted into audio, one of the key aspects of the gloves.
• “My niece wears the gloves, pairs them with her phone or mine, then starts signing. I’m able to understand what she’s saying,” Allela told The Guardian newspaper.
• “People speak at different speeds and it’s the same with people who sign - some are really fast, others are slow. So we integrated that into the mobile application so that it’s comfortable for anyone to use,” he continued.
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• in 2017 He won the Hardware Trailblazer award in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Innovation Showcase competition, which the world’s largest organization for mechanical engineers.. Roy and two other African inventors took home the Grand Prize in second of three regional showcase events.
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• The young engineer’s goal is to place at least two pairs of gloves in every special-needs school in Kenya and to eventually be of help to the 34 million children worldwide who suffer from disabling hearing loss.
• “The general public in Kenya doesn’t understand sign language, so when my niece goes out, she always needs a translator. Imagine that dependency over the long term; how much that plagues or impairs her progress in life. When it affects you personally, you see how hard people have it in life. That’s why I’ve really strived to develop this project to completion.”
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-RISING AFRICA. ORG
-THIS IS AFRICA .ME

[@happyngulube1871]

Keep him safe

[@AndrewStopfords]

This is super amazing!!! ❤❤❤

[@LadyJ002]

Very good presentation! It answered my questions. Congratulations to ROY ALLELA. Thank you

[@Mregas1]

This invention its not something new. But I congratulate him that he joined the competition. Hadeel Ayoub, invented something similar to this and it was before this guy. SignAloud its the same invention and was before this guy. So this guy can't get all the credits but must be recognized that he is a competitor.

[@gurjeetsinghrai9210]

What is prize

[@steve.wonder817]

All this talk about this guy…. But not one video presenting his work. 😂. Another video I just saw on this guy actually stole a video from the original inventor who won mit prize in 2016😅. I smell 🧢