Responses by Ben Usher, senior creative, FCB Inferno
Background: Many of the 32 million deaf children in the world struggle to learn how to read. So, FCB Inferno worked with Huawei and The British Deaf Association to develop StorySign, a free app that uses the power of AI to help open the world of books to deaf children and their families.
Reasoning: 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents. They can’t hear their mother or father reading them a bedtime story. Plus, sign language is very different to written language. So, deaf children can struggle to match printed words with the concepts they represent. With StorySign, deaf children or their parents can simply hold their smartphone up to the words on the page, and our friendly avatar Star signs the story as the printed words are highlighted. This helps parents and deaf children learn how to read together, at their own pace.
Challenges: Discovering if AI smartphone technology would do what we needed it to do, and making sure that what we were creating was actually useful for the deaf community. That’s why we worked with Huawei’s world-leading AI, and with experts and charities, including the British Deaf Association and The European Union of the Deaf.
Favorite details: Our avatar’s tongue! We worked closely with the amazing team at Aardman Animations to make sure Star could deliver perfect sign language. The experts and deaf children loved the attention to detail, especially the fact that she has a tongue, which you need for certain signs. We are also very proud to have worked with Chris Overton, Academy Award-winning director, and Maisie Sly, star of The Silent Child, on the one-minute Christmas TV advert.
Specific demands: The sheer scale of the project. The StorySign app launched on the same day in ten countries across Europe, with ten different sign languages. That meant a lot of technological and creative complexity to overcome. On the plus side, we can now say “hello” in sign language from Birmingham to Brussels.
Anything new: We learned so much about sign language, and about the barriers that deaf children can face. Deaf literacy is a real hidden problem, and we’re happy that with StorySign, we could do something to help.
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