AI ASL Video Translator

What is AI ASL video translation?

ASL video translation converts a signed video performance into written English. Unlike speech-to-text or video transcription, which translate audio into text, ASL translation has to read the visual modality — the signer's handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and the non-manual markers (facial expressions, head tilts, body shifts) that carry grammatical meaning. There is no audio track to fall back on.

ASL is also not a one-to-one map of English. It has its own grammar, word order, and idiomatic phrasing. Word-for-sign substitution produces output that is technically literal but reads as broken English. Quality translation has to recognize the visual signal AND restructure the result into natural English — closer to translating between two languages than transcribing one.

The goal: a deaf or hard-of-hearing signer records a video; a hearing audience reads English subtitles or a transcript. The translation is the bridge.

How does Curify translate ASL video?

The pipeline runs in four stages. First, frames are sampled from the source video at intervals — it does not watch the video continuously, and that single fact explains most of what follows.

Second, those sampled frames are read by a general vision-language model. This is the part worth being precise about: there is no sign-specific component here — no handshape tracker, no movement-vector model, nothing trained on ASL. The model describes what it can see in still images.

Third, that description is turned into English sentences. Because the model reads sampled frames rather than continuous motion, it does not reliably recover what ASL carries in movement and in non-manual markers — direction, aspect, and the facial grammar that turns a statement into a question. In a control test we fed it the same clip played backwards and it did not notice. Treat the output as a rough guess at the topic, not a translation.

Fourth, the translated text is aligned back to the source timing — each English sentence is anchored to the seconds of video that produced it. That gives you subtitles you can drop straight into a video editor, plus an SRT export that loads cleanly into YouTube.

The demo on this page is the live pipeline running on one real conversational ASL clip. Your own uploads run through the same pipeline, with the same limitations.

Where ASL video translation matters