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Home > News > Transcense

Transcense

Spring 2015 issue
May 1, 2015 by Paul Preuss
This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Spring 2015
  • In this issue

    Features

    In the domain of design

    Jacobs Hall: New home for design innovation

    Design case studies

    Dean’s Word

    Upfront

    • Simplify: The RISC story
    • Seismic song
    • Fostering disruptive technologies
    • Lost and found

    Breakthroughs

    • For clean water
    • The graphene switch
    • The many frontiers of synthetic biology

    Alumni notes

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design team | Thibault Duchemin / Pieter Doevendans

360 million:  The number of deaf  and hard-of-hearing people worldwide

Thibault Duchemin

Thibault Duchemin

At SkyDeck’s Kairos Society startup competition in 2013, Thibault Duchemin, a graduate student in industrial engineering and operations research and the son of deaf parents, pitched an idea for a smart glove that could translate sign language into words on a screen. Pieter Doevendans, pursuing a master’s in innovation sciences at the Haas School of Business, joined Duchemin’s team because “Thibault wanted to solve a problem, unlike many ideas presented that weekend, which had no purpose.”

Transcense speech-recognition software on a smartphone.

Transcense speech-recognition software on a smartphone. (Photos by Noah Berger)

At the end of the two-day competition, they presented their prototype, won Overall Best and launched a business. “We thought we knew what we had to build,” says Doevendans — until they interviewed a hundred potential users. “The hard-of-hearing all said the glove was not what they wanted. The real problem was following group discussions. That was a big moment for us. We pivoted.” Transcense was born when Duchemin and Doevendans recruited Skinner Cheng, a programmer who is deaf, to write the smartphone and web software.

Using the tool, individual speakers in a group conversation are recognized by their cellphones using existing speech recognition technology; in less than a second, the hard-of-hearing user’s phone displays a running text of the conversation, colored-coded to each speaker. Crowdsourcing response was dramatic; continuing research involves 50 beta users, and Transcense could be on the market within a year.

Topics: Devices & inventions, Design, Industrial engineering, Students
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