IT faculty member's new project asks: "Hey Google, can you understand ASL?"

Dr. Abraham Glasser, assistant professor in Gallaudet’s Accessible Human-Centered Computing program and a faculty research member in the Artificial Intelligence, Accessibility, and Sign Language Center (AIASL), has just received a $174,999 National Science Foundation grant for his project, “CRII: HCC: American Sign Language-enabled Digital Assistants: Models and Metrics for User Satisfaction.” The award (2348221), which runs from June 1 of this year to May 31, 2026, will allow him to investigate how personal assistant devices — such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa — can have successful interactions with people using American Sign Language.

This is the first grant for Glasser, who joined the faculty last year. The project puts him on the cutting-edge of research as ASL recognition technology is still limited to a small number of signs or fingerspelling. “I will simulate what is feasible for ASL technologies within the near future, such as isolated word-level recognition, and see if this could be usable for personal assistant technology,” explains Glasser. “I will also simulate a ‘full’ ASL recognition algorithm, imitating various levels of accuracy, and gauge users’ responses.”

It is exciting for him to be diving into this work while other researchers are actively pursuing ASL recognition algorithms. “I will be able to inform these researchers and developers whether their algorithms will be usable for ASL-powered personal assistant devices,” Glasser says. “It’s important to have Deaf-led research inform technology to ensure it is useful and beneficial to the ASL community before it’s implemented and commercialized, and further marginalizes this group of users.”

Glasser was encouraged to apply by Dr. Raja Kushalnagar, director of Gallaudet’s B.S. in Information Technology and co-director of Gallaudet’s M.S. in Accessible Human-Centered Computing programs, as well as director of the AIASL.

Earlier this year, Glasser weighed in on the topic of personal assistant devices and the barriers posed by voice AI during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver, Colorado. Gallaudet-led personal assistant related research projects were also presented at the recent ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hawaii.