SLAIT FOUNDERS: ANTONIO DOMÈNECH, EVGENY FOMIN, WILLIAM G. VICARS – AKA ‘DR BILL’
COUNTRY: SPAIN STARTED: 2020
What is Slait’s origin story? I’m Evgeny Fomin, co-founder of Slait. It all started at a meet-up in Barcelona. One of our other co-founders, Antonio Domènech, showed a prototype of a glove that could translate the Catalan Sign Language alphabet. At the end of the event, I approached Antonio. We met the next day, and he showed me a concept for sign language translation he was also working on. We immediately agreed to join forces to solve this problem. This is how Slait was born. After a couple of months, when we realised it was impossible to do a project without an ASL expert, we wrote to Dr. Bill (William G. Vicars), and to our surprise he responded with great enthusiasm. Dr. Bill is a professional who represents the interests of the Deaf community, which is very important for this kind of project. What are you working on right now? At the moment, the development is focused on three main directions. First, we’re improving and expanding the current AI model. The latest version recognises 200
characters with an accuracy of 92%, using only the device’s CPU. The next steps are 500 and 1000 gestures. Second, is creating our own data set. Third, is improving the current prototype of a client-server web application that is already working, but not yet available to users. What is your next step? We would like to release a minimum viable product as soon as possible, and enable users to interact with it. We plan to launch an educational platform, on which people can learn and practice sign language. To launch, we need additional resources, so we are preparing to look for investments. What’s the one thing you need most right now? We are looking for investors, because we have already passed the technical concept validation stage – and are ready to create a product and grow. Resources will be spent on hiring good developers for the team, as well as creating our own data set with high-quality data to improve the AI model.
DREAM TEAM (From left to right) Antonio Domènech, Dr. Bill and Evgeny Fomin
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