The origins of Ava

Examining the unexpected depths of his frustration led Thibault Ducheminto realize that the communication barriers he’d seen growing up could be broken.

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Introducing Ava: 24/7 accessible conversations with deaf & hard-of-hearing people.

Ava captions the conversations for you when lip-reading is too hard for you to follow.

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How we changed a life (and many more)

Several months ago, I found out about something that would change my life. It was something I had only imagined.and suddenly, it wasn’t only a hope,wishful thinking,or a fantasy -it was becoming a reality!

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Illustration representing the communication between deaf and hearing worlds via Ava

Our Manifesto For Total Accessibility

Every single day, we deny 360M deaf and hard-of-hearing people full access to our social & professional lives. What needs to happen to fix that?

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“I gained a level of confidence that I could not have imagined before. Suddenly meetings I used to avoid are now accessible. You can’t possibly imagine the impact it has made for me.”

Frederique Seneque, Long-time Ava User

Our mission

We want to radically improve how we humans communicate with each other. Our core mission at Ava is to empower 466M deaf and hard-of-hearing people to live in a fully accessible world.

Every day, millions of people are excluded from conversations because they cannot hear what others say well. Our CEO Thibault grew up in a Deaf family & witnessed firsthand how the world was not accessible for them. Together with our CTO Skinner — deaf since age 2 — Thibault co-founded Ava to make live captioning of conversations as easy as turning on captions on TV.

Our small but fast-growing team has reinvented AI-based speech recognition technology to be in service of people who need it the most. We dream of a 24/7 accessible world, without any communication barrier. In this pursuit, we're seeing how critical communication skills are, yet very far from ideal, to unleash our collective potential. This is for us the ultimate barrier we need to lift.

Our belief is that well-designed technology can help everyone communicate and connect better — much more effectively & authentically — so humanity can achieve the greatest things together.

Our values

Unity

It doesn't matter where you're from. Together, we're stronger. It's you & us now.

Singularity

Ava users are Pioneers. Every day they explore the limits of what's possible in accessibility with us. We are the same. We set an ambitious goal, total accessibility, and to reach it, we need to go where no-one has gone before.

Authenticity

In sign language, communication is direct and respectful. It is authentic. We believe in a culture where everyone speaks their mind, improving accessibility.

Beyond

We think our product, our business, our company with empathy. We ought to go beyond surface-level interactions, to go beyond barriers.

Impact

We get up every morning because we know that our work with technology can have a real impact on millions of lives and fundamentally help to build a better society.

Our team

We're a small team spread between two cities (San Francisco, where our Product & Growth teams are, and Paris — where our AI team is). We care about making the world a much more connected place, and we believe it's best done by a highly-creative and driven group of humans working in concert to change the current status quo. We value potential as much as experience and empathy as much as authenticity. Our culture is always evolving, and we believe new people can and should change how we operate and what we value. A few recurring themes:

Amazing people have joined us in our mission to challenge the status quo in accessibility, mobile and speech technologies. Here's who's behind Ava.

Want to join our journey?

Today, Ava is used by hundreds of thousands of deaf, hearing & hard-of-hearing people around the world who have come to rely on it for their daily conversations, meetings at work or hangouts with their friends. We've helped small and large organizations alike easily become accessible to their members, from startups to Fortune 500 companies like Disney or Airbus, world-class universities or even some of the largest events in the world like Dreamforce.

We're growing quickly and have found product-market fit, but we're still at the very beginning of this journey. Interpersonal communication is a fascinating and immense space, largely untapped by technology. Yet we see a clear path to enable a world where billions of people communicate better with each other and connect at a deeper level. We are already lucky to work with some of the best investors & advisors in the world to make this huge ambition possible.

See our open positions ->

We are Ava and we believe total accessibility is possible.

We're a small team from around the world and we're breaking down communication barriers between the deaf & hearing worlds.