(10 Aug 2025)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Nairobi, Kenya – 26 June 2025
1. Various employee of Signvrse wearing motion capture suit and translating audio we hear into sign language so it can be used in app
2. Pan from employee to screen showing avatar being trained by employee
3. Close of avatar
4. Wide of office as Signvrse founder Elly Svatia enters
5. Various of Savatia and colleagues in office
6. Tilt up of Signvrse employee doing sign language, whilst wearing motion capture suit
7. Wide of office
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Elly Savatia, Founder of Signvrse:
"Signvrse is an assistive technology, a social enterprise, with a mission to bridge communication barriers for the deaf community. And, how we do this is? We’ve built Africa’s first AI translation platform called ‘Terp-360.’ We like to call it Google Translate for sign language – and how this works is it interprets text and speech input and outputs very fluid natural avatars, which is a digital human that now signs the same way a human being does at scale."
9. Tilt up of employee wearing motion capture suit
10. Various of employee translating into sign language
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Elly Savatia, Founder of Signvrse:
"Our biggest challenge has been access to sign language data. Looking at the nature of our solution, it heavily relies on localised sign language data to power our platform, and accessing that has been a problem. One, African sign languages are not documented online. You would easily find British Sign Language, American Sign Language data on the web. So we have had to collect our own sign language data, which is expensive. So we really had to push our fundraising efforts to enable us to really generate localised, diverse Kenyan sign language data."
12. Various of employee translating into sign language wearing motion capture suit
13. SOUNDBITE (English) Elly Savatia, Founder of Signvrse:
"I think AI is becoming an ongoing conversation and it is an enabler and with companies like Signvrse that are building assistive devices, there is only less that human interpreters are able to do. They are very limited. Context: if I am to take a human interpreter from a legal kind of setting to a medical kind of setting. Now what we are doing is that we are now using AI to have interpretation at a scale and this is the power of AI that we are leveraging on."
14. Various of employee translating into sign language wearing motion capture suit
15. SOUNDBITE (English) Elly Savatia, Founder of Signvrse:
"The techniques that we are using to digitise sign language we use motion capture systems to accurately record sign language motion. So we are looking at the body movement, hand rotation and articulation, facial expressions that enables us to accurately capture the linguistic and vibrant nature of sign language as a language and that is what makes our platform unique."
16. Waiter Kelvin Munene, who is deaf, walking up to table to take order from customers at Pallet Cafe through Signvrse’s Terp 360 app
17. Various of Munene taking an order using the app
18. SOUNDBITE (Kenyan sign language with English translation – interpreter not shown) Kelvin Munene, waiter at Pallet Cafe:
"I had a lot of challenges when searching for a job and sometimes when I go to hospital I have a lot of challenges but I think when using this app, it will help those challenges and it will make communication easier."
19. Various of Munene delivering order
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Nairobi, Kenya – 27 June 2025
22. Various of people interacting at Galaxy Sign Language Training Centre
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