Shiven Velagapudi and Aadi Sanghvi are lifelong friends, seniors in high school, and developers of Hand Wave, a new AI application meant to help translate American Sign Language in real time.
While most seniors in high school look forward to doing nothing the summer before heading off to college, Velagapudi and Sanghvi commandeered a home office and converted it into their own artificial intelligence lab, from an idea that completely evolved outside of the classroom.
Velagapudi told NBC DFW, “This was completely unrelated from school. We kinda just picked this up for fun and mainly because we noticed that this was a problem that we wanted to solve in the real world.”
The friends use machine learning to program ASL letters and phrases. The signs appear like a hand skeleton and are translated through smart glasses with an integrated camera.
Sanghvi believes this project is a way to bring people closer together.
"I think it fosters unity. I think there are a lot of things happening in our world that makes it easy to feel divided, I guess, so I think it reminds us that we are more similar than we might expect," he said.
"Being able to communicate or share conversations about our fears, our strengths, our weaknesses, our dreams, just on a human level, I think that's something we have to be doing."
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