NVIDIA's Signs turned every webcam into an ASL tutor that feeds its own dataset

Around 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and traditional ASL classes are expensive and geographically uneven; video tutorials exist but cannot tell a learner their hand position is wrong. That missing feedback is why self-study of sign language so often fails.

NVIDIA, Hello Monday/DEPT and the American Society of Deaf Children launched Signs in February 2025: a free web platform where a 3D avatar demonstrates each sign and AI tracks the learner's hands through any webcam, giving instant corrections. At launch it offered 100 validated signs, with a goal of 1,000.

Learners' own videos become contributions to an open-source ASL dataset that trains better recognition models, making the resource more valuable with every user. Launched with zero paid media, Signs was covered by CNN, Axios and VentureBeat, and won a Silver Pencil at The One Show 2025.