Picture – Shivansh Kulshrestha

Shivansh

Nominated by All India Deaf&Dumb Society

All 2022 Children’s Peace Prize Nominees

Shivansh witnessed his hearing-impaired grandfather struggle to converse with him, notably using video communication portals due to their inability to provide live speech captioning in Indian languages. As a result, Shivansh decided to launch Lingocap. It is India’s first communication portal for people with hearing and speech impairment powered by the Indian language speech captioning and ISL (Indian Sign Language) translation. It has real-time speech captioning in 5 Indian languages and ISL. In other words, he created a technology enabled ISL curriculum and ISL language learning tools to enhance sign language learning. He worked on standardization of ISL under the National Education Policy 2020. Since its launched, Lingocap is adopted by 12 deaf schools in India and the platform havs over 7,000 users. It is being used by 63 mentors to teach and support more than 1,200 deaf students for after school education. A total of more than 100,000 hours of live transcription were provided because of his initiative. His work was highly necessary during Covid-19, as it supported deaf schools and other non-profit schools that lacked infrastructure to support education through technology of students with auditive impairments. At the moment, he is currently working on a mass petition to recognize ISL as the 23rd official language of India. Plus, he wished to address the learning difficulties of people with visual impairment, adding features like a text-to-speech voice, smart contract, text alignment and adaptable font functions. Within the next 5 years, he plans to scale the impact of Lingocap across South-East Asis. He is keen on developing an international network of users and contributors.