What the Tech? App of the Day: Hand Talk
By JAMIE TUCKER Consumer Technology Reporter
An estimated half-million people in the United States use American Sign Language. Most of us don’t and if you’ve ever found yourself trying to have a conversation with a deaf or hard-of-hearing person, it would be extremely helpful to know ASL.
But it’s a complex language to learn for most of us.
I found a smartphone app that takes what you say and translates it to ASL in a clever and cool way.
Hand Talk is an app for iPhone and Android devices and it is super easy to use. Simply enter what you want to say in a text box or hold down a microphone icon and speak.
When you hit enter, an animated character appears on the screen to deliver what you say or text into American Sign Language.
The words appear at the top of the screen as well.
I found the app could do better with long sentences but does fine if you break up what you say into short statements and questions.
For example, when I said “I am learning how to use sign language, how am I doing?” the character on screen did not respond at all. When I broke that up into “I’m learning how to sign”, and “How am I doing?” it worked just fine. It also responded quickly to short questions such as “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” and “Would you like to go see a movie?”
You can control how fast the character signs and which character to use on the screen. It doesn’t work both ways. Hand Talk can’t take someone’s sign language and interpret it to speech or text. So the person who knows sign language will need to use their phone to enter text so you can read what they say.
On its website, Hand Talk states it has been used to translate nearly 2 billion words since it was launched.
It’s helpful, easy to use, and very cool. Hand Talk is supported by advertisements so this free app is going to have ads pop up on the screen. If you want to get rid of those, it’s a one-time payment of $10. It’s available for iPhone and Android devices.
Hand Talk was named “Best Social App” in Latin America in 2015.
