Building with the community

We believe in building with the Deaf community, not just for it. Deaf perspectives have shaped every stage of this project — from conceptualization by Sam Sepah, a Deaf Googler, to data collection with Deaf partners, evaluation in Deaf user studies, and impact assessment of the technology with Deaf experts.

To guide responsible real-world deployment, we established the AI Sign Language Advisory Committee (AISLAC), bringing together many global Deaf organizations and subject-matter experts. Through this participatory governance model, the communities most impacted by our technology directly influence our development priorities. We co-authored a joint impact report for the release of SL2T 1.0 in Gboard and Live Transcribe, transparently detailing the technology's capabilities and current limitations — a collaborative approach we plan to continue for all major sign language releases.

Looking ahead

SL2T builds upon decades of foundational research across academia and industry, but bringing ASL input to users’ phones is only the beginning. Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Achieving universal accessibility means reaching full parity with spoken and written languages. Our team is working to expand this technology into additional sign languages, sign language generation, and frontier AI capabilities. We look forward to sharing our progress responsibly in order to make access through sign languages standard across the digital landscape.

You can experience SL2T in Gboard and Live Transcribe first on Pixel 11, with more devices coming soon — all at no additional cost.

Acknowledgements

This work was done jointly by teams from Google DeepMind and Android. The core team who developed the SL2T model is: Garrett Tanzer, Benoit Brard, Elizabeth Clark, Tim Dozat, Sebastian Ebert, Dan Garrette, Manfred Georg, Vicky Holgate, Shankar Kumar, Mohammad Saboorian, Miloš Stanojević, Megh Umekar, John Wieting, Andy Zhang, and Chris Dyer.

The Android team who integrated the model into Gboard and Live Transcribe is: Ausmus Chang, Sai Aditya Chitturu, Dayle Chiu, Anna Chou, Ajay Dudani, Angana Ghosh, Alex Huang, Joanne Kim, Ed Lee, Thomas Lin, James Su, Yanchao Su, and Sharlene Yuan.

We are grateful for additional support from Anelia Angelova, Abhishek Bapna, Sara Basson, Glenn Cameron, Scott Crowell, Trevor Cohn, Noah Fiedel, Zoubin Ghahramani, Raia Hadsell, Tom Hudson, Alexander Hauerslev Jensen, Kazuya Kawakami, Peike Li, Liam McCafferty, Caroline Pantofaru, Abhinav Parashar, Christopher Patnoe, Laura Rimell, Sam Sepah, Thad Starner, Dave Uthus, and Biao Zhang.

Many thanks also go to those who participated in early stage testing of our models.