Shani Zidmi is the co-founder of CODA, an Israeli startup that brings together its knowledge in Artificial Intelligencel (AI) and software engineering and his personal story. Zidmi is a daughter of deaf parents, an experience that is included within the term Child of Deaf Adults, or precisely, CODA.
The Israeli company is developing an innovative system that offers deaf people the possibility of enjoying audiovisual content translated into sign language through an avatar created with AI. By having a particular syntax and grammar, sign language is a language like any other. This is why for deaf people reading a subtitle is like reading in another language, with the complexity that this entails.
“It is beyond the alphabet. We can take a sentence and change the essence just with our voice, right? I can say 'I want to go home' very calmly or very intensely. It's the same in sign language. Our approach is to make the AI understand this when creating the language,” explained the CODA co-founder.
There are nearly 70 million people who use sign language globally. And depending on the region in which they live, there are also more than 300 different “dialects”, with considerable variations. This is why the startup is working to adapt the language to different regions, to localize the content.
This year, CODA was one of the winners of the acceleration program MassChallenge Israel. It also received funding from the Israel Innovation Authority.