QuickSign — Learn ASL with Zippy
QuickSign turns learning American Sign Language into a game. Guided by a friendly companion named Zippy, learners practice signs with their webcam while the app recognizes hand gestures in real time and gives instant feedback — no downloads, no special hardware.
Overview
QuickSign is an interactive ASL learning platform built around immediate, playful feedback. Instead of passively watching videos, users sign in front of their camera and the app confirms whether they formed the sign correctly, keeping a streak and progression that make practice feel like play.
The Problem
Most ASL learning tools are passive — videos and flashcards that never tell you whether you are actually signing correctly. Beginners get no feedback loop, so bad habits form early and motivation fades.
The Solution
We built a browser-based recognizer that reads hand landmarks from the webcam and validates each sign live, wrapped in a gamified flow (a mascot, streaks, and levels) that rewards consistent practice and keeps sessions short and fun.
Challenges
Running gesture recognition smoothly in the browser meant carefully managing the camera pipeline and inference performance across devices, and designing forgiving detection thresholds so learners feel encouraged rather than penalized.
Outcome
A shipped, publicly playable product that makes a genuinely hard skill approachable — and a strong proof-of-concept for on-device ML in an education setting.