Five percent of the world’s population suffers from disabling hearing loss, which includes both the Deaf and hard of hearing. While all people should be aware of the things that are happening in their homes, this still isn’t the case for the millions of people living with disabling hearing loss. Not being able to access sounds is disorienting and could be the difference between life and death. Simply put, when you’re deaf—if you don’t see it, it’s as if it never happened.

The current products on the market for the Deaf and hard of hearing are extremely limited. Assistive hearing devices—such as cochlear implants—help indicate or amplify sound but do not assign meaning to what’s heard. Others use visual cues—such as flashing lights—to help notify of a doorbell, incoming phone call, or fire alarm, but are only single-use.

There is no product that can differentiate the sheer volume of sounds that happen in the home on a daily basis. This leaves consumers with a handful of single-sound devices, but nothing that can distinguish a microwave from a baby crying, from glass breaking, and so on.

Lack of data has stood in the way of developing products that address general situational awareness. It would take literally millions and millions of sound samples to create a machine-learning model that could report with any level of accuracy.

Recognizing the unmet need and confronting this technological barrier head on, we invented a way to significantly change the day-to-day lives of the Deaf and hard of hearing by finally giving them access to the one thing they’ve been missing. See Sound is the world’s first smart home hearing system for the Deaf. Our revolutionary home device is powered by an AI-learning model that is able to not only listen for a multitude of sounds but distinguish between them with a high level of accuracy. Because every home sounds a little different, See Sound’s learning model is powered by millions of sound samples from YouTube. Each type of sound in our data model is composed of several thousand YouTube audio samples.

See Sound units plug directly into your wall outlet and connect via WiFi to the See Sound app on your mobile phone. When a sound occurs, the closest See Sound interprets it, makes a prediction based on its confidence level, and alerts users of the sound on their various devices, including smartphones, watches, and smart lights.

See Sound is a significant advance for this underserved community and a life-changing accessibility tool that can report on sounds ranging from the convenient to the critical. No longer do the Deaf need to rely on their partners or pets to alert them to noises around their home. They can finally see sound.