How many pitches do you listen to on a monthly, weekly, maybe even daily basis? How many of these pitches claim to solve big problems, and how many actually do?
At Ava we are really solving a big problem!
Even though it's almost impossible for most of us (hearing people), imagine how it would be to enter a group of people when you can't hear a thing. Even if you know sign language, nobody else will! You can try to lipread when someone starts talking, but the moment someone else responds you miss their first words and get lost in the conversation.
There are 360 million people in the world who suffer from disabling hearing loss and encounter this situation every day. Very quickly they become isolated from the conversation and isolated from the group. A meeting at work, dinner with their family, or out with friends, it's impossible to be part of these social and professional opportunities.
Ava was founded by Thibault, a data scientist from France, who grew up with Deaf parents and a Deaf sister. Based on his personal experience, Thibault was determined to empower his own family, and all the people who encounter similar problems. The story became even more personal with Skinner joining as a co-founder. Skinner, who is a brilliant full stack developer (15 years of experience in software and mobile), has been deaf since he was 2 years old.
Ava is a mobile application that translates any group conversation into text. The app connects people's smart devices, captures the audio, and then uses speech recognition and speaker identification to show to a deaf person in realtime who says what. This way, any deaf or hard of hearing person can understand and participate in the conversation again.
While starting by solving a real need for a very large group of people, we are building a technology that can scale into many more applications like; business meeting efficiency, language translation, and most of all, the space of Artificial Intelligence.
With a mission to solve a real problem and a vision to fuel the future of speech intelligence, we invite you to come and talk to us!