Legato, a hearing technology startup, has emerged from stealth mode with $12 million in funding from Neotribe Ventures, Listen, and Village Global to develop AI-powered hearing glasses. The company aims to address the gap in hearing loss treatment, as only 20% of the estimated 50 million U.S. adults with diagnosed hearing loss currently seek treatment.
Google DeepMind has released SL2T, a sign-language-to-text AI model integrated into Gboard and Live Transcribe on the Pixel 11 smartphone. The gloss-free model, trained on over 100,000 examples, represents the first sign language AI to ship in a consumer device, providing deaf and hard of hearing users with a smartphone equivalent to voice dictation.
Meta AI researchers have developed Brain2Qwerty, a deep learning model that non-invasively decodes typed sentences from brain activity using external sensors, achieving an 18% character error rate. The breakthrough, published in Nature Neuroscience, represents a significant advance toward non-invasive brain-computer interfaces for communication.
Casey Harrell, a 42-year-old man with ALS who lost his ability to speak, has successfully used a brain-computer interface for almost three years to communicate and control his computer, producing approximately 2 million words. The at-home brain implant represents a significant milestone in assistive technology for neurodegenerative disease patients.
