Google ships sign-language dictation on the Pixel 11

Google DeepMind said on 12 August 2026 that its sign-language-to-text model, SL2T, now powers sign-to-text dictation in Gboard and Live Transcribe on the Pixel 11. A Deaf signer can sign at the phone’s camera to dictate a search, draft a message or query Gemini, and can answer in sign inside a Live Transcribe conversation instead of typing back. The feature ships on the Pixel 11 at no extra cost, in American Sign Language to English, with more devices and more sign languages stated as planned.

SL2T was trained on more than 100,000 hours of signing across more than 50 sign languages, roughly a quarter of it ASL. An on-device model reduces the video to geometric landmarks of the hands and body before translation, which keeps the camera feed itself on the phone. The model translates straight to English text rather than passing through the gloss notation that earlier systems used as an intermediate step. DeepMind reports a zero-shot score of 70 BLEURT on the FLEURS-ASL benchmark, which it says is higher than any previously published result.

Development ran with an AI Sign Language Advisory Committee of Deaf organisations and subject-matter experts. Research demonstrations of sign-language translation are years old; what changed on 12 August is that one of them is a shipped keyboard.