Kara Technologies: Increasing accessibility for the Deaf

Kara Technologies is a small start-up with a big vision: making the lives of Deaf people as easy as those of hearing people. To do that, it’s developing digital sign language avatars that will ultimately be able to sign everything Deaf people need or want to know.

“English isn’t Deaf people’s native language,” says Grace Covey, Kara Technologies’ Deaf communications manager and sign language expert. “It’s unfair to ask a community to rely on their second language to access vital information.”

The seed for Kara Technologies was planted in 2016, when Arash Tayebi, then a PhD student in electrical engineering at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, lost his hearing in one ear and was told he had a 30 percent chance of becoming completely deaf.

As he learned New Zealand Sign Language and got to know the Deaf community, Tayebi had the idea of ‘teaching’ digital avatars to sign.

However, Tayebi discovered that most existing avatars’ faces hardly moved. Other avatars had more expressive faces but lacked hands. Both are problems because sign language relies heavily on face and body movements.

Figuring the best way to create impact would be to start a company, Tayebi and some university friends did just that, with Tayebi as CEO. In 2017, the group was the social enterprise winner of the Velocity $100K Challenge, which enabled it to participate in the VentureLab incubator programme.

UniServices provided advice and invested in Kara through the University of Auckland Inventors’ Fund. It also helped connect the company with other investors.

“The support was amazing,” says Tayebi. “Without the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and UniServices, we wouldn’t even exist at all – they gave us the confidence to do it and helped connect us to the resources we needed.”