Auckland start up Kara Technologies is nearing the public launch of an AI sign language platform that will translate everyday announcements into New Zealand Sign Language using a hyper realistic digital avatar, with Auckland Transport lined up as the first major rollout partner for train, bus and ferry updates.
The project, built in partnership with the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Foundation, has spent more than two years digitising the unique gestures, facial expressions and body movements that make up NZSL. Kara has been recording fluent signers in motion capture suits, the same kind of rig used to bring the creatures of Avatar and the characters of The Lord of the Rings to life. The captured movements are then assembled by AI into more than 10,000 individual signs that can be stitched into full sentences in real time.
NZSL became one of New Zealand’s three official languages in 2006 and has its own grammar, idioms and regional variants. It cannot be substituted with American Sign Language or Auslan, which is one reason the project has taken so long to build out a proper digital library from the ground up. The company received $1.3 million in seed funding through the University of Auckland’s UniServices in early 2023 and has since pulled in support from the NZSL Board, the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and Epic Games via its MegaGrants programme.
The case for the technology is straightforward. Around 24,500 New Zealanders use NZSL, and roughly 4,500 of them rely on it as their first language. The country has only a few dozen accredited interpreters available at any one time, and they are concentrated in the main centres. Outside business hours, in regional towns, and during emergencies, the gap between Deaf New Zealanders and timely information can be enormous.
NZSL expert Jon Tai-Rakena, speaking to 1News, said the shortage of interpreters routinely leaves the community in the dark. “We don’t have enough interpreters. We miss a lot of information,” he said. Kara co-founder Farmehr Farhour told the same outlet that the company is not trying to replace human interpreters, who remain the gold standard for nuanced and emotional content. “Our focus is to be there where human interpreters cannot be, especially in emergencies,” she said. Chief executive Natasha Gallardo added that “the response from the Deaf community had been fabulous” through the testing programme.
The Auckland Transport rollout will start with the kind of short, formulaic announcements that are easiest for AI to handle reliably and where delays in interpretation cause the most frustration. Platform changes, service cancellations, route diversions and security alerts are all candidates. Travellers on the Northern Express, the Western Line and the Devonport ferry already see live arrival boards and hear PA announcements. The new system would add an avatar to the same screens, signing the announcement at the same moment hearing passengers receive it.
That parallel timing matters. Until now, written captions have been the main accommodation for Deaf passengers on public transport, but written English is not a first language for many NZSL users and reading it can be slow or incomplete. A signing avatar delivers the message in the language the audience actually thinks in.
The Deaf and Hard of Hearing Foundation has also pushed for a world first inclusion of te reo Māori concepts inside the database, ensuring everyday signs for kai, hāngī, marae and other words used routinely by Turi Māori are captured properly. The point is that NZSL as it is actually used in 2026 is already a blend of English derived signs and Māori derived signs, and a digital library that strips out one or the other would not reflect the real language community.
Kara has been quietly proving the model overseas while it built the NZSL library. The company has worked with Australia’s Red Cross on emergency announcements through its Humanitech programme, and has built American Sign Language libraries used by tech companies and broadcasters in the United States. The New Zealand version is the first to be designed for full bilingual integration with Māori from day one, rather than added on later.
There are limits the company is upfront about. The avatar handles short, factual announcements well. It does not yet replace a human interpreter for live press conferences, court hearings, medical consultations or the kind of fast unscripted dialogue where context, emotion and turn taking all matter. Government messaging during major emergencies, such as the Civil Defence alerts that followed Cyclone Gabrielle, will still need accredited interpreters on screen. The avatar is the layer that fills in everywhere else, especially the hours when a human interpreter simply is not available.
A second wave of partnerships is expected to follow Auckland Transport, with airports, hospital outpatient services and large retailers among the organisations that have shown interest in adopting signed announcements alongside the visual displays they already run. Once the core sign library is locked in, adding new fixed phrases is reportedly a matter of hours rather than weeks.
For the Deaf community, the practical shift is the one that matters. Missing the announcement that your bus is cancelled, or that the train has been diverted, or that the airport terminal is being evacuated, has consequences that hearing passengers rarely think about. A digital signer on the screen, available at every hour, in every station, fluent in NZSL and in the bits of te reo woven through it, would close a gap that has been quietly excluding tens of thousands of New Zealanders from public information for decades.
What do you think of AI avatars taking on real time NZSL translation for transport and emergency announcements? Have you or someone you know felt the gap in interpreter availability around New Zealand? Leave a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply