GoVoBo’s mission is to foster equitable communication, fully under the control of deaf and hard of hearing individuals.
We seek to shape a future where the deaf and hard of hearing community is provided with inclusive access to all spoken words, ensuring freedom of communication to all. GoVoBo intends to be the gold standard for universal accessibility platforms for auto-captioning.
We are passionate individuals who have come together to bring the very best in user-centered community-driven design with AI-enabled speech and language technologies to the deaf and hard of hearing communities. The key movers and shakers behind GoVoBo are representatives from the Gallaudet University Technology Access Program, AppTek, and most importantly direct consumers of the technology itself. GoVoBo is one of the finalists at the Eureka Park Accessibility Contest at CES 2022.
The partnership between the Gallaudet University Technology Access Program and AppTek was seeded by funding from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (grant number 90RE5020) and the Consumer Technology Association Foundation.
Dr. Boudreault is a Research Scientist at Gallaudet University. He has collaborated with scholars across North America on a variety of research topics related to the Deaf community and sign language. At the heart of his work lies a passion for the human right to sign language. More broadly, Dr. Boudreault’s primary work entails sign language translation, sign language acquisition, sign language assessment tools, the data collection of AI for machine translation in sign language which led to his involvement with GoVoBo.
Dr. Vogler was one of the first deaf people to graduate with a PhD in computer science, and now leads a well-respected accessibility research group at Gallaudet University. GoVoBo is his brainchild, and he is responsible for the overall technical vision. He is a relentless advocate for keeping the user experience simple.
Mr. Maddock is a 25+ year marketing veteran with experience in developing and delivering creative and technology-driven solutions while driving profitable revenue growth. Mr. Maddock currently serves as the SVP Marketing at AppTek and brings his expertise in driving products and applications for the purpose of accessible communication to enterprise clients. Mr. Maddock holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh.
Mr. Veronis is AppTek’s Chief Revenue Officer and Head of Accessibility Advocacy. He has been in the data analytics, AI and natural language processing sectors for most of his career. He has business-focused expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially in automatic speech recognition and machine translation as enablers for Accessibility solutions and systems.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hermann Ney is a distinguished and highly-regarded pioneer in the field of natural language processing. Prof. Ney is the 2021 ISCA Medal Finalist, 2019 winner of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, and the recipient of a 2018 Google Focused Research Award for his groundbreaking contributions to speech recognition.
Gallaudet University is a bilingual, diverse, multicultural institution of higher education that ensures the intellectual and professional advancement of deaf and hard of hearing individuals through American Sign Language and English. The university enrolls over 1,600 students in more than 40 undergraduate majors, as well as many graduate programs at the master’s and doctoral level. It also conducts research in a variety of disciplines, including educational neuroscience, bilingual education, sign language linguistics, psychology, technology and accessibility, Deaf studies, and Black Deaf studies. For more information, please visit http://www.gallaudet.edu.
The Gallaudet University Technology Access Program has been conducting research related to communication technologies and services for over 30 years. It has the goal of producing knowledge useful to industry, government, and deaf and hard of hearing consumers in the quest for equality in communications.
Based in Mclean VA, AppTek is a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies for automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (NMT), natural language processing/understanding (NLP/U) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies. The AppTek platform delivers industry-leading, real-time streaming and batch technology solutions in the cloud or on-premise for organizations across a breadth of worldwide markets such as media and entertainment, call centers, government, enterprise business, and more. Built by scientists and research engineers who are recognized as among the best in the world, AppTek’s solutions cover a wide array of languages, dialects, and channels. For more information, please visit http://www.apptek.com.
