it is hard to enthusiastic about AI at the moment and the daily utterances leaders of the big software companies hardly inspire confidence. Remember in days gone by how AI proponents used to enthuse about how AI would extend access to everyone to education. Well a Google press release brings good news. Google DeepMind has shipped shipped SL2T, a sign-language-to-text model, into Gboard and Live Transcribe on the Pixel 1, starting with ASL to English. It works like voice dictation, but instead of speaking, you sign to the phone's camera and it turns your signing into text in real time, anywhere you'd normally type: a search bar, a message, or a prompt to Gemini. Trained on 100,000+ hours across 50+ sign languages, it treats signing as a full language to translate, not gestures to decode, the mistake that doomed earlier tools like sign-language gloves.