“Reinventing the accessibility architecture of the future”
Interview of Thibault Duchemin, founder & CEO @Ava
Can you introduce Ava?
Ava was born with a single mission: offer people with hearing problems communication access to all conversations. Today, one in twenty people have difficulties understanding conversations around them, whether in a personal, academic or professional context.
We propose a fix to this unfair situation by offering a 24/7 available and accurate transcription service, Ava Scribe, that is based on a mix of AI captioning and professional captioners, on-demand. Deaf and hard of hearing people can use our mobile and desktop apps to caption any in-person or online conversations, from meetings to classes, at the highest accuracy level that fits their needs.
What led you to create this platform?
One could say that I was born with Ava! I am a CODA, the only hearing person in my family. Growing up, I have had the front row seat to what was not accessible in the everyday life of deaf & hard-of-hearing people.
When you’re watching movies, you can turn on your subtitles, but what about all the other daily situations?
Most of the social life is not that easy when you’re hard-of-hearing, which leads a lot of them feeling excluded. Society has just not created solutions to facilitate their daily life. We needed to change that!
Do you think there is enough recognition of this cause today, especially by the mission-driven actors?
Yes and no! Of course, if one compares the situation 400 years ago when people would think deaf children were cursed because they had hearing problems, we can consider that progress has definitely been made! There’s definitely better visibility and representation today of deaf & hard-of-hearing people, but it remains exceptional!
One cause I always suspected of this lower visibility is that hearing loss & deafness are invisible. As it makes communication more difficult, it’s not that easy to make people aware of the challenges associated with being deaf & hard-of-hearing.
I believe that the recent evolution of AI to transcribe speech has made technologies like Ava more present in the day to day life of deaf people, and allowed some of them to make their surroundings aware of their communication needs.
Many hearing people first encounter Ava when a deaf person points their phone at them and ask them to speak! However, speech-to-text accuracy, while having gone through immense progress, is struggling in reaching 100%, and the level that is expected for, say a student or a professional during a meeting.
Ava developed the Scribe service for exactly these high-importance conversations. By combining our AI with the intervention of our Scribes, Ava’s technology substantially lowers the cost of captioning.
Today, a traditional live captioner bills at an average 120 euros for an hour of transcription, not to mention the fact that professional subtitlers are not instantly available. With our Scribe technology we can provide the same accuracy, faster, and less costly.
If we go beyond the technical side of things now and look at the root causes, we are facing a millennial problem here compared to more recent issues like climate change. We are talking about 5% of the world’s population who are affected, as well as those around them, who are made invisible by society and are doubly impeded by the cost of their transcription needs. Yet, these people must also have access to the very modern notion of empowerment by being able to work, participate in projects, etc. There is a collective responsibility here. States and companies must seize it!
Would you say that the ecosystem is now ready to leverage this issue?
Based on what’s happening in the US where we operate, I would say that the market is clearly in need of a better accessibility architecture. We’re talking about 10 billion dollars yearly to increase the understanding of people with hearing difficulties.
Beyond the numbers, what will really make the difference is connecting the classic human transcription market with the new AI-based one and to support the transition that is happening in every industry. We weren’t afraid to build new technologies and work with all stakeholders to understand how one could fundamentally reduce accessibility costs. This is a necessity if one wants to make total accessibility possible for 450 million people, which is our end goal!
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