BOCA RATON, Fla. – According to the World Health Organization, by 2050, nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss, and the impact of unaddressed hearing loss can significantly affect a person’s role in their community.
But now, one local company is using its technology to try and create a future of accessibility and inclusion for everyone.
In addressing those impacts, the WHO cites communication, cognition, education and employment as potential aspects of life that can be affected if help is not provided.
Now we’re hearing from two people who are trying to provide some help and make sure no one feels excluded.
Communication is key -- that’s the phrase we’ve always heard, but it’s not so easy, or even inclusive, for everyone.
“If you promote inclusion, just make sure that you’re also including accessibility. It’s very important that you provide someone the basic thing that they need,” said Saida Florexil, co-founder and CEO of Imanyco.
Florexil and Aakrita Gupta are the co-founders of Imanyco — a South Florida-based company focused on bridging the communication gap for the deaf and hard of hearing.
The name is a combination of the Swahili name, “Imani,” meaning faith and belief, and “‘co,” standing for communication and connection.
“What we wanted to do is provide a holistic experience to improve communication. So someone could not only be part of it, they could participate in it,” Gupta said.
That participation comes with the help of “Koda,” the company’s product.
It’s a real-time transcription technology that assists deaf and hard-of-hearing people during in-person group conversations.
Koda works by using a group of AI models, built from scratch, to work behind the scenes.
One converts the audio in a conversation to text. The other is breaking the audio down by speaker.
Technically speaking, this is called “speaker diarization,” which is the process of taking an audio recording and separating each individual involved, automatically.
“As someone who can hear, we know where the audio is coming from,” Gupta said. “For someone who is deaf or hard of hearing, they don’t know.”
Koda is a web-based app, so there’s no need to download anything in order to use it.
All it takes is a device connected to the internet to access the site.
We were able to use it during our conversation, with Koda detecting speakers in the flow of conversation and separating them by color and number.
Gupta and Florexil say they’ve had positive feedback so far, but it’s still a new frontier of sorts, building something for a community that doesn’t normally get the a lot of attention.
“They love the concept of technology, but they’ve never had technology built for them,” Gupta said. “It’s been technology that’s built for the rest of the world, but it doesn’t work well for them.”
While it might not be the only transcription technology available, Imanyco hopes to show that its passion toward inclusion and accessibility is the calling card that makes it stand out.
It’s also a chance to highlight the message that no one should be left behind because of a disability, ultimately providing everyone an opportunity to be a part of the conversation.
“My younger self would be really proud of myself, and think, ‘Oh my God, I have this.’ I also think about all of those things I messed up and I’m like, ‘You know, I could help the next generation,’” Florexil said.
“It’s a hard community to build a product for. But I think it’s all that much more innovative, promising, you know, really motivating to see, OK, if we can build something for them that they’ll use on a daily basis, we know it’s worth it,” Gupta said.
Koda officially launched under its new name in May, and has since been upgraded a few times, including with a real-time note-taking capability and a way for users to personalize the experience.
The product is only available in English right now, but the plan is to work on AI models specific to different languages and expand it that way.