Deaf community lauds positive impact of technology

As Xu Cong, who is deaf, used sign language to express how technology has impacted his life, his phone turned the draft of his speech into spoken text for the audience.

Xu was attending a promotional session in Beijing's Fengtai district about the recent achievements in the effort to build an accessible environment in the city. The April 1 event, which was simultaneously livestreamed, made use of speech-to-text technology that gave deaf audience members another way to follow along.

The conversion was based on smart transcription technologies developed by a range of tech companies like iFlytek and Sogou that enable hearing-impaired people to interact with others more efficiently.

"With these technologies, we gain greater understanding and are able to break out of the cocoon we used to be trapped in," said Xu, the vice-chairman of the Beijing-based China Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, via sign language.

He added that young, educated deaf people can also take part in online meetings with real-time captioning, and watch TV and make phone calls using apps and hardware specially tailored to their needs.

He was referring to the ZimuPlus caption box, which makes it possible for the deaf to watch television news, live shows like China Central Television's Spring Festival Gala and sports through real-time captions, and the i-Clear SIM Card, codeveloped by China Unicom and Tencent, which helps the hearing-impaired make phone calls using a real-time voice-to-text feature.

According to Yang Yang, chairwoman of the association, both products, released in 2020, are the only ones of their kind because they are not profitable due to the limited size of their target market.

The association participated in the research and development of both products, as well as their promotion.

Yang particularly called for wider popularization of the caption box to help more families with deaf people.

"Smart transcription and real-time subtitle technologies are in high demand for the hearing-impaired, as they are crucial to our improvement as a whole," Yang said, talking about technological innovations that have had a huge impact on the community since 2017, when iFlytek first popularized its voice-to-text technology. "But we still lack social understanding and support."

Xu pointed out that some technological challenges remain. For example, the accuracy of speech recognition is quite good in Mandarin, but it doesn't do as well with dialects.

He said the Beijing Municipal Science& Technology Commission and tech companies including Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba and Huawei are developing virtual sign language figures for various uses. He added that he has been working with some companies on this technology.

The difficulty lies in making sign language understandable to a deaf audience. When companies translate text into sign language, it's sometimes inaccurate and causes confusion and misunderstanding.

"We expect our experience and suggestions to be heard during the development of accessible products and an accessible environment, and we hope they will be practical and meet our specific needs," Xu said.