“There's value in being able to bring together people who are working on these problems from a lot of different angles,” Matt Macvey, Community and Project Lead for the initiative, told Engadget, “and that that's what we've tried to facilitate.”
The six teams include Bangla AI, which is developing a web platform that surfaces and translates relevant news stories into the Bengali language for journalists and New York City’s sizable Bangladeshi immigrant community. “One of the greatest promises of things like this and Bangla AI,” Chequeado team member Marcos Barroso said during the demo, “is the ability for this kind of technology to go to an under-resourced newsroom and improve their capacity, and allow them to be more efficient.”
“Our live broadcast doesn't have a meaningful entry point right now for deaf or hard of hearing audiences,” WNYC team member, Sam Guzik, said during the demo. “So, we really want to think about as we're looking to the future is, ‘how can we make our audio more accessible to those folks who can't hear?’”