An empowering, inclusive Next Generation Internet

Develop novel mobile applications translating between speech and sign languages to assist people with hearing impairments. The projects should leverage on current state-of-the-art in translation between all official spoken and sign languages of the EU Member States and associated countries for efficient and effective use on mobile devices. Projects should explore how end-users can best interact and cooperate with the application and how the system adapts to users in real-life conditions and prevents unintended gender bias in translation. The resulting applications should be open source, robust, cost-effective and validated across a wide spectrum of users. Priority will be given to projects addressing a wide range of languages, in particular under-resourced languages.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU between EUR 2 and 4 million would allow this area to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

As the digital transformation of society accelerates, the use of mobile devices and applications can significantly improve the daily life of citizens. Leveraging on multidisciplinary expertise drawing on knowledge from both the technological and human sciences, novel technologies, such as automatic translation as well as speech and sign recognition and synthesis, could offer inclusive human-centric solutions facilitating communication between people with and without hearing impairments.

• Improve multilingual speech processing and sign language detection on mobile devices, and deploy solutions allowing wide take up by people with hearing impairments.