What SimuSign is, and its limits

1. It is in Early Access

SimuSign is in Early Access, and it changes every week. We're refining every animation and our ASL grammar, and bringing ASL professionals into that work.

2. What to expect

• The signer may mis-sign a word, or sign words in an order a fluent signer would not use.
• Words outside our sign vocabulary are fingerspelled, letter by letter, and marked as spelled.
• Facial grammar and co-articulation — how signs flow into one another — are in active refinement.
• Captions can mis-hear speech. Live signing can fall behind; the delay is shown, and any span the session could not hear is marked. Fast speech, meetings and long videos can fall a minute or more behind.
• In live signing, a question asked in two pieces may be signed before its question mark arrives. The part already signed keeps the face it was given — a statement's, or another kind of question's.
• If your connection drops for longer than our 30-second buffer, the earliest part of what was said during the outage is not signed. The page tells you when this happens and shows how long the gap was.
• On a phone, SimuSign listens through the phone's microphone to the sound in the room. Tab audio is a desktop feature, in Chrome or Edge.

3. What the signer does not show yet

• The signer does not mouth English words. Where ASL tells two signs apart only by the mouthed word, the two signs look the same.
• Fingerspelled words are spelled by the hand alone; the mouth stays still.
• Mouth shapes that place the tongue over the lower teeth, as in the ASL sign for "not yet", are not shown.
• Mouth movements that repeat during a sign, such as the "sta-sta" of a long struggle, are not shown. Each sign holds one mouth shape, or makes one quick opening.
• Many other mouth movements used in ASL are not shown. The mouth shapes the signer does show are pressed lips, rounded lips, the open "cha", the tongue between the teeth, the bursts "pah", "pow" and "ps", the open "ah", a hiss, the "fish" close, puffed cheeks, and bared teeth.
• A few two-part signs, such as the signs for "couch" and "decide", show only their second part.
• ASL can show how something moves with a handshape that stands for it, called a classifier. Some of these are not shown yet, among them an aircraft flying over something, a light, flat object such as paper carried by the wind, and a round object such as a bottle rolling. A sentence like these is signed word by word instead, and a word with no sign is fingerspelled.
• When the signer's hand shows a vehicle moving, the direction it travels is shown approximately: the hand does not always point exactly along its path.

4. The boundary we keep

SimuSign is in Early Access. It is not a replacement for a live interpreter and is not intended for medical, legal, emergency or other high-stakes communication at this time.

Do not use SimuSign for safety-critical communication, or where the law requires a qualified interpreter. It is not an auxiliary aid or an accommodation: if your organization has a legal duty to communicate effectively with Deaf or hard-of-hearing people, using SimuSign does not meet it. The full terms are in our Terms of Service.

This follows the position of Deaf advocacy organizations, including the World Federation of the Deaf and WASLI statement on signing avatars.

5. Tell us what you see

Spot something wrong? Tell us through the feedback form, or rate a signed sentence in the studio. If you're a fluent Deaf signer and want to work with us, reach us the same way.