What happened
On 12 August 2026 Google DeepMind and Android launched sign-language-to-text (SL2T) in Gboard and Live Transcribe on Pixel 11, starting with American Sign Language to English. The model translates pose landmarks from MediaPipe Holistic rather than a raw camera feed, was trained on more than 100,000 hours across more than 50 sign languages, and is reported at 70 BLEURT zero-shot on FLEURS-ASL. Deaf testers and the AI Sign Language Advisory Committee shaped the release. This is Google’s first consumer deployment of sign-to-text dictation, limited to Pixel 11 and ASL at launch. There is no independent outcome study of adoption or communication-access gains beyond the lab announcement and the user studies it cites.