Good News at Your Fingertips: Sign Language AI Diary

Song Jiayin, a girl from Guangzhou, is an AI engineer who was raised by a deaf-mute mother. Her biggest wish is to let her mother "speak" the words she has hidden for half her life. In order to develop a recognition system adapted to "Cantonese Sign Language", she joined a deaf-mute dance troupe in the old city. During 300 hours of gesture collection, her fingertips wore out her gloves, but she still could not solve the problem of AI "not being able to read emotions" - the system always misjudged "concern" in her mother's sign language as "worry". It wasn't until she was sorting out her old things that she dug out her mother's music book that had been pressed at the bottom of the box: On the yellowed pages, there was the admission notice of the choir that year, and on the back, her mother wrote in sign language "For good news, it's worth it." It turns out that her mother had locked her love in a drawer in order to learn sign language with her. From the mother and daughter quarreling over misunderstandings in system V1.0, To the mother facing the screen in system V2.0, Using AI to clearly "say" "Mom is proud of you" for the first time, Song Jiayin finally captured her mother's silent tenderness after 187 debuggings. Later, this system helped deaf-mute people living alone to open an emergency call line, and even elderly people in the community learned to use it to "chat" with their distant grandchildren. She suddenly understood: The best form of technology is never perfect code, but the ability to catch every "neglected voice", just like her mother's sign language used to catch all her growth.